Eu vou, tu vais, ele vai: when memory meets the stranger

Abstract

This review examines Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel Go, Went, Gone through the transformation of Richard’s perspective, a retired professor of classical philology who, after leaving university life, becomes involved with a group of African refugees in Berlin. His contact with these men shifts his initially academic curiosity toward an ethical practice of listening, through which individual stories replace the abstract category of “immigrant.” The novel brings together migration, historical memory, national identity, and bureaucracy, showing how contemporary violence also operates through prolonged waiting, institutional invisibility, and the suspension of life. By connecting the refugees’ present to the legacies of Nazism, German reunification, the Cold War, and European colonialism, Erpenbeck constructs a narrative that avoids both didacticism and idealization. The review also highlights the novel’s interdisciplinary character, which brings it close to anthropology, sociology, and cultural history, and concludes that literature restores complexity to debates on belonging, hospitality, and human rights by turning attention to the other into an intellectual, political, and deeply human act.