A powerful, beautiful tale of twisted love in East Berlin
by Jenny Erpenbeck, tr Michael Hofmann
304pp, Granta, £16.99 (0844 871 1514), ebook £12.99 “What is inside, what is outside?” A version of this question appears twice in Jenny Erpenbeck’s latest novel, Kairos, an extraordinary story of twisted love that unspools in East Berlin during the last years of the GDR. The first time, it is being considered by Hans, a middle-aged writer, recalling the unusual shape of a jar from his childhood – it “held the ice cubes in a separate blown chamber to one side”. Later, Katharina, his young lover, picks up the same question while contemplating which of her feelings for Hans are genuine, and which are being performed.
The entanglement of interior and exterior is a central preoccupation in Erpenbeck’s writing, which has over the past 25 years encompassed novels, short stories, novellas, plays and non-fiction. In her unfailingly serious work, physical objects and places serve as portals to memories and emotions, and what’s happening in the world is never merely a backdrop: history is the material from which lives are made.
In Kairos, translated almost irreproachably from the German by Michael Hofmann, Erpenbeck presents Hans and Katharina’s relationship, which spans the period from 1986 to 1992, as an allegory for the 41-year existence of the state of East Germany. (Like her female protagonist, Erpenbeck was born in East Berlin in 1967.) They embark on a dizzying affair – Hans is already married – powered by the idealism of new love.
Erpenbeck beautifully portrays this entwining of two selves, alternating between the two characters’ perspectives, their thoughts separated by no more than a line-break. Then the romance darkens. The sex becomes violent. There is jealousy, deception, surveillance, cruelty. Erpenbeck avoids words such as “codependent” or “abusive” – things are murkier than that – but the reader can make up their own mind.
Kairos cannot be reduced to a single, unambiguous message. There are too many questions and no concrete answers. Plus, from Katharina’s perspective, neither West nor post-reunification Germany offers more real freedom than the GDR. As Erpenbeck observes, in a rare flash of wry humour: “Coca-Cola has succeeded, where Marxist philosophy has failed, at uniting the proletarians of all nations under its banner.” But that’s a story for another time. is a stunning autopsy of those broken bonds that you were sure would last for ever.