Michael Hofmann

Jenny Erpenbeck

Jenny Erpenbeck’s much anticipated new novel Kairos is a complicated love story set amidst swirling, cataclysmic events as the GDR collapses and an old world evaporates Jenny Erpenbeck (the author of Go, Went, Gone and Visitation ) is an epic storyteller and arguably the most powerful voice in contemporary German literature. Erpenbeck’s new novel Kairos―an unforgettably compelling masterpiece―tells the story of the romance begun in East Berlin at the end of the 1980s when nineteen-year-old Katharina meets by chance a married writer in his fifties named Hans. Their passionate yet difficult long-running affair takes place against the background of the declining GDR, through the upheavals wrought by its dissolution in 1989 and then what comes after. In her unmistakable style and with enormous sweep, Erpenbeck describes the path of two lovers, as Katharina grows up and tries to come to terms with a not always ideal romance, even as a whole world with its own ideology disappears. As the Times Literary Supplement writes: “The weight of history, the particular experiences of East and West, and the ways in which cultural and subjective memory shape individual identity has always been present in Erpenbeck’s work. She knows that no one is all bad, no state all rotten, and she masterfully captures the existential bewilderment of this period between states and ideologies.” In the opinion of her superbly gifted translator Michael Hofmann, Kairos is the great post-Unification novel. And, as The New Republic has commented on his work as a translator: “Hofmann’s translation is invaluable―it achieves what translations are supposedly unable to do: it is at once ‘loyal’ and ‘beautiful.’”

Kairos

daphne

A long time ago, the papers in his boxes and those in her suitcase were speaking to each other. Now they're both speaking to time. 

Laura Dobie

Katharina's memories of her two days with Hans in Berlin seem to overlay everything she experiences in Budapest like fine sand.

On their way, Hans pulls Katharina into an entryway, and holds her in his arms for a long time. Today and tomorrow, and then she'll be gone. Then the thing that today still passes for "now" will be over. The waiting on the steps of the press, the asphalt perfect for roller-skating, the school, the playground, the conversation beside the fast-moving water, and now their embrace: step by step, block by block, he's been walking through her childhood with her. Step by step and block by block, he has also created memories for them both. Memories as iron rations for the lonely week ahead.

Behind the steel barrier that runs parallel to the train tracks, and that on this side too is a steel barrier, the S-Bahn presumably continues to run, in the familiar way, towards Strausberg or Erkner or Ahrensfelde. Or not? Does the East, which so far has been her element, cease to exist the moment she can no longer see it? Has she, Katharina, displaced it from present to past with those few strides to the other side of Friedrichstrasse station? Or is this gray station endowed with the power to hold two different sorts of time, two Competing presents, twO everyday realities, one serving as the other's netherworld? But then where is she, when she stands on the borderline? Is it called no-man's-land because someone wandering around in it no longer has any idea who he is?

Would there have been these innumerable letters without the Wall? Did writing have something to do with the abruptness of separation?

Katharina thinks of the masks and the costumes she saw in the store. Is it only possible to really be yourself when no one knows who you are? And if the fulfillment of desires here is only a matter of the price, doesn't all desire convert into the one desire, for cash?

Katharina is at home on the wrong side. Not in her own eyes, but in the eyes of the world, which all of a sudden are all on this country, which for twenty-eight years was obscured by the Wall. Through the hole in the Wall, itS presence was torn out into this world as by a vast sucking pressure, in the first few days she even had the sense she could hear the whooshing of time. Has the present gone for good, never to be seen again? And what's left behind?

“It will never be like this again,” thinks Hans. “It will always be this way,” thinks Katharina

Kairos quotes

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