Kairos

3.5 | 1,520 ratings

Price: 21.83

Last update: 11-02-2024

About this item

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 19-year-old Katharina meets by chance a married writer in his 50s 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.

PVM

Just when you think you know where this is going, it leaves you behind

Reviewed in the United States on October 4, 2024

I didn't think romance and East Germany and obsession were good ingredients for a novel, but they work here.

Not Mastering the Past

Reviewed in the United States on June 14, 2023

“Vergangenheitsbewältigung” or “mastering the past” has been the major theme of post-war German literature, and the results have not always been successful. Gῡnter Grass, who many thought of as the conscience of Germany, spent decades preaching to Germans about how they should come clean about their activity in the Third Reich. He turned out to be hiding his own membership in the Waffen SS. Christa Wolf devoted her writing career to the theme of historical memory, yet she could not recall her own work as an agent for the Stasi in East Germany.

Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel Kairos is a novel that attempts to come to terms with a more extensive past, which now includes not only the Third Reich but also the rise and fall of the GDR. It is a reflection on history largely through flashbacks, as it tells the story of an affair between the nineteen-year-old Katherina and a novelist named Hans who is ten years older than her father. The story is told as a series of vignettes, in which you cannot always distinguish a clear chronology. The lines between past and present, as well as reality and imagination are fluid. Katherina is initially completely devoted to Hans to a point where she does not even care that he is married with a son about her age. But gradually, as more of his past surfaces, he becomes sadistic and tyrannical. At times the two seem to merge into a single character, divided against itself, and perhaps a metaphor for the GDR. The book ends as the GDR is abolished and Hans dies with it.

The East German intelligentsia were always far more enthusiastic about Communism than their counterparts in the Soviet Union or the rest of Eastern Europe, and it is not hard to see why. Communism was a philosophy heavily based on the work of German thinkers such as Marx and Hegel so it fitted in well with their traditions. By contrast, the Russians always felt it was a foreign import. Even while recognizing that the reality was far from utopian, German intellectuals such as Christa Wolf and Stefan Heym clung to the Communist ideal and passionately resisted the dissolution of the GDR until the very end. The playwright Heiner Mȕller saw the Communist system as perhaps doomed from the start yet viewed its fall as a majestic tragedy.

Erpenbeck is in that tradition. The initial innocence of Katherina represents the hopes that initially attended East German Communism, and its demise is observed with sadness yet a sense of inevitability. This is a vision that will resonate with American readers, since the hopes associated with the GDR in many ways resemble the American Dream. But artistic flaws in the book point to ways in which her attempt at Vergangenheitsbewältigung has been less than successful. For all the philosophical weight it is made to carry, the relationship at the center is still largely the stuff of melodrama. Katherina seems absurdly naïve and innocent, while Hans is irredeemably corrupt. Katherina is fairly interesting but not believable; Hans is entirely believable but of very little interest. Even the background of global history, with all the grandeur invested in it by German philosophy, is not enough to make their relationship deeply tragic or profound.

Sandra Iler Kirkland

Shortlisted For the International Booker Prize

Reviewed in the United States on May 9, 2024

It is the end of the 1980s in East Berlin. Katharina is nineteen when she meets and starts an affair with Hans, a man in his fifties who is a decade older than her own father. He is married but a serial adulterer and his wife knows about the affair but doesn't seem to care. Her friends tell her that its a bad idea but the two seem entranced with each other.

Over the next two years, we watch as the affair sours just as the East German government is souring and failing as reunification looms. Hans is controlling, desperate to dictate every moment of Katharina's life. She begins to rebel against this and eventually has an affair with a man close to her own age. This insures that Hans beats her down psychologically for the rest of their time together.

At the end of the novel, reunification has happened. Katharina has moved on, into a theatre career in set design and finds a more stable love. Hans is caught in the fact that his talents are no longer needed as a radio commentator and that his ideas have passed. His relevance is over and he has a hard time adjusting to the new reality of reunification.

This book is on the 2024 shortlist for the International Booker Prize. It is an allegory using the doomed love affair to shadow the doomed government of East Germany and the control of the government similar to the control Hans needs to have over all around him. Hans is a despicable character and we only learn the depths of his degradation at the end of the novel but Katharina also has issues as the hope of the future. Jenny Erpenbeck is recognized as one of the leading voices of German literature and she lived through this time period and experienced much of what was happening. This book is recommended for literary fiction readers.

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