Jenny Erpenbeck is a German novelist. She also writes plays and worked extensively staging theater works and operas. Her new book, Kairos, has been well-received and, more or less, universally acclaimed. (It has been translated into English by the industrious Michael Hofmann.) Erpenbeck has been publishing fiction since 2001; she was born in 1967 in East Germany and, so, was about 22 when her homeland disintegrated after the Fall of the Berlin Wall. She is sometimes considered to be an exponent of Ostalgia (“nostalgia for the East” or the old Communist regime.) In her case, this is an oversimplification but she expresses some sympathy for the folkways of the defunct Deutsches Demokratisches Republik. She necessarily associates this vanished world with her youth and coming-of-age, and, therefore, is entitled to her ambivalent, but somewhat warm, feelings for this lost realm. Whatever the hardships and injustices of her youth, that time is beautiful because she was, then, young and the world was fresh and new to her. Longtime admirers of Erpenbeck are wont to claim that Kairos isn’t her best book. Some assert that a 2018 novel, Go, Went, Gone is her most accomplished novel.
Erpenbeck is a very self-assured, and, in my view, slightly smug writer. She is confident, based on copious research that she apparently undertakes – her novel Heimsuchung (Visitation) ends with a page and a half of names listing those who assisted her in sustaining the authenticity of the historical, topographical, and legal details in that rather short book (it’s 180 pages long). Erpenbeck is sometimes claimed to be the heir of Guenter Grass and, stylistically, she seems sometimes similar to the great, older novelist’s approach to his material. Her writing is incantatory and musical in form – she relies heavily on repeated phrases and, even, paragraphs that have the effect of being extended leit motifs, that is, nodes of significance that organize her narratives. In some instances, she uses highly specific vocabulary as to architecture, geography, animal and plant husbandry, and, often, invokes the rather obtuse jargon of German law. She is capable of surprising metaphors and has an oblique, somewhat askew slant on things that makes her prose interesting, if somewhat difficult – Erpenbeck will sometimes deploy a simile or metaphor (or indulge in a reflection) that is so seemingly off-kilter that it is hard to parse. She is ultimately a writer who has developed in the vein of Thomas Mann – that is, she is learned, makes many allusions to art and literature, and organizes her prose around phrases and images that she repeats as themes. Of course, she has evolved over time and the prose in Kairos differs quite markedly from her style in Heimsuchung published in 2009. She writes almost no dialogue in Heimsuchung and her characters in that book have a fairy-tale quality – they seem to be archetypes embodying certain eras in German history. Kairos, by contrast, appears to be a lyric memoir, written in a variety of styles including dialogue, stream of consciousness, with dense historical allusions, and a venturesome, bold shifting perspective: Kairos is a love story and Erpenbeck is not reluctant to oscillate points of view between the two lovers, a 19 year old girl and a distinguished older writer in his fifties. Erpenbeck, I have said, seems a bit smug to me – by this I mean she knows everything about the fictional world that she offers to our inspection; if there are obscurities, these are carefully contrived and part of her comprehensive design. Like many German novelists, she is extremely disciplined and her works are architecturally conceived to within an inch of their lives – there is no sense of the accidental or contingent in her approach to her material; and if something is, in fact, accidental or contingent as in Kairos, she is quick to tell you this – it’s not an accident, in other words, if she expressly tells you its an accident or coincidence. By this I mean that she has no “negative capability” – that is, no faculty for holding things in suspension without encouraging us to form judgements about these events. Like Thomas Mann, she tells you what she wants you to know and makes sure you understand it. This is admirable in many respects but it makes her the opposite of German writers like Kafka, the Grimm Brothers, and Georg Buechner, for example. This approach to writing works well in the context of her detailed examination of every day events, a vein that she mines in her prose. But, I must admit, I find her prose style insufferable in the context of descriptions of extraordinary suffering, for instance, the holocaust content in Heimsuchung.
Heimsuchung is, more or less, a family chronicle framed in terms of activities taking place on a tract of land a half-hour’s train ride from Berlin. The acreage comprises a rather steep slope above a large lake. At one point, realtor boasts that the lot offers sunset vistas over water, always an attractive selling point for real estate of this kind and there is access to the lakeshore. (When the lot is subdivided, access to the water becomes problematic for one of the tracts and the subject of disputes – don’t Germans know about easements?) Short chapters, more or less self-contained, present the history of the site in roughly chronological order. These chapters are reliably separated by shorter sections describing improvements and management of woods, lawns, and meadows on this terrain by an unnamed gardener. The gardener is obviously a symbolic device, representing human stewardship over the land and benign intervention in the natural order. The gardener isn’t ever described and no one knows where he comes from – it’s not clear how he is compensated although he spends his life caring for the property until, at last, vanishing without a trace. There is a nearby village and the people in that place gossip about the gardener and ascribe all sorts of weird qualities to him, but he seems to be just an industrious and helpful fellow who spends a long life alone in a cottage on the property fixing things up. The gardener never speaks, has no friends or lovers, and, as a literary emblem, no character other than his deeds. When we first see him, he is engaged in veredelung of fruit plants on the acreage, a word that means “grafting” but, also, implies something like “ennoblement” –this seems to be Erpenbeck’s vision of how people should intervene in nature.
The short stories comprising the bulk of the text are a tour of German history from the Wilhelmine era to the litigious 1990's after the Wende, as it is called, the Fall of the Berlin wall and the collapse of East Germany. The lake-house is located in land that was once East Germany after World War Two. Erpenbeck describes the activities of people on the property in terms of their rest and relaxation – although, of course, this tale, taking place in Germany during the 20th century, is generally dolorous with episodes of madness, horror, and terror interpolated into the otherwise bucolic narrative. Readers in Minnesota will recognize many elements in this novel: the story takes place at a lake cabin that is a refuge from the workaday life in Berlin. There is a dock, a boat-house, various sheds in which firewood and recreational equipment are stored as well as a small cabana-like bathing house that can be moved around. Stone steps lead down to the water. Other elegant houses line the shores. Max Schmeling, the famous boxer who fought Joe Louis, has a place on this lake. For half the year, the houses, which seem to have ornamental reed-thatched roofs, are empty. (In some ways, the lake house, at least in its earliest form, is similar to the vacation home that the hero and his family occupy in the last section of Hans Fallada’s Little Man, What now?) As a lawyer, I know that summer cabins on the lake begin in joy and end with tears – within a generation the heirs who have inherited the premises are at one another’s throats. Erpenbeck’s lake house is no exception and the book ends in a dispiriting crossfire of lawsuits described in daunting jargon that I’m not sure that I fully understood. The last occupant of the lake house is described as the “Unauthorized Possessor” and it wasn’t clear to me whether the property was burdened by claims originating from its expropriation by the Communists, who regard rights to the place as a reward for service to the regime, or an earlier expropriation from a Jewish family forced to sell at one-half market price to the Aryan architect occupying the adjacent lot. In a sense, it doesn’t matter – Erpenbeck’s point seems to be that property of this kind is always contested and encumbered by competing claims of right. (If you want to understand this better – for instance, details as to how German law accounts for improvements made by unauthorized occupants – you will need to read the English translation by Susan Bernofsky.)
After a geological prologue stretching back into the deep history of the terrain (glaciers and such), Erpenbeck begins her chronicle with a morose tale of the four daughters of a successful and acquisitive farmer. The young women are all destroyed in one way or another, by getting pregnant or abandoned – one of them is masculine enough to be the sheriff in the locale; she never marries and we don’t know what becomes of her. The youngest daughter, Klara, is appointed the heir to the lakeshore property that the farmer has purchased. Thus, the tract of land is called “Klara’s Woods”. Unfortunately poor Klara is unlucky in love – she forms an attachment to a fisherman whom her father disdains as a future son-in-law and, therefore, successor to his property. Pa locks Klara in her room where she promptly goes mad. She spends the rest of the chapter insane, mourning her lost love, and, finally, kills herself by drowning – the masculine Emma, who could have been sheriff, finds traces of her clothing dropped along the shoreline of the “grey water.” Later, her corpse is found and Erpenbeck provides an ethnographically detailed (and poetic) account of mortuary customs in northern Germany circa 1910. The depressing content of this chapter is interspersed with lyrical lists of local folkways – traditions for celebrating weddings and births, nonsense rhymes, and peasant protocols for mourning. Before her death, Klara’s Wood is divided into three parcels – one is sold to a tea and coffee importer (this tract, more or less, vanishes from the novel), the second is acquired by a wealthy Jewish textile merchant, and the third tract, graced with an ancient oak, is bought a Berlin architect. A date midway through this initial chapter establishes that the novel begins in 1892 although the villager’s traditions have a timeless aspect.
The gardener appears in the next section, as he does after each narrative section, to put things to right. He cuts down trees, stacks firewood, and digs drainage ditches. He sets up lawn sprinklers to keep the grass green. It appears that the gardener is in the employ of the Berlin architect who builds an ostentatious house on his land. The home is equipped with secret hiding places, a bird made of wrought iron on a balcony, and stained glass panels over a foyer. (Late in the book we learn that the architect worked with Albert Speer and was occupied in Berlin with Hitler’s Germania project, that is, the Fuehrer’s grandiose plans to renovate his capitol into a New Rome.) The Jewish textile merchant has the prime access to the water and he builds a dock and bathing house on his premises. The chapter involving the architect takes place six years after World War Two – the architect has acquired the Jew’s property at a discount, but now is out-of-favor with the new regime and decides to flee to West Germany.
The following chapters document events in the war with interpolations, of course, describing the gardener’s work. The Jewish textile merchant and his wife are horribly murdered in a concentration camp. Their son escapes to South Africa where Erpenbeck shows him complicit in apartheid – in this book everyone oppresses everyone else. (The chapter is hard to interpret at first because it is comprised of scenes in South Africa, with a eucalyptus thicket, and events occurring in the Second World War.) Motifs of hiding become prevalent in the book. Ludwig, the son of the Jewish merchant, is shown half-concealed under the silvery leaves of the eucalyptus. His parents come to visit him in South Africa but disastrously return to Germany – when their property on the lake is expropriated, the Nazi architect buys it, although he has to pay a 6% tax to the State on his below-market purchase price of the tract. The Jews try to flee but are stopped in Amsterdam and, then, killed. Ludwig’s sister has married; she and her husband are also exterminated but not before their daughter is shipped off for refuge to Warsaw – this turns out to be departing the frying pan for the fire.
After the gardener intervenes, cleaning up fallen tree limbs and setting up the lawn sprinklers, Erpenbeck, then, indulges in her two most harrowing chapters. These involve the architect’s wife and the little girl hiding in the Warsaw ghetto. Both of these chapters are vulgar and distressing. Erpenbeck seems to regard the horrors of the World War Two as grist for her mill and, although she distances the ghastly material with her chant-like rhythms and hypnotic prose style, the effect is unfortunate. Human tragedy of this kind is too terrible for representation and, therefore, a writer like Erpenbeck, who is supremely confident and smug, runs the risk of exploiting atrocity in depicting these sorts of things. You have the sense that Erpenbeck somehow rejoices in this misery since it affords her a serious subject matter from which her readers are deterred from looking away – if you skip these chapters, you reveal yourself to be unworthy of the gravity of the subject matter. But this is coercive and Erpenbeck’s aesthetic delectation in this material is more than a little disgusting.
Here, the gardener appears for a short entr’acte – he is now aided by Polish forced laborers – and sets up an apiary. Then, Erpenbeck opportunistically changes the scenery – the whole book takes place at the lake property except for this chapter set in the Warsaw ghetto. There is the distinct sense that Erpenbeck thinks it’s her duty to rub the reader’s nose in horrors and so she violates her own structural principles to drag us into the Warsaw ghetto. The Jewish merchant’s granddaughter, Doris, is hiding in another closet. The prose invokes Beckett – everything is destroyed and the ghetto is empty and the child is enveloped in stygian darkness. Doris has to urinate and her pee flows from the closet through a trough in the floor and out into a room where a Nazi is rooting around. The child is dragged from the closet, shot, and her corpse thrown in a pit with a thousand other dead bodies. (Erpenbeck seems to get this story line from watching Schindler’s List.) The gardener has another cameo – a potato bug is advancing from the East and destroying crops. Then, we see the architect’s wife hiding in a secret chamber that the builder of the house has concealed in a “Schrank” – a cupboard, cabinet, or closet (here something like a closet). An innocent young Red Army officer, carefully described as humane and gentle, finds her concealed in the closet. In order to avoid being raped by the man, the architect’s wife rapes him – she mounts the man’s erect penis like a “mare” and, then, pisses all over his organ. I don’t know what Erpenbeck is doing here, but whatever it is, I wish she hadn’t done it. It’s obvious that Erpenbeck’s intent is to create an esthetic pattern here – the two female characters are concealed in closets, trapped in the darkness, and both urinate. But ascertaining these motifs don’t make these episodes any more tolerable and they are examples of the sort of sententious vulgarity in which Erpenbeck sometimes engages.
The book is gets better after these horrors. The pressure enforced by atrocity lessens and the novel becomes more humane and engaging. Erpenbeck produces an earnest pair of authors, a married couple, who are allowed to occupy the lake house by virtue of their service to the Communist party. They have made their way to this home via Moscow and Prague, collaborating on anti-Nazi radio broadcasts during the war and, at last, have returned to Germany. Ich kehre heim (I have returned home), the lady propagandist writes. This couple conceives of the world as a battle between invisible armies in which invisible shields and lances clash and are broken – these are the armies of the night with their warring ideologies. The Party is not idealized, nor are the couple without their grave faults – they have been silent about the gulag and, in fact, refused to shelter a comrade fleeing imprisonment and likely liquidation for venal motives (their permission to reside in a Moscow apartment has lapsed and they can’t risk losing their dwelling). But, in general, the writers perceive themselves as the agents of change for a better world. They experience a visceral repulsion with respect to their fellow Germans who remained in the country and supported (at least by their presence) the Nazi regime – the writers can’t shake hands with many of their neighbors. Meanwhile, a doctor in Berlin with good Party connections – he apparently treats high-ranking members of the regime – schemes to acquire lake access. At the end of the chapter, encompassing probably thirty years, the doctor is granted the right to occupy the adjacent land and the bathing house is moved to a position higher on the steep slope above the water. The writers, at long last, are approved for purchase of the house, but not the land – the terrain on which the home is built apparently belong to the government.
The elderly gardener removes some trees and finds, entangled in their roots, trunks full of cutlery and other precious objects that previous owners, presumably the architect and his wife, buried for safekeeping during the advance of the Russian army. The narrative flashbacks slightly to describe an elderly woman, she is called die Besucherin, who lives with the pair of writers – she’s a displaced person, a sort of permanent guest because she has nowhere else to go. This woman is amazed at the Communist party’s system of social security – she can’t believe that she is paid not to work and yearns for the old peasant economy of strict reciprocity: I give you a hen, you give me milk. This woman’s daughter married a Ukrainian and had three children with him. After the war, the Besucherin made her way to the estate once owned by her family – earlier, she had apparently found herself trapped in Ukraine by the fighting. She discovered her home was occupied by Poles, but, making the best of the situation, worked in that place as a maid for the new owners. The lake house where she is installed after many hardships becomes her home where this permanently displaced person lives for five years – the female author is her granddaughter’s mother-in-law, apparently, the result of a liaison between one of the writer’s children and someone in the Soviet Union when the two writers were living there. (I can’t quite make out the family relationship, but the old woman is conceived as a collateral relative dependent upon the generosity of the writers – it would be incorrect to say that she lives off the “kindness” of the householders: after five years, she is still referred to by her benefactors with the formal Sie and there are quibbles about her countryfied manners.)
The Communist writers die and the house is sublet to a couple from a nearby town who use the lake property primarily as place to dock their sail boat. This chapter, called “The Sublessor” (Unterpaechter) is the most accomplished in the book, a wonderful miniature, that casts a slightly sardonic light on the dying days of the East German regime. The couple enjoy the freedom of sailing on the big lake – this avocation seems to be a symbol for an inner flight from the constraints of the Communist system. Sailing invokes memories of the husband’s attempt at an actual escape from the DDR. One night, while drunk, he and another young man tried to swim across the Elbe River to the West – his companion, in the lead, drowned. The young man turned back and was arrested, convicted, and sent to prison. The husband’s attempted defection was not due to any political convictions – rather, he was facing some exams that he thought he was likely to fail and thought it best to avoid those tests by gambling upon an escape to the West. (The attempt to flee East Germany is dated to the construction of the Berlin Wall – the jail where the husband is confined is full of masons assigned to the construction of the wall who took the opportunity to try to escape themselves.) Erpenbeck shows us that the young man neglected his studies due to much partying, including a memorable night spent boozing in a Berlin national history museum – the drunk students passed-out in dioramas full of stuffed elks and foxes. In another bizarre, but indelible detail, the young man, during his rambles through the unreconstructed ruins in East Berlin stumbles upon a crypt under a smashed church – he spends hours sketching the mummified corpses of parishioners buried there. (This seems to be some kind of oblique reference to work by Adolf Menzel, the German artist, who made a macabre set of sketches in 1873 of dead generals found in a crypt dating to the era of Frederick the Great.) The man and his wife sail each weekend and hope that they will both die before a pending dispute about the ownership of the lake property is concluded – in that way, the eulogist at their funeral can say that they were able to do what they loved up to the very end, that is, sailing.
By this time, the gardener is weary and mostly inactive. However, when a big tree is cut down so that a telephone line can be installed, another trunk full of treasures is found – this time, porcelain. Images of concealment and hiding developed earlier in the book are reprised in the novel’s penultimate vignette. A local man falls in love with a girl who visits the lake house for several months each summer. Their close relationship starts when he is five and she is four years old and continues for many summers – at the outset of the chapter, the man is described repairing the roof of the summer cabin when he is in his mid-fifties. As their romance blossoms, the boy and girl find yet another casket of treasure buried on the property, this time, a trunk full of aluminum pennies dispensed at weddings and concealed under a tree. (From Kairos, I know that aluminum pennies were an iconic currency in the DDR.) It is implied that the young man hopes that he can marry the girl when they come of age. At one point, an older boy invites them to hide in the woodshed and watch as he has sex with a girl. As they watch, the older boy rapes the girl – they have seen something that they should not have witnessed and their bond of silence seems a guarantor of their intimacy. They watch Westerns on TV on rainy days and swim in the lake. A neighbor dying from cancer murders his wife. These people were the parents of a little boy, now grown to a man, who once pissed out of a window and caught catfish with them but, later, got drunk and drowned in a river shortly after the borders of East Germany were opened – “it was as if the border-opening only increased the possibility of his dying.” The local man yearns for the young woman’s visits to the summer-house, but he learns that she has a boyfriend in Berlin. The relationship becomes instrumental – the woman pays (in fact, overpays) her childhood friend to care for the house in the default of the old gardener who is now too decrepit to work. Max Schmeling’s house on the lake burns down. The woman marries and her childhood friend decides to move to the nearest town, Kreisstadt, to a home with central heating and a reasonable re-sale value. After the horrors of war, this chapter, composed in a minor key and involving not tragedy, but domestic sorrow (a life of quiet desperation) is nicely designed and moving – Erpenbeck does best, I think, with this sort of material.
The gardener, rumored by the villagers to be living on snow alone, vanishes. His room in an annex to the house is full of mold and dry-rot; it’s walled off from the rest of the premises. The house is decaying. An investor representing the heirs to the contested property, probably the grandchildren of the Communist writers, puts the property on the market. A woman designated as the “unauthorized occupant” (or better: “party in possession”) spends days cleaning up the house. It’s inspected by various potential buyers and touted by the realtor as being designed by one of Albert Speer’s colleagues, but the place is collapsing and no one makes a bid on it. The woman works to restore order in the house but it’s a quixotic effort – she doesn’t have any claim on the land under the decaying structure and, ultimately, the house is destined to be torn down. But cleaning is a quintessentially German activity and, in this last chapter before the book’s short epilogue, the “unauthorized possessor” takes over the role of the gardener – now, she cleans and repairs and sets things in order. The final time that she sweeps out the house is her moment of greatest Hausfrieden – an untranslatable word that means something like being joyfully content with the house. She has been sleeping in the house and dreams of a corpse on a bier with an “Indian face” – we are told that she read in an article in a newspaper used to polish a window that, among the Aztecs, sweeping with a broom was a heilige Handlung, a “sacred act.”
A short epilogue informs us that the house was carefully dissected into its component parts in accord with German law as to recycling and the elimination of harmful emissions from debris. Erpenbeck tells us that the house weighed 500 tons and comprised 17 loads of debris hauled to a landfill near Berlin. After the house is destroyed, and before a new building is erected, gleicht die Landschaft fuer ein kurzen Moment wieder sich selbst – that is, “the landscape for a short moment was like itself once again.” Earlier in the book, we are told that persons can be more firmly connected to a place by their Gier und Scham (“greed and shame”) than by good fortune. This assertion suggests that the chronicle of the house has been one of “greed and shame” – true to some extent, but not entirely, and this declaration is attributed to the disappointed childhood friend and so should not be taken as Erpenbeck’s opinion.
In the Aeneid’s first book, Virgil uses the phrase lacrimae rerum – these are “tears of things”. The phrase expresses the most effective elements of Heimsuchung. Setting aside the atrocities, the novel’s essential focus is on the house and its furnishings, the constant and abiding presence (or characters) in the narrative. The pretentious stained glass window panes, the window with its crank mechanism concealed in the windowsill, the dock on the water and the bathing house, the cast-iron bird, the treads on the wooden stairs that reliably creak when stepped upon, the trees that seem eternal until the gardener cuts them down and replaces them with new ones, the stone stairs descending from the upper meadow to the water, the shallow reef in the water with the funny name (it sounds like “naked” in German) where desperate householders drowned their silver and gold in crates to protect these valuables from marauding armies – these are the figures of true gravity and sorrow in the book. All of the gardener’s efforts to forestall entropy fail – in the end the terrain has, for at least an instant reverted to itself. Time dissolves all things, even regimes – the Thousand Year Reich vanishes and the German Democratic Republic once formidable enough to seal its borders with walls and barb wire also is gone like a puff of smoke. All that is solid melts in air (to quote Marx) and the house is vaporized into its constituent elements. One day, perhaps, the glaciers will return or the desert will unscroll it’s parchment color wastes over the dry lake. The Japanese have a term for this as well: Mono no aware (“the pathos of things”). A commentator on the Japanese novelist Kawabata says that this pathos is expressed in the sound of crickets at nightfall, water trickling, the color of snow...
Jenny Erpenbeck’s most recent novel, Kairos, was published 2021 by Penguin Verlag in Munich. Kairos is an ambitious novel that tells the story of a love affair that takes place in East Berlin between 1986 and 1992. Of course, in that time period, East Germany, the Deutsches Demokratisches Republik (DDR) imploded, the Berlin Wall was torn down, and, ultimately, the DDR, itself, ceased to exist. Erpenbeck’s book argues that the love affair, in its decline, at least, parallels the fall of East Germany. Her protagonists are, to some extent, emblematic figures designed to embody the human condition as it existed under East German communism. Although the book is sufficiently realistic and factually detailed to evade an allegorical interpretation, nonetheless, Erpenbeck means to convince us that the novel’s love affair reflects larger currents in German history – in this respect, the novel is kin to Heimsuchung in which the fates of individuals are entwined with historical movements and events. Kairos is about the length of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary in most English translations – the book runs to 379 pages.
Kairos is vivid and engaging, full of intimate details about the love affair of its two principal characters, Katharina and Hans W. The book is compelling due to the villainy of Hans W., one of the most despicable characters in recent novels. Books with noteworthy and frightening villains are always gripping and Hans W. is the Hannibal Lector of bad boyfriends. He persecutes Katharina for her erotic misdeeds for about 200 pages and, of course, the reader longs to see his comeuppance. Erpenbeck is too sophisticated and reticent a writer to provide readers with the pleasure for which they yearn, that is, the total humiliation and demise of Hans. But she implies that he comes to a bad end, unmourned by Katharina, at least. In the novel’s prologue, an unnamed man begs a woman to attend his funeral; the woman agrees. (We come to understand that this spooky colloquy occurs between Hans and Katharina.) Katharina, now a famous writer herself, is conducting some kind of seminar in Pittsburgh when Hans dies. It happens to be her birthday and she is staying in a hotel. Later on the day of the Berlin funeral while our heroine remains in Pittsburgh, Katharina scans the internet and finds some Youtube videos of classical music that Hans admired – Mozart, Bach, and Chopin’s Mazurka in A. Erpenbeck reports that ads interrupt the Youtube music: Hyundai, a bank that makes mortgage loans, a medication to treat “sniffles”. This last advertisement obliquely (and bleakly) suggests that Katharina may be very briefly verklemmt about the death of her former boyfriend. A bit later, two cartons of memorabilia are sent to her house, probably by Ludwig, Hans’ son. Katharina’s husband, who is shadowy to the point of nonexistence in the book, helps her retrieve her own box of souvenirs from a shelf in the basement. The cartons contain diaries, calendars, letters, and other ephemera documenting the love affair and Katharina sifts through these materials, looking at things that include travel tickets, programs for concerts, and, even, packs of matches and sugar from restaurants that the lovers frequented. Katharina’s perusal of these forlorn documents and objects becomes the basis for the novel, a narrative that is scrupulously detailed as to times and place – the couple celebrates various intimate anniversaries during their six year affair and, of course, Erpenbeck frames the love story by providing precise dates as to events significant in the decline and fall of the DDR and, therefore, this trove of souvenirs is important as a reference. In a serious misstep, Erpenbeck provides her heroine and the reader with access to yet another source of documentation in a six page epilog – this information proves to be mostly irrelevant and, in fact, falsifies or contradicts some of the themes established in the preceding pages. Although Erpenbeck is hailed as a brilliant writer in full command of various post-modernist narrative devices, the structure of the book is very conventional – it’s like Dr. Zhivago, the story of a love affair cast against a turbulent time in history, a novelistic version of Reds or, for that matter, Ryan’s Daughter (Madame Bovary during the Easter Rebellion in Dublin). The lovers’ passion and suffering is entangled with exciting historical events, although Erpenbeck’s heroine and the villainous Hans are, of course, merely bit-players on this grander stage and Katharina manages to miss some of the most dramatic events in the collapse of East Germany — for instance, she’s MIA when the Berlin Wall is ripped down.
From the outset, it’s apparent that Katharina’s love affair with Hans W. is a very bad idea. We first meet Katharina as a 19 year-old girl working in graphic design for an East Berlin print shop. Because her bus is delayed, she takes a slightly different route home and encounters Hans. It is mutual love at first sight. Hans is much, much older than Katharina, indeed, older than the heroine’s father. (There is a slight, disreputable whiff of a “daddy complex”in the book – Katharina’s father who is depicted as a well-meaning Marxist stooge lives in Leipzig and has apparently abandoned Katharina, her brother, Ralph, and her mother who remain in Berlin; characteristically, Erpenbeck provides a precise address for the family who are said to live across the street from the ruins in which the Fuehrer bunker is buried.) Hans is the sort of specious public intellectual (and informer) that the DDR produced by the thousands. He’s a bit like a Red Bill Moyer, employed by the East German equivalent of PBS. When we first meet him, Hans is hurrying to attend some kind of conference on Lukacs and he idolizes Bertolt Brecht, a figure that he describes as his paternal mentor – although Brecht has been dead for a generation when the book begins. Hans is reputed to be a lady’s man and this is well-known to everyone; even, Katharina’s mother warns her against the liaison, observing that although Hans is married to a woman named Ingrid, he has never been without a girlfriend on the side. Hans seems to sincerely love Katharina and suggests that they have a future together, but, of course, he can’t afford to get divorced and, even, seems rather devoted to his wife. So, from the very outset, the love affair involves a severe and dysfunctional imbalance of power: by East Germany’s rather austere standards, Hans is wealthy, privileged, authorized to travel in the West, and relatively famous; by contrast, Katharina is penniless, waiting for admission to the equivalent of a technical or vocational college, and a mere child in comparison with the domineering Hans. But, as we know, these sorts of power imbalances don’t take into account the fascination and obsession that a pretty girl can engender in an older man and, for a time at least, Katharina holds her own. Nonetheless, Hans’ behavior is abusive from the outset – for instance, he makes his girlfriend go grocery shopping with him, picking up household provisions on a list scribbled by Ingrid his wife. A joke that I don’t understand is that everyone is always buying a product called Eppswalder Wurtschen (little Eppswald sausages). (The trip to the grocery store doesn’t sound like a very appealing date and its characteristic of some of the deplorable ways in which Hans exploits the girl.) Hans dazzles the impressionable young woman by taking her to expensive restaurants and introducing her, a bit circumspectly, to luminaries in the old DDR – for instance, the notorious playwright and man of the theater, Heiner Mueller; the book is full of East German artists, musicians, and writers and a reasonable history of the declining days of the DDR could be compiled from references in Kairos.
Everything goes well (or reasonably well) up to the point that Katharina is permitted to matriculate to a technical college in Frankfurt an der Oder, a city in Brandenberg on the border with Poland. Like Erpenbeck, Katharina is studying set design for the stage. Hans expects Katharina to dutifully return to East Berlin on regular intervals to have sex with him. (At this point, they’re enlivening their intercourse with mild bondage and some spanking using a belt.) At one point, Hans travels to Frankfurt a.d. Oder to see Katharina but has some sort of mysterious breakdown on the railroad platform, exclaiming that he can’t continue with this and hopping back on the train from which he just disembarked – probably, he’s had a fight with Ingrid and is miffed about having to take the train to get what he should be enjoying back home in East Berlin. It’s always a mistake to spurn any woman, particularly when she’s young, away from home, and free to do as she pleases. Katharina allows a fellow student, Vadim (they’re designing a production of Swan Lake) together to kiss her breasts – up to this point, she’s been teasing the boy but remaining, at least, technically faithful to Hans. Later, she has revenge sex with Vadim. Of course, being a hyper-literate German, and, probably, wishing to make Hans jealous, she makes a note about the interlude. When Hans is at her apartment, he is looking for a note about the Soviet poet, Tretjakow that he made on a Zettel (a scrap of paper) and left among her other stacks of writings near the bed. Hans, searching for his Zettel, finds Katharina’s note about sex with Vadim and, of course, all hell breaks loose.
Hans demands that Katharina write a letter to the poor Vadim, denouncing him as a vile seducer, and cutting off all relations with him. Katharina, who will behave like a masochistic door-mat for the next 190 pages obliges. Then, Hans begins recording sixty-minute cassettes that he demands that Katharina listen to, annotate, and, then, respond in writing to him. (You have to love these Germans for the way that they turn even jealousy into a complicated bureaucratic and administrative proceeding.) The cassettes are simply protracted harangues in which he vituperates Katharina in the most absurd and degrading manner possible. But the girl remains weirdly devoted and, in fact, carefully listens to Hans’ deranged tirades and prepares her own responses. (Hans is the sort of pretentious fool who writes in all lower-case letters, a bit like a commie e.e. cummings and he fancies himself as a cunning and penetrating social critic – this may, in fact, be the case but Erpenbeck gives no evidence for this status; rather, Hans seems to be the sort of vulgar Marxist who reveres the Soviets and, even, takes Katharina on a pilgrimage to the holy city, “hope materialized as stone”, as he picturesquely calls Moscow.) It must be admitted that the latter half of the novel is somewhat tedious. Hans’ rants occupy many pages and he produces, I think, no less than four cassettes denouncing the hapless Katharina – he tirelessly repeats himself in these casettes. Now, Hans, ever a sentimentalist, begins to celebrate the anniversary of Katharina’s perfidy. Their erotic beatings become a bit more intense and, seemingly, less pleasurable to Katharina. When Hans whips her with a belt now, he’s a bit more vigorous. Katharina has developed the custom of appearing surreptitiously during Hans summer vacations in August on the Baltic Sea. He goes to the sea with his wife and son, but is happy to meet Katharina behind a convenient dune where he has sex with her. After Hans turns into a jealous “green-eyed” monster, she continues to visit him at the beach resort – but, now, he has installed her in a shack without running water a few kilometers away and she has to ride her bicycle to the seashore to have sex with him. Hans blows hot and cold. In the midst of his vicious diatribes against Katharina, he takes her to Moscow for a week and they have sex repeatedly – it may be, in fact, that her dalliance has revived his desire for her. Katharina desperately tries to regain Hans’ affections, which, in fact, she never fully controlled from the outset – at one point, she dresses up as a bride and consummates her own informal wedding with him; sometimes, there’s some cos-play – for instance, she dresses as a school girl trying to please a stern headmaster. Finally, and most alarmingly, Katharina plots to have a child with Hans – this is in recompense to his repeated taunt on the cassette tapes that he desired that she to bear his child except that this is now impossible due to her betrayal. Fortunately, Katharina doesn’t get pregnant with Hans’ child, notwithstanding her best efforts. Unfortunately, by this time, Katharina has strayed rather significantly from Hans and ends up pregnant by another boyfriend, Roger. (She has a gory abortion.) Throughout 1990 to 1992, as the DDR is crumbling, Katherina has been exploring her sexuality – she has two lesbian affairs and sex with a few men as well. When she returns from a sojourn to Italy, Hans, ever the gentleman, greets her with the statement: “So now you’ve learned how to say ‘fucking’ in Italian.” To which she replies: “Yes.”
In the end, the DDR collapses and Hans gets fired – he’s employed by a State-run radio station but the State has ceased to exist. Hans has been writing a book about his love affair with Katharina, a task on which he has been struggling mightily, but, now, no one’s interested in publishing his prose. A darling of the old DDR critics, he’s now just an embarrassing relic of a discredited regime. The old-guard Communists despair – at first, it is believed that the West will allow the DDR is survive in some semblance as a state parallel to the government in Bonn, but, of course, this proves to be impossible. East Germany is simply absorbed into the Federal Republic of Germany. The DDR’s useless currency (aluminum pennies) is re-valued and, in a heartbeat, the citizens of East Germany lose half their wealth. Both Hans and Katharina’s father contemplate suicide but are too cowardly or pragmatic to commit the act – in effect, they die of broken hearts. Needless to say, the reader has no sympathy for Hans or for Katharina’s absconded father. The restaurants that Hans and Katharina used to frequent go out of business and the streets in Berlin are all renamed. The Palace of the Republic is torn down and the old Imperial castle is rebuilt on that spot. The book concludes with a penultimate chapter that is a free-form fantasia depicting in brief telegraphic paragraphs the demise of the DDR, historical events occurring while Katharina, apparently on vacation in Egypt, sleeps in the warm sands between the paws of the mighty sphinx – I can’t tell if this is supposed to be a report on a real event or merely something that Katharina imagines. Katharina separates for a third time from Hans – there have been two earlier separations that ended in reunion – and the book tells us that she never saw him again. In this final chapter, Katharina’s efforts to recreate and re-imagine her love affair with Hans are described as the work of Isis collecting the fragmentary body-parts of her brother and lover, Osiris. The novel, it seems, is conceived as the restorative project of Isis – she is assembling the bloody fragments of both her relationship with Hans and the decayed, ruined DDR. The epilogue to the novel, which seems seriously misconceived to me, shows us Katharina reading Hans’ Stasi file. Of course, we know that Hans was a Stasi informal Mitarbeiter, that is, an informer currying favor with the brutal East German regime. But this aspect of Hans’ life was never particularly apparent in the preceding part of the book and it seems odd for Isis to abandon her own memories and have recourse to official secret files now, apparently, made available to the general public. The entries in Hans files, totaling 2400 pages, are written in horrible bureaucratic diction and quite hard for a non-German-speaker to read. (It’s unclear how Katharina gets access to these files – she’s not a blood-relative of the deceased Hans; does she have some kind of release executed by his wife or son?) So far as I can see nothing of any significance is revealed. Hans went by the code name Galilei, a reference to his adoration for Brecht and his plays, including, of course, one about Galileo. Predictably, he seems to have informed on his friends and neighbors as did, apparently, most everyone in the DDR. As an informant and spy, the file tells us that he became, more or less, useless about the time that he met Katharina in 1986 – the last notation indicates that Hans’ file will be closed due to Perspektivlosigkeit der Zusammenarbeit (that is, something like “lack of prospects for future work with him”, but Perspektivlosigkeit also means “hopelessness.”) The final chapter feels somehow obligatory, as if Erpenbeck has to address the “elephant in the room” – that is, Hans’ complicity with the vicious East German regime. But I don’t think the chapter adds anything of substance and, in fact, suggests unwittingly, I think, that Erpenbeck’s perspective on the preceding materials is missing a crucial component – in other words, the reader feels a little cheated to learn that Hans’ past involved all sorts of interactions with the Stasi or secret police that have never been mentioned up to these final six or seven pages. This is particularly irritating because, from time to time, Erpenbeck gives us access to Hans’ thoughts – this is particularly true in the first half of the book before the character turns into a monster. For instance, we learn that Hans was a member of Hitler Youth until he was nine and that, as the Russians advanced, he father took the boy’s uniform and threw it over a fence into a neighbor’s yard – this event recurs in the text periodically as metaphor for putting something radically aside and hoping that it is forgotten. (We also learn that Hans is afraid of water due to something his mother seems to have done to him on a beach when he was a toddler; other bits of information about Hans’ past are periodically relayed to us, but, unless, I missed the clues there is nothing about the character’s involvement with the East German secret police.) The final chapter, described as an “Epilogue”, therefore, seems to misfire.
“Kairos,” the name of the novel, refers to a Greek deity associated with good fortune. Kairos is depicted as a smiling youth with a forelock. Should you encounter this figure, you should seize him by the forelock and clasp him to yourself tightly. If your grip fails, Kairos will turn her head away from you and the back of his skull is bald with nothing to take in your hand. Erpenbeck, who stands outside of the perspective of her characters and comments on their fates, suggests that Katharina’s chance meeting with Hans, an event resulting in a six year love affair, was an encounter with Kairos, that is, a life-changing moment of good fortune. The fact that Hans spends at least half of their six-year liaison tormenting Katharina, of course, complicates this understanding. Erpenbeck’s theme is that carnal knowledge is also knowledge and that Katharina’s travails with Hans have equipped her for other and better things and, perhaps, her extensive, forensic replies to her lover’s vituperative cassettes have made her into a writer. This interpretation may be fanciful – we don’t see Katharina engaged in any artist endeavors in the novel except designing sets for theater and opera. But we, also, know that Erpenbeck began her own career as theater technician, that she is the same age as her heroine, and that she is now probably Germany’s most well-known and famous writer – thus, we are unavoidably drawn to the conclusion that the protracted and unhappy affair with Hans, as well as her roots in the late and not much lamented DDR, are an important source for her esthetic accomplishments. The novel resembles a memoir and I think it is reasonable to perceive Kairos as Erpenbeck’s portrait of the artist as a young woman. (The general theme of a young woman exploited, but, ultimately, inspired by a toxic relationship with an older man is “in the air”; Joanna Hogg’s two films, The Souvenir and The Souvenir Part II address this theme – these films were made in 2019 and 2021; Lone Scherfig’s 2010
An Education addresses similar themes. Although An Education, which was nominated for three Academy Awards, precedes the “Me Too” movement, there is a sense that Hogg’s films and Erpenbeck’s novel are intended as to complicate the simplistic narratives that affairs between older men and younger women are always wholly toxic – Erpenbeck’s reference to Kairos, certainly, suggests that Katharina’s “coming of age” experience with Hans wasn’t completely harmful and, in fact, encouraged her interest in theater and, ultimately, literature. It’s interesting to observe that The Souvenir (I and II), An Education, and, for that matter, Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation with a similar theme, like Erpenbeck’s novel, are all made by women.)
Characteristic of German literary fiction are references to classical art and mythology. When Katharina is granted permission to spend a week in the West German city of Cologne where she visits her elderly grandmother, she muses on a mosaic showing Dionysus excavated during the war when workers were building an air-raid shelter. At this point in the book, the West represents licentiousness, a realm of the senses. The orgies celebrated by Dionysus within a mosaic meander pattern buried in the earth rhyme with a porno-shop that Katharina visits. Clothing is cheap in West Germany, and there are beggars, something Katharina has never seen in East Berlin and she is both excited and appalled by the pornography on offer – these things don’t exist in the DDR. (Katharina thinks that it would be stimulating to tour Cologne with Hans at her side.) The ruins of Hitler’s bunker are posed against the Pergamon altar that she and Hans inspect on a visit to Museumsinsel in Berlin. Erpenbeck describes the Gigantomachy portrayed in the figures battling on the altar, a war in which the Olympian Gods fight the Titans. The subtext for this scene is the conflict for dominion over the world between Communism and Capitalism, the ongoing war between the sexes, and the clash between Hans and Katharina. When possible, Erpenbeck expands her themes and give them mythic resonance. At the end of the book, as she sleeps between the paws of the sphinx, Katharina’s adventures assume forms from Egyptian mythology – Katharina is imagined as Isis collecting the body parts of her brother and lover, Osiris. The shattered love affair is reconstructed in the form of the novel, its pieces assembled and put on display for analysis. Similarly, Germany broken into two parts is reassembled by the end of the book. The work of the artist, it is implied, involves restoring to order that which has been fragmented and broken.
Kairos is exquisitely written. There are many fine details and the book isn’t wholly grim. In fact, it has comic episodes, most notably, a passage describing sorties into West Berlin by young women living in the East. After the Wall was torn down, East German girls seems to have engaged in an orgy of shoplifting – one woman is described as marching a lawn mower out of a hardware store in West Berlin. As recompense for decades of austerity, the East unleashes a eine ganze Partisanarmee bislang unbescholtener Ostmaedchen (‘an entire partisan army of previously respectable girls from the East”) who swarm into the West Berlin stores, striking blows at the vulnerable underbelly of capitalist commerce, that is the “question of possession and payment”. This is an interesting aspect of events in 1989 and 1990 hitherto unknown to me and vigorously depicted in Erpenbeck’s book. Returning to East Berlin with a sketchpad (full of pictures made in Venice), Katharina muses:
“Coca-cola, she had seen, was now peddled on the east side of the Friedrichstrasse train-station. Coca-cola was also in the little convenience stors in Pankow where she always went to buy things, no different than New York or Munich. Coca-cola had achieved what Marxist philosophy had never accomplished, it had united the proletariat of all nations under its banner.”
(The Friedrichstrasse train-station was on the border between East and West Berlin and the point of departure for East Germans authorized to travel to the West. Pankow is a borough in former East Berlin known for neighborhoods where elite members of the DDR’s regime lived. “Pankow” was often used as metonym for the German Communist Party – hence, the encroachment of coca-cola into Pankow represents that brand penetrating to the very center of the Communist regime.)
Here is an extended sample of Erpenbeck’s prose characteristic of Kairos. The text below is my translation. Kairos has been put into English by Michael Hofmann but I haven’t consulted his work. (Hofmann is a brilliant guy but too clever by, at least, half. He can’t resist improving upon his source material. I have a beautiful book of Gottfried Benn’s poetry translated by Hofmann – he isn’t faithful to the original poems and, indeed, often makes the verse more difficult and allusive than the original texts. Whether he has done this with respect of Erpenbeck’s Kairos I don’t know.)
Up to the DDR’s bitter end, coterminous with Erpenbeck’s novel, Hans has continued to denounce Katharina, abuse that she meekly accepts while at the same time enjoying a varied and, even, rather promiscuous love life apart from her married mentor. (He has told her to “keep her filthy hands off art” since everything she touches is tainted by her sins.) There’s a funny episode in which Katharina is engaged to designed sets for Gertrude Stein’s Dr. Faustus, a theater piece planned for premiere in New York City. Katharina is used to the lavish, no-expenses-spared style of set design once typical in East German opera and she looks forward to contriving an elaborate set of the New York stage. But the arts aren’t well-subsidized in America and Katharina’s design gets reduced to a single neon light illumining an otherwise bare stage. During a lecture at her college, Katharina is offended by something that a professor says disparaging the revolution in East Germany and, with her fellow students, she walks out of the assembly. The Stasi are still notionally empowered to arrest people and Katharina gets assigned to a harvest work detail putting cucumbers onto a conveyor belt in the rural environs of Berlin. This task isn’t too onerous and she’s with her friends who also protested the remarks made by the professor and, so, the whole punitive regime backfires – the labor outside causes Katharina to recall pleasant excursions when she was a young girl working on the harvest for the virtuous socialist state and she and her buddies sit around talking politics and plotting against the government. Hans, meanwhile, angrily reports that his son has committed the ultimate offense – he has had himself baptized as a Christian. All borders with the West are now open. In this context:
“As she (Katherine) returns to her art history lecture, there stands before her an old professor who knew more about Babylon’s Ishtar Gate than any other other person in the world, a fellow who would not hurt a fly – this man smites himself on the breast and accuses himself of not raising his voice loud enough against injustice. But this duplicity, he says, his tight-rope walk between justice and injustice, was not something that had been imposed upon him primarily by the Party leadership but rather by his own parents. My mother, he cries to the students (of whom most simply wanted the lecture to come to an end so that they could see the West with their own eyes), my mother renounced me when I became indignant over the deportation of Biermann. She cursed me and I took this curse to heart and never made the attempt to reconcile with her. That was my punishment for equivocating, for walking the tight-rope.
But I’m happy nonetheless, he says, although I suppose I look more exhausted than pleased, but I’m happy all the same that now I’m able to cast off this slave-language.
But I’m unhappy when I see how my people are plunging into an abyss and there is nothing I can do to pull them back.
And they knew that this was true.”
A couple of notes may be helpful. The Ishtar Gate was extracted from the ruins of Babylon by German archaeologists beginning in 1904 and installed in the so-called Pergamon Museum, an institution in central Berlin that ended up behind the Wall in East Berlin. The reference to the Ishtar Gate rhymes with the visit to the Pergamon Museum during which Hans and Katharina examine the famous altar sculpted with the Gigantomachy relief. Wolf Biermann is German folk singer. He was originally associated with Hanns Eisler, a German composer who casts a long shadow over Cairos – Eisler was associated with Brecht, wrote the East German national anthem, and is described as an influence on Hans in the book. Biermann wrote protest songs, got in trouble with East German authorities, and was expelled from the country in 1976, a significant injustice particularly because Biermann had emigrated from Hamburg to live in the East in order to assist in building the Socialist state. Biermann’s expulsion was a cause celebre in Germany and exposed significant rifts in the DDR between the government and intellectuals. The Biermann affair isn’t significant to Katharina although it was a litmus-test for older Germans. The pop-musicians important to Katharina and her friends are Lou Reed and Queen. The term that I translate as “equivocation” or “tight-rope walking” is Gratwanderung, a word that literally means walking on the ridge-line of structure, that is, balancing as if on a tight-rope.
