Fate and freedom are at loggerheads in this mesmerising novel depicting an abusive relationship that crumbles alongside the Berlin Wall, writes Lucy Kenningham
Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck won the International Booker Prize in May 2024
East Berlin, July 1986. Sheltering from a torrential downpour, Katharina (19) and Hans (53) meet and – to the sound of Chopin, Bach and Mozart and the mantra of Lenin – fall painfully in love. But their relationship, like the DDR (German Democratic Republic), will not last.
Initially caught up in the headiness of sex, the emotional force of late-baroque and romantic-era classical music, and the arresting words of Bertolt Brecht, it is an unsurprisingly imbalanced relationship in which Hans takes on the role of a teacher, Katharina at times a school girl. Hans is married with a child, Katharina has yet to alight upon a career. “Are you looking for a father?” he asks her. “Are you looking for a daughter?” she responds.
East Berlin is painted with vivid language as the reader is pulled into the lovers’ rapidly intensifying relationship. Yet in a Yeats-like swirl that is foreshadowed at the start, things fall apart, the Wall cannot hold, and a powerful metaphor develops between the lovers’ desperate will to keep their dying relationship together and East Germany’s struggle to resist its own increasingly inevitable demise.
The traditional Western narrative of the collapse of communism is rendered as a tangle of emotional complexity: it is a break up and though freedom is enticing, not every heart-broken lover wants it, and likewise some East Germans find it hard to move on.
“If only I could understand!” cries Hans, in regards to Katharina’s disloyalty. But as he grapples with the end of the political system he grew up in, he could just as well be talking about the collapse of communism.
In a stunning and shocking scene, masterfully sequenced by Erpenbeck, Katharina betrays Hans and in sync their relationship turns abusive. The relationship continues to burn with increasingly dark intensity when it becomes clear it should have been extinguished. Like the East Germans who refuse to cave to the new creed of capitalism, Hans and Katharina dig their nails deep into the remnants of their broken relationship until blood is drawn – and refuse to let go. “Has the present gone for good, never to be seen again? And what’s left behind?” Katharina wonders.
The power wielded by Hans over Katharina – physically, and emotionally – is at times akin to the Stasi, such as when he devours her diaries. The strength required to mentally recalibrate as a relationship breaks down is compared to the strength required to shed a lifelong belief in communism. Throughout the book, the pull of old habits, familiarity and patterns compel Hans and Katharina to continue their relationship. Likewise, the DDR lumbers on with little legitimacy.
“If only I could understand!” cries Hans, in regards to Katharina’s disloyalty. But as he grapples with the end of the political system he grew up in, he could just as well be talking about the collapse of communism.
Things fall apart
Erpenbeck, who grew up in East Germany, describes intimately the confusion of that initial, tentative contact with the West. Particularly powerful are some of Katharina’s first encounters with capitalism: her shock verging on disbelief at seeing the homelessness; her dance with porn.
A new identity is imposed on the city and its inhabitants. “They will use the word “gray” to describe the section of the city that has no neon advertisements. And when Katharina walks around the West, she feels like a bad copy of the people who live there, an imposter, a cheat, liable to be exposed at any moment. With her eyes, which in this other half of the city are a stranger’s eyes” For Katharina, it is overwhelming. “Sometimes, when [she] is in her apartment, she bursts into tears in a doorway, or leaning by the window, just because her mind has nowhere to go. Where there used to be perspective, now everything knots itself into one confused tangle of possibilities.”
Hans is very much like East Germany: both have been her teacher, her introduction to life, her rock, her fountain of knowledge. To let them both go, simultaneously, requires a total shattering of the belief system.
Kairos
In Greek, it means ‘the right or critical moment’. Erpenbeck’s narrator has the omniscience and slight reticence of a Greek god lending the events, both personal and political, the gravity of history. East Berlin changes. Chants of “We are the people [become] We are one people! A massive shift is taking place.” The political intersperses the personal. As Hans and Katharina slowly start to separate, East and West Germany gradually converge. “Everything is collapsing. Some of it crumbled, some was smashed, some repurposed.”
“Is this what freedom feels like? Not having an enemy you can put a name to?”
Freedom is dizzying. Hans’s wife asks “Is this what freedom feels like? Not having an enemy you can put a name to?” She attends a protest for the first time, against the “moribund” East German state. As their political system and personal ideology disintegrates around them, the East Berliners realise they “ought to become something that they are not”.
This masterful novel by Jenny Erpenbeck is gripping, intimate and more than worthy of its International Booker award. Whether personal or political, it is not easy to let go of the past.