Everything you need to know about Kairos

Kairos is an intimate and devastating story of the path of two lovers through the ruins of a relationship, set against the backdrop of a seismic period in European history. It intertwines the personal and the political as the two lovers seemingly embody East Germany’s crushed idealism, with both holding on to the past long after they know they should move on. A meditation on hope and disappointment, Kairos poses complex questions about freedom, loyalty, love and power.

In East Berlin in 1986, a man and a woman meet by chance on a bus. She is a young student, he is older and married. Theirs is an intense and sudden attraction, and they embark on an affair fuelled by a shared passion for music and art, and heightened by the secrecy they must maintain. But when she strays for a single night he cannot forgive her and a dangerous crack forms between them, opening up a space for cruelty, punishment and the exertion of power. And the world around them is changing too: as the GDR begins to crumble, so too do all the old certainties and the old loyalties, ushering in a new era whose great gains also involve profound loss.

‘Kairos is a richly textured evocation of a tormented love affair in the dying years of East Germany. In luminous prose, Erpenbeck fully exposes the complexity of the passionate connection between a 19-year-old student and a much older writer.

‘Kairos is uncomfortable and complex. It’s about the weight of history and how it impinges on our lives. It starts with love and passion, but it’s at least as much about power, art and culture, a different kind of obsession. 

‘In fluid, musical sentences, Erpenbeck brings the reader close to her characters and to the fraught demands they face. These are dramas of the body as much as moral and political dilemmas, all brought to a crisis point. 

‘Though the novel follows two sensibilities throughout, this is Katharina’s story. We follow her as she descends into a self-destructive vortex and then re-emerges, all the while remaining connected to the larger history of East Germany during the last three years of the 1980s.  

‘The novel allows the reader to become intimate with East Berlin just before the fall of the Wall, the apartments, cafés, and city streets, workplaces and foods of the city that is now gone. It also evokes the difficult moral choices of the time and the losses that came with the seismic political transformation. 

‘Not a moment but a sensibility: Katharina is as much in love with art as she is with Hans. The discussions of music, poetry and theatre illuminate the book throughout.’

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Dwight Garner, NY Times:

‘If “Kairos” were only a tear-jerker, there might not be much more to say about it. But Erpenbeck, a German writer born in 1967 whose work has come sharply to the attention of English-language readers over the past decade, is among the most sophisticated and powerful novelists we have.

Clinging to the undercarriage of her sentences, like fugitives, are intimations of Germany’s politics, history and cultural memory. It’s no surprise that she is already bruited as a future Nobelist. Her work has attracted star translators, first Susan Bernofsky and now the poet and critic Michael Hofmann.’

John Powers, NPR:

‘Pain and pleasure do the tango in the engrossing new novel Kairos, the story of a love affair set in East Germany right before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It’s the latest book from the East Berlin born Jenny Erpenbeck, the 57-year-old writer and opera director who I fully expect to win the Nobel Prize sometime in the next five years. A grownup writer for grownup readers, Erpenbeck has an unsurpassed gift for showing how our ideas, passions and choices are shaped – and reshaped – by passing time and the ceaseless transformations of history.’

Charles Finch, Los Angeles Times:

‘Inasmuch as the German novel exists, however, its undisputed star in America at the moment is Jenny Erpenbeck. She’s a writer with a roving, furious, brilliant mind, and in her best-known books, including Go, Went, Gone, about a retired professor drawn into the refugee crisis, she fuses the emotional and historic in a way that suggests a new path for — well, the German novel. Now, in her severe but rewarding “Kairos,” Erpenbeck has done it again, carefully mapping the disintegration of an East German love affair onto the era just before the 1990 reunification of Germany. The book bears with it, as so startlingly few novels seem to when you encounter one that does, the absolute urgency of existential questions. Questions that encompass both the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of S&M.’

Natasha Walter, the Guardian

‘Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos is one of the bleakest and most beautiful novels I have ever read. On one level, it is a love story, or rather a story about the loss of love. It begins with a woman, Katharina, hearing about the death of her former lover. Boxes of his papers are delivered to her apartment, and when she finally sits down to open them the past rises before her like a pack of playing cards thrown into the air. […] Throughout these personal and political journeys, Erpenbeck never reaches for the stock phrase or the known response. While the novel is indeed bleak in its view of love and politics, spending time with Erpenbeck’s rigorous and uncompromising imagination is invigorating all the way to the final page.’

Adam Begley, the Spectator

‘It’s easy to read Kairos as an allegory, the doomed love affair analogous to the fate of East Germany and the ruin of its socialist experiment, its idealism corrupted by the rigid control of its citizens. But the two questions, uttered in one breath, merit separate answers. A strict allegorical reading can’t do justice to Erpenbeck’s subtle, richly layered, densely allusive and hugely ambitious novel.’