“Will you come to my funeral?”
It is impossible to resist the pull of a novel that opens with such an evocative question. Jenny Erpenbeck’s latest novel Kairos begins with discussing death over coffee, an atmosphere that haunts the rest of the novel as its characters sense the inevitability of collapse in late 1980s East Germany.
Released in German in 2021, and then translated into English by Michael Hoffman this past June, Kairos is Erpenbeck’s fourth novel. Termed “a museum in the form of a book” in the author’s own words from an interview at Barnard College, Kairos follows the romance between inquisitive, 19 year-old Katharina and 58 year old writer Hans against the backdrop of the failing state of East Germany. Katharina is young, untainted, and malleable when she meets Hans, stepping off of the S-Bahn bus. Hans is brooding and rather melodramatic for a married man with an established career. The seeming naivety of young Katharina is gradually stripped away as the older Katharina sweeps layers of dust from now-boxed ephemera collected in her youth.
The first section of the book paints the picture of a sweet yet passionate romance between two deeply introspective characters. They listen to classical music, sit in cafes, and eat meals together. Katharina cooks while Hans smokes, and sometimes Hans lets her link arms with him in public. He remembers her silhouette in the door jamb, always. Sweet, if not for the shadow of their irreconcilable age gap of 39 years, which is ruminated on by the lovers as well as their acquaintances.
Erpenbeck does not shy away from nakedly showcasing the unequal power dynamics at play, yet no one in the novel is ardently opposed to the relationship. The 21st century reader wishes to reach in between the pages and pull Katharina from silvery arms, but Erpenbeck asks us to remember that Katharina is not a child nor a beacon of purity, a view Hans may be inclined to believe. Kairos investigates and inverts expectations tied to writing. Hans’ voice of authority as a writer shakes with his perversion, beginning when he sees Katharina at their first meeting: a little pigtailed girl on her mother’s shoulders who appears 16 at most. It is inevitable that Hans’ questionable character destabilizes his power as the voice of truth.
Erpenbeck’s narrative employs a curious form where the point of view slides back and forth between Katharina and Hans within the same paragraph, sometimes from sentence to sentence, yet the identity of the narrator is always obvious. She does not even allow for physical space between their thoughts; from the moment they meet they become one. Later in the book, as their relationship crumbles and Katharina grows into herself, there are more instances of “he says” and “she thinks,” identifying the differences that everyone else already seems to see. As the book progresses, there are longer and longer sections of text from a single point of view. Katharina becomes a writer herself; whereas Hans put language to their experiences at the start, Katharina finds her voice. She grows older and stronger while Hans cannot go in any direction but towards decay.
In the vestiges of the GDR’s socialist governance, writing becomes Hans’ only truth. To Hans, truth is familiarity, and knowing is to control. Spoken words can be twisted into anything, but a diary does not lie. There is a sense of a new cogito ergo sum; this time it is ‘I write therefore I am.’ While living away from Berlin, when Katharina falls into something between romance and lust with an age-appropriate boy , Hans explodes. For Katharina, infidelity is not real when it’s not in her diary, for “what is not written down has not taken place,” but Hans demands to see every scrap of paper she owns. She lets him read her diary. He enters a stupor and becomes disillusioned with Katharina and the power of words. Is it possible to offer empathy to Hans because his carefully controlled spheres of writing, women, and politics crumble whichever way he looks, leaving him nothing to trust? Or is he just another conceited writer who believes he is observing the world, yet remaining blind to his own cruelty?
Hans does appear incredibly self-absorbed; he is pretentious, even a masochist. The September night Katharina cheats on him launches a years-long power trip. Hans was born in the 1930s but writes in an angsty lowercase, refusing the conventions of capitalization. Writing can be conceived as communal, but to Hans it really is not; he is allegedly writing a book for Katharina but its contents are never revealed. As with the angry cassettes he insists on making her, he seems to simply want to hear his own voice. Katharina too becomes disillusioned with the power of writing after Hans does not listen nor care about her written responses to the cassette tapes.
It is easy to hate Hans when Erpenbeck escalates his depravity to the point of cartoonish villainy. This becomes clear the moment it is suddenly revealed that Katharina had become lovers with a female friend. Rosa’s only other mention was a poorly-veiled attempt at foreshadowing: a single kiss with Katharina once, a blip in Katharina’s all-consuming, never-ending affair with Hans. Then towards the end, Katharina abruptly reveals that she has been intimate with Rosa, and Hans does not explode the way he did when Katharina slept with a boy. He encourages their relationship, gets off to it. This classic case of the sexualization of queer women for male pleasure feels as though Erpenbeck was attempting to maximize the reader’s disgust towards Hans. From the beginning, the reader is skeptical of his pedophilic behavior, his unfaithfulness, and lack of responsibility towards his family. Then, after around one hundred pages of Katharina enduring his unrestrained psychological abuse and manipulation after the cheating incident, it is doubtful that anyone needs more convincing of his corruption. Additionally, Hans is not exactly unfamiliar; he fits a certain archetype of the emotional socialist artist who treats women badly. Erpenbeck herself can be mapped onto Katharina as she too was born in 1967 in East Berlin, but Hans lacks that degree of authenticity.
Perhaps one of the most interesting parts of this book was the historical portrait of East Berlin at its end. Erpenbeck provides a view into the lives of ordinary citizens: what they ate, what they saw, and how they thought from what they were taught in school. The S-Bahn, the plazas named after famous communist thinkers, and Leipziger Strausse; all relics of a Germany temporarily removed from its modern state. Katharina was never as interested as Hans in the theoretical aspects of governance, but does it really matter at the end when the wall is knocked down and so are all truths?