Katharina is waiting for Hans on the threshold in front of the apartment.
It's already past midnight, but he has the key, only he, and because it's 1986 and no phone at hand, she waits to worry about her place in his life and in the world.
He's sitting in the bar. He doesn't want to go home, wants to drink to forget, thinks he'll be alone tonight.
Without it, the apartment is worthless and he is lost in this world.
She waits for hours, then he comes up the stairs drunk.
Reconciliation.
The next day everything seems to be forgotten.
The middle of the novel is almost reached, and when the two of them sit past each other at night, the abyss is indicated, initially as a small crack.
Elena Witzeck
Editor in the features section.
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Love needs romantic capital to survive.
When we first met.
Our first journey together in the rain.
The music to accompany our desires.
How you lay in my lap while reading, holding your head while thinking.
This love is also a very special one because it is forbidden: a woman who has barely grown up, a married writer over fifty.
From the moment their eyes meet on the bus, they made a promise to each other.
And because everything is so secret, there is a lot of anecdotal material that can be celebrated on paper and in the most characterful restaurants in East Berlin before the fall of the Wall, because Hans is a successful writer, not a dissident.
Seeds of doubt
“Kairos”, that is the god of the happy moment, who can only be grasped by the lock of his hair for a moment. When they sleep together for the first time, they hear Mozart's Requiem. “We mustn't make ourselves unhappy,” says Hans. Death and love are already connected in the old tragedy manner, and although the end is already hinted at for Katharina and Hans and the readers, none of them want to see it, they all prefer to be inside instead of outside, another leitmotif of the novel, and like a lover one reads over the scattered seeds of doubt: “It is unbroken, somehow clean. If she were different, he wouldn't want her that way, and not that way. "
What an old, familiar story. What a task to fill such a story with new metaphors, to make it unpredictable and unique in its tragedy. Jenny Erpenbeck, born in East Berlin in 1967, has already been called the “master of prose precision”, and her literary work has repeatedly received awards. We learn: A museum visit does not have to be about the museum at any point; it can begin with the sentence “Darkness snorts from the nostrils of the horses of death” and reads like an adventure among gods. Her writing has been compared to orchestral music because of her precise work on rhythm and tempo and her attention to detail. It is like that again now. You almost wish that everything worth remembering from these years would be recorded in the language of this author in order to convey it to the generations that will come afterto present with constant intensity.
Because the story takes place in East Berlin at the time of the fall of the Wall, with a view of the empty strip of the Wall. Katharina is learning typesetter at the state publishing house, later she wants to go to the art college. Hans' father was an enthusiastic Nazi, as a child Hans absorbed the ideology, later he went to the GDR voluntarily. He teaches Katharina the music of Hanns Eisler, plays her how Ernst Busch sang long before she was born, explains Brecht's theater, thinks of the last words of the tragic Lenin companion Bukharin: “If you die, what do you die for? “The capital of their love comes from an East Berlin bohemian that follows its own dynamics, whose vocabulary and references are alien to many just thirty years later, but deserve to be remembered. The social system around them, little noticed by them, is falling apart in the speed,in which her happiness also passes, and now one wishes to be able to look at her from outside, not to be so far inside.
Hitting the right note for everyone is also such a task, for the grandmother and the Nazi father (none of our business concerns), for the very young woman who never sounds naive, just hungry for life, who courageously extends her vacation in the West, but just for an hour that Hans describes as apolitical, as a member of a new age - often their voices are on an equal footing - which is addicted to making him addicted and constantly ignoring the warnings of friends. Because those do not understand what they are experiencing and how heavy love can weigh. "What do you want with someone like that, it has no future."
In the first summer, Katharina secretly visits Hans on family vacation, speaks to him on the beach while his wife and son are bathing. In the second year his view has changed, the exhilaration of the successful surprise is gone. And the clever Hans, who has already lived a life and made some women unhappy, who knows that it is marriage that feeds his love affairs, who wishes to separate the feeling and put it under the microscope - “it consisted in Truth is art in this cursed 20th century ”- he too always holds on in vain.
Jenny Erpenbeck herself comes from a GDR family of writers.
That Hans has the traits of the writer Heiner Müller and that he walks through her novel like a ghost, for example as a reminder at the sight of a pianist in a pub, that Katharina and the author are similar in some professional decisions, all of this can be done with interest and curiosity to take note of.
How she manages to condense a moment of contemporary history in a relationship as oppressive as it is fascinating is the real secret of this novel.
Jenny Erpenbeck: "Kairos". Novel. Penguin Verlag, Munich 2021. 384 pp., Hardcover, 22, - €