Literature: Booker Prize for Jenny Erpenbeck: Love is so cruel

“I drink the coffee black, she thinks, and without sugar, then he will take me seriously,” is how the first coffee drink begins shortly after they met, by chance on the 57 bus in East Berlin in the mid-80s, when their eyes met met. It’s the famous love at first sight. First we go to the café and then to bed. Before that we listen to Chopin and Schubert records. Katharina is 19 and an apprentice, she is learning to be a typesetter. Hans is 53, married and a successful writer. »When his first book was published, she had just been born. He learned to walk under Hitler.” This is the height of the fall. Jenny Erpenbeck talks about this in her novel “Kairos,” for which she has now received the International Booker Prize in London.

A big prize for a great novel. Foreign language works in English translation have been honored since 2016. Jenny Erpenbeck is the first German author to get it, along with her translator Michael Hofmann. Both share the prize money of 50,000 pounds (58,500 euros). The jury praised her novel as exceptional because it was “both beautiful and unpleasant, personal and political.” There was no talk of “political” in Germany when it was published in 2021.

Kairos is the god of the right moment, at least as famous as love at first sight. »Things will never be the same again, thinks Hans. It will be like this forever, thinks Katharina,” and then they fall asleep on their first night together. According to Greek mythology, you can only hold the god Kairos by the curl above his forehead when he flies past you. Difficult, but possible, you think. As well as socialism in good. Ultimately, this is a feeling, an idea, an experience, similar to love. Katharina and Hans’ story ends with the GDR, whose erosion Erpenbeck casually recounts. Hans believed in this state, Katharina didn’t really care about it.

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The intertwining of love and politics, emotion and society, crisis and powerlessness makes “Kairos” a very excellent novel. They noticed it in Great Britain, but not so much in Germany, even though Erpenbeck won the Uwe Johnson Prize for it in 2022. This is because people are still hardly interested in East Germany. It’s dark, it’s funny, it’s strange, but the fact that something could have been more interesting in the East than in the West is at best an expression of a special sense of humor. And so »Kairos« was viewed in the West German feature pages as a tragic love story, but the fact that it also told a partially tragic state history didn’t matter.

Erpenbeck tells the love of Katharina and Hans as a story of sexual and psychological violence, which can also be read as a story of political violence. The violence comes from Hans: “The longing to keep control must be just as great as the desire to lose it,” he thinks on the first night. And wasn’t this paradox also the eternal conflict in which the SED found itself? According to the motto: Control the people so that they can be free. A people whose majority had supported war and the Holocaust. How was the GDR supposed to emerge as a new, free country under late Stalinism? What did the Ulbricht group, which was to begin this work in 1945, understand about the emancipation of people? Communists who were happy to have survived Stalin’s terror in Soviet exile.

These are the questions that Erpenbeck, born in 1967 in the better circles of the GDR, has already dealt with in her previous novels. Her grandfather, the writer Fritz Erpenbeck, belonged to the Ulbricht group. In “Kairos,” Hans thinks about Katharina: “She asks the right questions, but he can’t answer them. And I don’t want to.” Hans became a communist out of disgust for his Nazi father and went from West to East. Once Katharina is allowed to go west to Cologne for her grandmother’s birthday and is amazed at how normal it is to beg on the streets. Hans declares her a saint.

And then he ties the saint to the bed. This is where violence first appears, as a kind of educational experience. Later it becomes permanent, purely psychological, when he believes he realizes that Katharina is no longer a saint. She does an internship as a set designer in Frankfurt/Oder, has something with a colleague who is in love with her, Hans finds out and goes crazy. He humiliates her through endless questioning in which she is constantly asked to plead guilty. He discusses cassette tapes of insults, which she listens to and works through. Hans “is on both sides, he is the one who loves and the one who hates.” Like the two Goyas on the poster for Heiner Müller’s play “Lohndrucker” that someone showed him. »The poster on the left says: Can you bury what was? And on the right it says: No.”

Against all reason, Katharina goes along with it. She’s desperate, but there. She confesses herself objectively guilty, even if she cannot be guilty, as Nikolai Bukharin once did, the former “darling of the party” before the party that then killed him. This fatality is also cited by Erpenbeck. But suddenly Katharina says: No. She writes to Hans: “We have to say – and do – better things!” And the relationship turns around again, no one has to die: “Everything is as it once was, and everything is different”. This also applies to the GDR, which is currently collapsing. You think this is the good time. But not the right moment. Because who still believes in gods – or in the party?

Jenny Erpenbeck: Kairos, Penguin, 384 S., br. 14 €.

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