In the sprawling narrative of Kairos, as penned by the esteemed German writer Jenny Erpenbeck, we are embroiled in the clandestine love of a youthful Katharina and her elder paramour, Hans, a writer. The backdrop to this spirited coupling is the grim concrete canvas of 1980s East Berlin.
It is not in the throes of love that we find them, but in the ashes of their past, evoked through the delivery of two boxes of Hans’s writings following his death. Their relationship, a chance collision of souls, spins into a turbulent dance of guilt and betrayal, echoing the upheavals of a Germany torn in twain.
Erpenbeck, a native of the East German landscape, navigates the corridors of identity and the steady hand of time, her narrative seeping into the dark corners of history’s ravages. She plunges into the well of sensuality, something not seen in her earlier works, giving her characters flesh and blood and desires.
Here we have Katharina, a bud flowering in the dawn of womanhood, pitted against Hans, an elder man braced against his fading male privilege. The pair are caught in the tangle of a crumbling East Germany, their lives etched by the sharp knife of a country’s decay.
Erpenbeck, with an adept hand, brings to life the twilight of the German Democratic Republic, the toppled Berlin Wall echoing in the novel’s pages. She touches upon “Kairos,” the meeting of the eternal with the temporal, a divine collision.
But humanity’s victory is a hollow echo, the split between East and West a gaping chasm, the scramble towards capitalism a mad race, and the loss, a bitter pill swallowed by many. Her words, cut to the bone, are brought into relief by Michael Hofmann’s nuanced translation, a clear showcase of her literary prowess, making her a contender for the Nobel Prize.
Kairos is a love letter to continuity, a contemplation of change, and an exploration of time’s insurmountable power over identity. The story of Hans and Katharina is not a parable of German reunification but a separate thread woven into the tapestry of an era fraught with challenges. Their unity, their “oneness,” is a mirror held to the face of many who morphed in the face of East Germany’s collapse, a testament to time’s power and identity’s fluidity.
Kairos is a narrative that dares to push the limits of a novel, asking not just where we have been and where we are, but what endures. Thus, it offers us a unique lens through which to view passion, politics, and history.
WORDS: brice.