Kairos: Jenny Erpenbeck

Time itself

I read Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos (2021, trans. 2023 Michael Hoffman) at the end of last year, and again at the end of this year. Fitting for a novel named after a god of time. With the first read, I noticed Erpenbeck’s sophistication around writing about the complicated mechanisms of highly complicated, at times abusive, relationship. On my second read, I noticed more of Erpenbeck’s analogy of the relationship resembling end of days for East Germany (GDR, we’d say here in the U.S., but DDR much of the rest of the world would call it). Both times, I fell into the nostalgic, beautifully sorrowful spell Erpenbeck casts…

A man asks a woman if she will come to his funeral. She ignores the request until he asks again, and again, before she acquiesces. After his death, she goes through boxes of detritus accumulated during their relationship. Katharina is nineteen, and one day she leaves her house, walks into a bookstore, barely makes it onto a train. On that train, she glances, three times, at an older man, Hans, who, upon the third glance, knows he’s caught her interest. He’s thirty-four years older than her, their birth years, tallied up, equal a hundred. Significant to them, as small things are to lovers. They become lovers on their first night together. He’s married, his son is closer to Katharina’s age than he is, and he also tells Katharina that he has another lover outside his marriage. She’s relieved that he wants to continue seeing her, and accepts the complications of his life. He introduces her to art, music, and restaurants that feel nostalgic even as Katharina and Hans dine in them. He’s teaching her, enjoying the process of teaching, hoping to leave her better off than she was before, as he will not end his marriage no matter how deeply and intensely Katharina’s and his love burns. She follows him when he goes on family vacations. She lurks in the back of theaters when he watches movies with his son. She wants to have his child.

Such intensity cannot last. Katharina visits Budapest, then West (West Germany), and things begin to change. Everything was beautiful before, during that trip, the lovers both fear the other one is leaving them. In Budapest, Katharina buys cheap clothes and exotic vegetables to take back to Hans. Katharina’s trip West brings the first ugliness into the book. Katharina becomes emotional when she sees sex workers and the homeless poor for the first time as neither exists (or perhaps are invisible) in the East, but she finds herself adjusting to the sights very quickly. A sex shop is exciting but horrifying, the thought of all the things that can be purchased cheaply in the capitalist country. The Mercedes star looms above all, the scepter of capitalism that doesn’t exist in the East. Katharina, born the same year as Erpenbeck (who is also married to a years older artist, somewhat like Hans) was born and brought up in socialism, Hans began school when Hitler invaded Poland, he was part of the Hitler Youth. She waits and waits for Hans to call her grandmother’s house (yes, her family is aware that she’s in love with a married man much older than herself). The desperation of her love, coming from someone whose parents separated when she was young and afterward felt neglected, unsurprisingly, makes her vulnerable. He asks to tie her up during sex, and he wonders if it only the sex that draws them together and intensifies their relationship. The sex grows more violent, Katharina acquiesces. This, after all, as Rilke said, is what all her life prior has been preparation for. The relationship changes over the years. Hans’ wife discovers a photograph, then letters. Katharina applies for an internship that will take her out of town. Erpenbeck’s suspenseful build to the cataclysm in their relationship mirrors aspects of GDR (DDR), and the Fall of the Berlin Wall; a cataclysm I’ll let you discover for yourself should you choose to read this book.

The first time I read this book, I was reminded of Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984). I re-read that book immediately after my first time reading Kairos, and the melancholy, nostalgia, Fall of the Berlin Wall in comparison to Prague Spring (the setting The Unbearable Lightness of Being), older, philandering male partner and anxious younger partner, and both books look back after the death of one of more main character feel very similar. Upon the second read, I thought more of Lea Ypi’s Free (2021), a memoir of a childhood in communist Albania, in that both center on young women brought up in a world that existed briefly and ended in a way that feels abrupt in the way they both write of the end, leaving them to adjust to Western values and capitalism; both Kairos and Free mention coca-cola as a symbol of Western and capitalism. Erpenbeck has criticized Westerners for taking their view of GDR from The Lives of Others (2006), but some plot points of Kairos resemble that movie. I’ve watched and adored both The Lives of Others and Goodbye, Lenin (2003), and would recommend both films.

Besides being well-written and creative, I loved this book for personal reasons also. I spent several months in Berlin after an assault, and Kairos is the only work I’ve read that made me feel as if I was back there, capturing something of the feeling of freedom I had there, and her views on abuse are much more nuanced than most other writers. Yet Kairos is a divisive novel, and I’m one of those who loved it. I found some criticisms valid: it could have been edited as Erpenbeck goes on at unnecessary length about music (her husband is a conductor), and in some of her descriptions. There are a few points that feel self-consciously over-written and overly detailed. Fans of her previous work were disappointed by high emotionality of this work in comparison to her coolly concise, shorter novels that proceeded this one. That emotionality made this novel feel more personal, which is something I appreciated over her previous works. Some of the critiques are from loyal/nationalistic Germans who fear that Erpenbeck’s popularity will give non-German the idea that Erpenbeck is reflective of Germany; as a non-German I don’t believe Erpenbeck is representative of German culture or art. I believe some of the critiques are because Erpenbeck, born in GDR/DDR, was not overly critical of her birth country. At times she’s critical of the West, highlighting the inequality and the sort of unconscious control of consumerism capitalism. History is written by the victors, no where is that perhaps more known than Germany. I found Erpenbeck’s more balanced takes on the difference between the East and West much more interesting and valid than a flatly, thoughtlessly patriotic story.