Reading guide: Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated by Michael Hofmann

Hans

When the novel begins in 1986, Hans is in his fifties. He is a writer, married, with a teenage son. Hans grew up under Hitler’s grip on Germany, witnessing fascism take hold of his father. Hans wants ‘to prove to himself and to mankind that he would have behaved differently,’ so moved to East Berlin from the West when he turned 18 due to his lingering sense of guilt. When he meets Katharina, he is enamoured with her youth, but decides that only she the power to decide that the relationship can continue or whether it must end. As their relationship progresses, Hans becomes increasingly abusive while exercising a degree of coercive control over Katharina. 

Katharina

At the beginning of the novel, Katharina learns of her former lover’s death, and receives two cardboard boxes that contain an archive representing their relationship together. Katharina is 19 years old when she meets Hans. She was born in East Berlin under the German Democratic Republic and a divided Germany is all she has ever known. Katharina is a theatre design student who ‘had only just been born when [Hans’] first book appeared’. Despite Hans’ increasingly abusive nature towards her, she stays in the relationship because she feels she deserves the punishment he bestows upon her.

Michael Hofmann is a poet, reviewer and translator. He has published four books of poems, and Behind the Lines: Pieces on Writing and Pictures. His collection of essays, Where Have You Been? was published by Faber & Faber in February 2015. He has made selections of the poetry of Robert Lowell and John Berryman, and, with James Lasdun, co-edited the influential anthology After Ovid. Hofmann has translated many German authors, including Franz Kafka, Joseph Roth and Hans Fallada. His translation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis and Other Stories is published by Penguin, and he is now at work on a new translation of Alfred Doblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz. A hitherto untranslated novel by Fallada, A Small Circus, was published in January 2012. Hofmann lives in London and Germany, and since 1993 has held a half-time teaching position at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Michael’s recent translations include Kafka’s The Burrow (Penguin, 2017), and he is currently translating Fallada’s Little Man, What Now? (Kleiner Mann, Was Nun?) for Penguin.

In 2016, Faber re-issued Hofmann’s poetry collections Nights in the Iron Hotel, Acrimony, Corona and Approximately Nowhere. His most recent poetry collection, One Lark, One Horse, was published by Faber in 2018.

How would you summarise this book in a sentence to encourage readers to pick it up? 

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.    

Is there something unique about this book, something that you haven’t encountered in fiction before? 

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. 

What do you think it is about this book that readers will not only admire, but really love? 

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. 

Can you tell us about any particular characters that readers might connect with, and why?  

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.  

Although it’s a work of fiction, is there anything about it that’s especially relevant to issues we’re confronting in today’s world?  

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. 

Is there one specific moment in the book that has stuck in your mind and, if so, why?   

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. 

‘The age difference is not the point. The point is the character. Even if Katharina could have met a version of Hans when he was 20 years younger, he would have been the same character. The character is what matters—if someone is manipulating, or hiding a big part of his life. An older man looks at a young woman with a certain kind of pleasure? This is normal. You admire beauty. You are happy to look at some young person, man or woman, it doesn’t matter. It’s not a crime. Only if you use your experience to manipulate someone, like Hans does with Katharina.’

Read the full interview in LitHub.

‘Whether in music or literature, no repetition is ever the same: even if things seem identical, one experiences them differently because of what has happened in the meantime. A sense of melancholia arises because something may have broken in the meantime. One knows that things are not as they used to be, that there is a dissonance between what is now the past and what is the acute present. My stories carry inside them the mechanism of memory: the things that have hit you emotionally are always present; they’ll return again and again as constant reminders of time passing and the change that has happened, the loss. This principle of looking at something again and understanding more than previously, then looking at it again and understanding even more, and then looking at it a third time – it is always the same basic material that needs to be re-evaluated over and over again, that has to be examined from a new perspective and classified differently.’

Read the full interview in Tank Magazine.

‘We spoke German at home; I grew up bilingual in England and Scotland and the U.S. Once I stopped desiring not to be German, and began reading German books of my own volition, the way was clear, though the bilingualism – being on an easy footing with two languages, translation, as I wrote somewhere, “not a naturally occurring activity” – was a hindrance. I could then start turning myself into an open-cast mine for words. That’s an East German thing.’

Read the full interview here.

As much as Kairos is a novel about a deeply personal love affair between two people, it also documents the political history of a country in turmoil. Erpenbeck grew up in East Germany, close to the Berlin Wall, and was 22 at the time of its fall. To what extent is it fair to call the novel an allegory for the reunification of Germany, and if so, what sense did you get of the political reality of the time?

Kairos is written in the present tense, which can seem unusual as historical fiction is often written in the past tense. Why do you think the author chose to write this story in particular in this manner? How does it serve the narrative of Kairos and what effect did it have on you as a reader, both initially and as you progressed through the novel?

Erpenbeck also shifts perspective throughout the novel, oscillating between that of Katharina and Hans. She does this frequently, sometimes within the same sentence and with no signalling to the reader that a shift has occurred. What effect does this technique of duality have on the text? 

The body of the novel is the story of Hans and Katharina’s relationship, which could be deemed unconventional due to the substantial age gap between the two. Yet the author draws little attention to this, nor does she condemn Hans for his abuse towards Katharina or any of the relationship’s more toxic elements such as the power imbalance. Discuss the benefits of this neutrality within the narrative. 

Mirroring and symmetry reoccur throughout the novel: ‘They lie so close that when one turns, the other turns too,’ Erpenbeck writes of Hans and Katharina. The novel itself is also structured in a symmetrical manner, while much of it documents the political history of East and West Germany, two halves of a whole. What is the deeper meaning, and purpose, of these motifs that Erpenbeck has embedded throughout?

Hans and Katharina’s relationship seemingly begins as one of equality. Yet early in their relationship, Hans suggests ‘it’s important that he sets some conditions, before it’s too late,’ and mentions that in the future, he will ‘hand [Katharina] on’. Discuss what these glimmers offer the reader, and whether Hans’s potential for abuse is always apparent. 

How do Hans’s childhood experiences, particularly witnessing the grip of fascism within his family, influence his behaviour and relationships throughout the novel? Consider how his upbringing, under the Nazis, contributes to behavioural patterns of dominance and control, and the implications it has on his adult relationships. 

Hans and Katharina’s relationship ends while the Berlin Wall falls. What parallels does Erpendeck draw between the two? Discuss whether the author positions either of these conclusions as wholly good or bad. Is Erpendeck asking us to consider the grey areas between the two? 

In an interview with American novelist Claire Messud, Erpendeck states that she intended to create ‘a museum’ through Kairos. The novel reflects on the art, the objects, the brands and ideas of a waning GDR. To what extent does she encapsulate this period, and location, in the pages of Kairos? What aspects of life in East Berlin are highlighted, and how are they contrasted with the post-unification era?

Many readers have commented on the detached style of the novel. Erpendeck writes purposefully, observing while remaining staunchly uninvolved. How does this style serve the reading experience, and bring to life the relationship between the two protagonists?

While We Were Dreaming by Clemens Meyer, translated by Katy Derbyshire

Go, Went, Gone by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated by Susan Bernofsky

The New Sorrows of Young W. by Ulrich Plenzdorf

Beyond the Wall: East Germany 1949-1990 by Katja Hoye