Paradigms of Refuge: Reimagining GDR Legacy and International Solidarity in Jenny Erpenbeck's Gehen, Ging, Gegangen

This article examines a recent refugee novel, Jenny Erpenbeck’s Gehen, ging, gegangen ( Go, Went, Gone , 2015) in relation to debates on the refugees who have arrived in contemporary Germany in the context of the so-called “refugee crisis.” The article’s point of departure is Go, Went, Gone ’s rare pairing of GDR history and refugees – a pairing that deviates from usual discussions of former East Germany and distressed migration today. Such discussions tend to see the GDR as a source of present-day antirefugee sentiments and violence (which are higher in former East German federal states) because of the communist state’s alleged racial homogeneity and geographic isolation. Disputing both assumptions, the article points to Erpenbeck’s diachronic juxtaposition of refugees in contemporary Germany with the GDR’s relations to its partner countries in the global South, which the novel portrays in their ethical ambivalence. While the former GDR sought to position itself as part of an egalitarian transversal network of countries that emerged from the decolonization of Africa (including Angola, Ghana, Kenya, and Mozambique), as well as Cuba and Vietnam, the communist state also entertained various educational and economic exchanges with these partner countries (from 1970s onwards) that were often marred by colonial discourses of development and modernization, economic exploitation, and racialized oppression against participants in these programs. Turning to the novel, the article analyzes Erpenbeck’s paratactic juxtaposition of the now-“strayed” ( abhandengekommen ) utopian architecture at Berlin’s Alexanderplatz with a present-day image of striking refugees as an allegory of the largely unrealized, egalitarian potential of the GDR for contemporary discussions about refugees in reunified Germany. By opening up the failed utopian promise of the communist future that never arrived so as to include those who have been historically excluded from the imagined community of East Germany, the novel suggests that demonstrating solidarity with refugees in contemporary Germany might redefine East German socialist legacy, making it applicable for the 21st century.