MORE THAN A MILLION MIGRANTS have come to Germany since the beginning of 2015, many of them refugees fleeing from conflict in Syria or other parts of the globe. One of the many responses to this influx of people has been the establishment of a number of housing centers specifically for LGBTQ refugees, a phenomenon that has been covered by a number of mainstream press outlets. While Germany has been home to queer migrants and refugees long before 2015, the media reports on these centers constitute one of the few times that these migrants’ existence has been acknowledged in German public discourse, which Fatima El-Tayeb claims has long been, and still is, dominated by patterns of thought in which migrants and racialized “communities […] appear as by default heterosexual, the queer community as by default white.” Several authors and filmmakers have produced Germanlanguage films and texts that undermine this simplistic dichotomy by exploring the experience of migrant and racialized LGBTQ people, yet many authors—and critics—perpetuate the discursive tendency to erase the existence of queer migrants. In this essay, I will analyze and compare two novels that engage with forced migration and displacement, namely Terezia Mora's Alle Tage(All Days, 2004) and Jenny Erpenbeck's Gehen, Ging, Gegangen(Going, Went, Gone, 2015), to examine the place of non-heterosexual sexuality in authors’ attempts to render the experience and existence of (queer) migrants visible.

Before summarizing the plot of these novels in greater detail, it is necessary to explore some of the theory informing my methodology in this chapter. In its exploration of the dynamics of visibility and erasure, my analysis is informed by the work of Judith Butler, particularly those strands of her work that focus, in Moya Lloyd's words, on “the relation between normative violence and cultural intelligibility: how, that is, culturally particular norms define who is recognizable as a subject capable of living a life that counts.”