Kozhikode: A distance of 30 years is what she needed to be able to write about the Germany she grew up in, Jenny Erpenbeck believes. “The coolness that you need for writing – you need a lot of feelings too, of course – but that coolness, I was waiting for it,” she tells The Wire on the sidelines of the Kerala Literature Festival 2025. She wanted to write with equanimity. “I was feeling like okay, now is the time for this.”
Erpenbeck, along with translator Michael Hoffman, won the International Booker Prize for Kairos in 2024. Kairos, her fourth novel, is the first German book to win the coveted prize. It tells the story of a young woman, Katharina – only 19 when the book begins – and a 53-year-old married man, Hans, who bump into each other in Berlin one day in 1986 and start a relationship. The relationship soon goes south, in both expected and unexpected ways. While following their lives, the book also follows the political trajectory of Germany, as it heads for the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and sees a very different world after. “I wanted to start the story much before the fall of the Wall, to give a feel of the kind of life that ended with the unification.”
She’s keen, though, for the world to know that her book doesn’t exist in a vacuum. “We’re in a phase where a new way of looking at East Germany is starting slowly; there’s a newly won self-confidence amongst easterners to tell their own stories,” she says. After decades of media, academic and literary narratives being dominated by those from erstwhile West Germany, there are now people exploring more nuanced perspectives than the black-and-white picture that was being painted of the German Democratic Republic.
“I think it’s necessary to make clear that there were some good aspects of East Germany, as well as some really bad aspects. We know that the East German approach to socialist ideas failed, in many ways, but as it is here in Kerala, education was of high value and quality, the health system was a very good one, literacy levels were really high. Women were encouraged to be financially and socially independent. There were all these things that I consider good things – but of course there were also the horror stories of people being put into Stasi prisons, the Wall which was a bad experiment, one party ruling the whole system seems to be a bad idea… So to get a complex picture of a time, you need many voices. Only a choir of those voices can reach something resembling the truth, if at all. My story is just one of those voices.”
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One the narratives that needs to be challenged, she thinks, is the belief that the growth of the AfD (Alternative for Germany, a far-right political party) is because of its popularity in Germany’s east. Not only is this not a unique phenomenon, since across Europe and the world far-right parties have been on the rise, but “if you look at the leaders, they’re almost all originally from the West but have settled down in the East. And that’s a mean, nasty thing to do, to make it seem like east Germans are more open to the right-wing movement. But in fact the ideology came from the West.”
She pauses after this, thinking that perhaps she has strayed too far from the question she was asked, on why she situated Kairos in that particular moment of German history. “As always,” she smiles, “you can see that the past is no past at all. The flow of history also reaches our time, and it’s a time when everyone is also looking back to the fascist times and is asking themselves if perhaps some of that mindset has survived, undercover, and is now being recreated and awakened.”
A generation gap unlike others
Erpenbeck comes from a family of communists; her grandparents fought fascism. “They knew what it was that they were fighting, they had their own experiences of capitalism, of the struggle to make a living. Their own experiences convinced them that there must be some better world one day, based on equal rights for everyone. But you cannot pass on that kind of experience to the next generation, and this is a problem. I also tried to put it in the book, that Katharina is innocent, born into a socialist society. So her mindset is not shaped by the experience of suffering, of being oppressed. Her generation does not have an experience of capitalism, and since there was no freedom to travel, they also don’t know what’s out there.”
Jenny Erpenbeck, translated by Michael Hoffman
Kairos
Granta Books, 2024
There is a scene in Kairos when Katharina has got a pass to visit her family in the West. She sees a homeless person for the first time, and that experience changes her; it is her first encounter with complete poverty. “It might seem childish, but it really was like that,” Erpenbeck says about that scene. “We didn’t know poor people were living on the streets and it came as a shock. It was also a shock to see how much money you need in a capitalist society to just get by.”
This generational gap – of people who were born in a socialist society and those who knew the alternative – is something she wanted the book to bring out. Growing up, she thought of those in government as “old people, very old people”, who refused to make way for younger perspectives and ideas. “The 1980s were a time of not moving anymore, there was stagnation everywhere. The dictatorship had become boring; most people (except the opposition, who did a great job) didn’t even want to talk about it because it was so clear that everyone wanted a change. After having tried this and that, people were withdrawing into their private lives. That’s the time when the book is set – when love took the place of political engagement.”
Structures of power, in love and politics
Erpenbeck calls Kairos a love story, but the Katharina-Hans relationship is uncomfortable to read about. There’s the age gap, of course, and the fact that Katharina is still a teenager when they meet. Katharina’s friends and family – and the reader – do not believe that Hans will ever leave his wife and son, but Katharina seems to hold on to hope. He wants to engage in acts of BDSM, and while she agrees, in Erpenbeck’s words, “she seems bored by it”. But it gets worse: Hans is controlling and, despite being married, reacts terribly when Katharina meets someone else and has a sexual encounter. He uses her guilt as a weapon, and ensures that she cannot forget what happened, cannot move on with her life.
Why base the book on a relationship of this kind? Her research for a previous book, on Stalinism and the Soviet Union, provided some inspiration. “As I read about their interrogations, their purifications, the show trials – I thought in a way this is also about producing the feeling of guilt, and then using that guilt as an instrument to gain power over someone. This is comparable to some structures that, in the worst case, you experience in relationships as well.”
“I’m a fiction author, I’m not a historian or politician, so I wanted to see this kind of structure from the inside. Something that starts as a glorious love can turn into something that is oppressive, even abusive. The abusive aspects enter slowly, Hans is slowly taking over. In the beginning I would call it a real love, but then he takes advantage in a way that doesn’t pay any attention to her feelings, it turns abusive.”
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She also chose this type of relationship to portray, she says, because she wanted it to be a warning “I’m a mother now, we have a grown up son. I don’t have a daughter, but I thought that it would be good for young girls to read the book. Just to be aware – it’s not mainly the age gap, but the age gap makes it easier for him to manipulate her. But it’s not only his age, it’s also his character. There can also be young men who are manipulative like Hans is. So in a way, this is also a mother’s voice writing the book.”
A forgotten cultural life
If Berlin is the political stage for the novel, the personal stage is provided by the way the characters relate to music. Listening to music together is a form of deep intimacy; listening to the same music with someone else is an act of betrayal. While describing the universal experience music can provide, Erpenbeck also wanted to talk about the space music had in the GDR. “Music connects people directly – it’s like Bluetooth,” Erpenbeck laughs. “But it puts you in the same room of experience very quickly. The [sound] waves are touching you, it’s a physical thing; it’s invisible but it’s physical. It’s also connected to that stage in your life when you fall in love – just look around and young people are wearing headphones everywhere. It was the same in my youth.”
Films like The Lives of Others, she says, paint a picture of East Germany where artists are constantly under surveillance, where writers had to constantly hide their manuscripts. But that doesn’t provide a cohesive reality of the time; as she puts it, “it wasn’t all about oppression, there was also some life going on”.
“I wanted to describe my experience of having a very rich cultural life in East Germany. Theatre played a big role, also as a way of communicating indirectly in a society that didn’t provide a lot of ways to communicate. Books played a big role, reading was important. It was a way of not only escaping political life, but also of keeping your own space, finding some private space that cannot be reached. Music as a form of inward life was much more important then; now it is a form of entertainment, we go to a concert, then we go to have some dinner. But at the time, it was essential. With the fall of the Wall, the culture changed very quickly; the cultural life became a different cultural life. Of course there are great artists today as well, that’s not what I mean. And of course if all the books are available it’s fantastic, but in a way also books not being available creates an interest that’s much stronger.”
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An intimate politics
Kairos, for Erpenbeck, is both a love story and a political story. “Politics is not seen until it affects private lives,” she says. “If there’s a new law, you’ll see its impact on private lives and nowhere else. When I started writing, I wasn’t setting out with a political message or anything like that. It was just about looking at people’s lives and how they dealt with the cuts in it, the different situations in it.”
The last eight weeks before the fall of the Berlin Wall was one of those cuts she wanted to describe. The boredom that had lulled the majority into non-action was suddenly gone, instead “there was a euphoria that change was coming”. There was excitement about organising social structures in different ways. But that euphoria was short-lived; “after eight weeks, it became clear that we would just became part of western Germany. This short moment of self-empowerment ended.”
Using two lovers and their families, Erpenbeck says, she was able to show what it was like to live in that moment. Katharina and Hans experience this moment very differently – she finds freedom to travel and build a new life for herself, while he loses his job. “There is an ancient Greek story, about the Gordian knot. There’s a knot, and people are trying hard to undo it but not able to. Finally one person comes and just cuts the rope. It’s drastic. So similarly, in some ways private problems were solved by politics in this time – or there were others that were created by politics. The imbalance of the Hans-Katharina relationship is in a way solved by politics entering their lives. All of a sudden, she’s the one who has a future.”
Kairos – perhaps like the 1980s in Germany – ends on this note of tumult. There is change, drastic change, and the direction it will take is unclear. Like Erpenbeck says, perhaps a distance of 30 years makes moments like those easier to grasp.
