Education
Roughly one million migrants and refugees arrived in Europe in 2015, fleeing violence and poverty in the Middle East and North Africa. Germany accepted the great majority of asylum seekers — 890,000 according to the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees. In the midst of political backlash that followed, German author Jenny Erpenbeck sought to humanize the crisis in her 2017 novel, “Go, Went, Gone.” In it, she tells the story of a retired German academic who befriends a group of North African migrants in Berlin. Prior to writing the book, Erpenbeck spent time with migrants, including a Nigerian man named Bashir who became the inspiration for one of her main characters. “He was a bit like the president of the group, but of course, he was no president and the group was made of different people from different countries in Africa,” Erpenbeck said. “And he really fought for his people.” Bashir, like many migrants, lost loved ones on the treacherous journey from Africa to Europe across