Lust, Loss, and Liberation in Jenny Erpenbeck’s ‘Kairos’

During the war, and for a dozen years after, Austrian composer Hanns Eisler labored over his Deutsche Sinfonie, Op. 50. The piece melds traditional marches with elements of jazz, as well as the words of Bertolt Brecht, into a dissonant rejection of fascism. Asked about his intent, Eisler (who also composed the national anthem of the newly-formed German Democratic Republic), said he wanted to convey “Trauer ohne Sentimentalität und Kampf ohne Militärmusik”—grief without sentimentality, and struggle without militarism.

Grief without sentimentality. I struggle to come up with a better three-word description of Jenny Erpenbeck’s new novel.

Kairos tells the story of an all-consuming romance between East Berliners, from its heady genesis to its messy dissipation. Katharina is an inquisitive young intellectual, a trainee typesetter for a state printing house. Hans is a novelist working in radio, a war-scarred idealist and a still-married serial philanderer, 34 years Katharina’s senior. Their relationship, born of a chance meeting on public transportation, flowers quickly. Hans pours the wine and explicates classical selections from his record collection—a Requiem, among other things. “Sleep with me,” initiates Katharina.

They begin in the summer of 1986. The GDR and the Bundesrepublik have signed a cultural exchange agreement, permitting new collaboration between artists of their respective countries. Gorbachev and Reagan are floating disarmament proposals to each other. “A week ago, she didn’t exist,” supposes Katharina, contemplating the new person she has suddenly become, “at least not in his world.” The lovers lay on the carpet, listening to music (Eisler, among others), discussing politics and having revelatory sex. The affair must be kept secret, but their union feels like destiny.

Desperately anxious that Katharina will not return from a trip to Budapest, Hans superstitiously books a table for two at the bar within the Palast der Republik, seat of the East German parliament. “Command economy,” Katharina teases, upon learning of his presumptuous move, “what a good idea.” “Our star mustn’t stray into the earth’s atmosphere,” says Hans, who insists upon narrating and re-narrating the relationship as if it were a contested historical conclusion, “because it will burn up early.”

We readers, wise to history and mindful of our own youthful infatuations, immediately recognize that this relationship is doomed. And yet the lovers’ convergence nevertheless feels profound. Hans and Katharina entertain domestic fantasies and play-act a wedding. Within their incandescent enclave, time does not belong to employers, intellectual musings need not yield a return, and happiness is woven from art and intimacy, not things that can be purchased in the Kaufhaus des Westens, the showy department store on the other side of the Wall.

Erpenbeck dares us to wonder: Is there a world in which this relationship works out? Could the obstacles, as formidable as the Wall itself, be somehow overcome?

“Everything comes down to a single day in January,” begins one chapter near the novel’s midpoint. Katharina, pursuing a career in the theater, moves to Frankfurt an der Oder, a border town east of Berlin. When she befriends an easygoing (and more age-appropriate) colleague, Vadim, Hans grows jealous. Their relationship takes on an increasingly intense pattern of uncomfortable distance and stormy reconciliation. Hans and Katharina claim to be happy only when they are together, but are they even happy together? For the one-month anniversary of their pretend wedding, Hans decides to up the erotic stakes of their union, gifting Katharina pornographic photos in an effort to steer her toward a coercive fantasy.

In the relationship-world of Hans and Katharina, time is marked relative to relationship events: How many days since the first time he undressed her? Since their first visit to the cinema? Since he buried her naked in sand, on the nudist part of the beach? This is relationship-time, independent of any calendar the rest of the world might follow. But Erpenbeck makes sure to tell us the exact real-world calendar date when Katharina sleeps with Vadim: “the night of 19 to 20 January, early in the new year 1988.” It isn’t just a moment of infidelity; it’s a breach of reality itself, a reassertion of the temporal framework of the outside world.

Readers seeking allegory will almost find one. January 1988 was an eventful month in East German history, a quickening of circumstances across the Eastern Bloc that would lead to the collapse of the GDR the following year. On January 17, 1988, the annual state-sponsored commemoration of the deaths of revolutionaries Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht was disrupted by protesters, including many students. In the resulting crackdown, as many as 150 dissidents were arrested, triggering waves of additional protests. And on the night of January 19, when Katharina “at last gives up her resistance to the thing she desires and that Vadim also desires,” an inexperienced 19-year-old soldier on a nighttime training mission drove a Soviet T64A tank into the path of a Brandenburg passenger train, causing one of the worst railway disasters in East German history.

Kairos does not call out the above historical events, and Erpenbeck is too gifted and too subtle to go for easy parallels. She prefers oblique angles; near-misses fraught with meaning. The Frankfurt that Katharina is increasingly drawn to (an der Oder) is not the same Frankfurt (am Main) that, as a world banking capital, stands for the West in its full capitalist glory. But they are both called Frankfurt, and thus Katharina’s choice becomes, symbolically, Frankfurt versus Berlin.

Western narratives often describe the Wende in terms of liberation and reunion. Erpenbeck toys with such expectations. It’s tempting to read Katharina’s emancipation from Hans, and the stormy back-and-forth of their messy breakup that dominates Kairos’s second half, as a straightforward emancipation story. How easy it would be, if Katharina’s liberation from Hans’s increasingly obsessive grasp occurred in unsubtle parallel with the television images of East Germans bursting across the border, ready to start shopping in the West. Maybe this novel is a Bildungsroman about freedom, with young Katharina its hero and the West her inevitable liberation?

But Kairos doesn’t feel like an emancipation narrative. The sense of loss is too thick. Hans and Katharina are humans, not heroes. Their relationship is about mutual discovery and possibility, epiphanies of the self that emerge through contact with the other. The sacred space they created dissolves into guilt and recriminations.

The GDR decays in parallel. West Germany will absorb the corpse of its sibling, and the East will forever be known as the “former East.” Katharina’s theater closes, likewise the radio station where Hans works, and “with the capitulation of one bureaucracy in the face of the other, Socialist office furniture landed on spontaneously created dumps.” Kairos, in the end, reveals itself as a tragedy.

Erpenbeck, who was born in East Berlin and in her early twenties when the Wall came down, has written of the strangeness of an entire system disappearing virtually overnight, and of the loss she felt upon realizing how comprehensively East German society would be swept away by Western capitalism. She notes:

a border between the two halves of my life: a border made of time, between the first half of my life, which was transformed into history by the fall of the wall and the collapse of the East German state, and the second half, which began at that same moment…I had known this border all my life, but when it disappeared in 1989, it went very quickly. Why did it go so quickly?

Katharina experiences something very similar:

Katharina is at home on the wrong side. Not in her own eyes, but in the eyes of the world…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.

Dissonant, complex mourning, for the collapse of a relationship and an entire country, is the core of Kairos. Clear-eyed and without slipping into “Ostalgie,” Erpenbeck offers a counter-narrative to Western triumphalism and cliches of liberation.

Grief without sentimentality.

Erpenbeck’s 2015 novel Go, Went, Gone earned both critical praise and the attention of international audiences with its examination of Germany’s current refugee crisis. That, too, was an exploration of borders. (As Lauren Oyler observes in The New Yorker, “The Mauerfall can be felt in all Erpenbeck’s novels, as a way of thinking about borders, transitions, and the elusiveness of freedom.”) But Erpenbeck hadn’t directly addressed the fall of the Wall in her fiction until now. Mourning, sometimes, involves saying that which has remained unsaid, or unsayable, for decades.

Readers who come to Kairos craving the present-day moral immediacy of Go, Went, Gone will have to work to find it. Grief and moral clarity don’t fit together cleanly, and the East German historical setting doesn’t readily translate into a call to action in 2023. But Kairos, in its requiem for a bad romance, dares to ask if the losses were inevitable. At a time when many readers grieve governmental failures and related losses—of rights; of optimism—Kairos carries important medicine. Might other modes of living, informed by ideals and desire, still be possible?