JENNY ERPENBECK
More than 30 years after the dissolution of the German Democratic Republic, Jenny Erpenbeck continues to write – in prose too lucid for nostalgia – about her culturally rich and politically repressed country east of the alleged capitalist Eden, dissecting the many layers of loss with a Proustian sensitivity. The protagonists of her new novel Kairos (2022), on the other hand, try valiantly to keep the past alive by repeating it at the expense of seeing the present, until a bewildering future has suddenly arrived.
Interview by Claudia SteinbergPortrait by Nina Subin
Claudia Steinberg In all your books, the past and time in general play a recurring role. There is also often a symmetry between events – or relationships – taking shape and then being taken apart. Motifs return, like a refrain. In Kairos, the disintegrating love story between the protagonists is held together by the endless repetition and reenactment of their happy beginnings. You have directed theatre and opera, and repetition is also a musical structure – did working in this world influence your writing, your idea of literary composition?
Jenny Erpenbeck Not consciously, but probably yes. However, 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. Your sense of chronology comes from the fact that you understand more and more as you get older. The panorama widens, and you have more material to reflect upon, more fodder. It is almost as if everything you could ever know has actually always been there, you only have to see it. So you actually try harder, but you also begin to wonder what else you might be blind to in the picture. Goethe said that one sees only what one knows. If you don’t know what else to expect, or whether there might be a false bottom underneath, then you can’t even ask the right questions. In my book The End of Days [2014] I told a biography, but I also did something else: I took the material of a life – that of my grandmother – and looked at it in different phases, trying to reconstruct it a bit: over a lifetime, some things lose importance but when we are very old, those things may suddenly come back and have meaning again. It is an inner movement: insight is not to be thought of as something forward-moving, but as something that comes from looking at things long enough to simply understand them better.
CS For the reader of Kairos, this process also has the effect of getting caught up in the intimate rituals of the tight and painful relationship between Katharina and the domineering Hans. One acquires an anxious familiarity with the characters and the geography of their love story: sites will disappear with the end of the GDR, just as their feelings will.
JE It is also Hans’ intention to create a virtual sense of home, even of heimat, through these rituals. Although they are tied to some specific places, he creates a home in the mind as well. I was excited about a character who says that he wants to manufacture the present as the future – as a memory of what was, a place of perpetual return. Hans quite cleverly builds an ideational framework, which at first looks like a great gain – a shared place for art, music, and literature. It is so difficult for Katharina to leave all this behind because the bad doesn’t erase the good. Those are two different things.
CS While Germany was conceited enough to believe that it could literally bribe people with its endless supply of consumer goods – a conviction that was not totally unfounded – Katharina is not seduced by the material promises of capitalism. Before the fall of the Wall, Katharina is allowed to visit her grandmother in Cologne and is astonished to see homeless people in that rich city. Later, she wanders into a porn shop, which shocks, disgusts and excites her.
JE The Cologne episode is actually autobiographical. I was a young girl and I was also thrilled with the fact that things I liked were so insanely cheap there, because what I considered chic was expensive in the GDR. We earned very little, so a sweater was a big purchase. I was shocked at how little things cost in the West.
CS Much later in Kairos, you describe with a certain schadenfreude how young women invade the department stores of West Berlin, helping themselves to whatever they like with anarchic disregard for capitalist notions of property.
JE They express quite a bit of aggression: we weren’t really asked to join that country, so now we’re not asking what the rules are. Reunification was really difficult for us, and I would say that even today we don’t see ourselves as federal citizens. It all happened quite quickly, and we would not have dreamed of saying, “This is our country”.
CS As children in the West during the early 1960s, our schools asked us to contribute to care packages for “our brothers and sisters in the Eastern Zone”. The Left in the West always thought that good things were happening over there, too, but the majority of West Germany always saw itself as far superior. Almost nobody wanted to know about what good and interesting things might be going on in the East.
JE Wolfgang Schäuble, the conservative politician who was in charge of reunification negotiations on behalf of the West, said it beautifully: “Dear people, let’s be clear, this is not a merger of two countries with equal rights, but actually a takeover.” In other words, don’t harbour any illusions: we are going to impose our system on your country; that’s just the way it is. I still find it exhausting that you are supposed to shop all the time, and to me it’s an impertinence that you have to go through the duty-free area at the airport – I don’t want to have the compulsion to buy inscribed in the architecture.
CS Kairos begins with the opening of two cardboard boxes that contain relics of the relationship between Katharina and Hans, sent to her after his death. Letters and photographs from different moments of their shared past lie side by side; time has collapsed. In your book Visitation [2010], the beautiful old summerhouse with all its history and all its memories is crushed and broken down into its components; in the end, you step far back and view it through the lens of geological time, radically detached. Your essay collection, Things That Disappear [2009], contains a chapter in which someone soberly explains how to demolish a house properly. The sum of the parts remains the same, minus the emotions that were once associated with that material.
JE As a child, I saw a relatively large number of people die, and in my childhood diary there are a few pages that say, today, little grandma died, an entry two weeks later mentions that the guinea pig died, followed by another pet, then my grandfather. I saw how it is when people and animals are suddenly no longer there. I have a horror of things ending, and I wrote that fear into Katharina – she denies that anything can ever be over.
CS It is also very difficult to imagine – and to accept – the disappearance of the country you grew up in. The loss of the world that was the GDR is still a wound and a central theme for you. Do you see the rise of right-wing extremism in the ex-East Germany – which exists in the ex-West, too, but to a lesser degree – as connected to the contempt the West displayed toward the GDR after reunification?
JE If someone is made to feel small, then he hits on the even smaller. There is a generation that was confronted with emotionally broken parents, as well as great economic decline. In the industrial areas many things simply closed down. People with good schooling found themselves in unskilled jobs during the transition through a work-creation scheme that asked them to do a volunteer job that just paid a little bit. Then you were supposed to see if you could somehow get back to work, but the West didn’t wait for us and had few jobs to offer. Many biographies were shattered, and people experienced the decline to second-class status. Leipzig and Chemnitz, the two cities in the south-east of the country where the extreme Right is now strongest, are the same places that thought of the GDR as a failure. They mounted the so-called Great Peaceful Revolution, and that’s the same area where the identification with the Federal Republic still hasn’t worked out. They hated Merkel because she took in the refugees. In school, we were taught ideas of worldwide solidarity, of friendship between nations; at least, that was the idea, but the Cuban, Angolan or Mozambican guest workers had very little contact with us. It was a noble idea that they should be educated and then go back to their home countries with that knowledge – such as electrical engineering or agriculture – and do something good with it there. The idea that people should pass on knowledge altruistically and not because they want its recipients to work for their companies has become unfashionable. We were taught that people everywhere are equal and should have a decent life. I wonder whether Nazi ideology could hibernate precisely because the GDR acted so rigidly against the Nazis, especially those in higher positions; you really were not allowed to voice any Nazi ideology. In the West, the elites were not completely replaced, though, and there was still a quiet understanding of solidarity based upon the common Nazi ideology all the way into the judiciary. There was a certain camaraderie among those who had been in the war. In the GDR, these feelings had no place to go. To the great distress of my grandmother, neo-Nazis had already begun to rise in the GDR. [East German writer] Christa Wolf even interviewed a neo-Nazi and a filmmaker who worked with young people at the end of the GDR era, and simply asked why they thought that way. Her questions were not that great, but the answers were rather childish: they were part of a circle of friends and didn’t want to be excluded, or their parents were shit, or they had made trouble before and felt unjustly punished. Typical youth problems. Some slipped into the left-wing militant corner and others into the right – unfortunately, at least in the beginning, the two sides are relatively similar. In the anti-vaccination movement, the neo-Nazis actually meet with the quasi-militant leftists and the miracle healers, they once even marched together to the Reichstag. It’s very bad, although not all are neo-fascists; they are people who have come together over the opposition to vaccination and a general distrust of the federal government. ◉