Jenny Erpenbeck’s 2024 Booker Prize winning novel Kairos explores the interpersonal drama between a young woman, Katharina, who falls in love with a sophisticated older married man, Hans. The novel teeters on the precipice of the banality of its theme, but Erpenbeck’s sparse, unadorned prose and unique interlacing of the personal and the political prevents it form falling over the edge. Erpenbeck lets the story unfold itself and refrains from interjecting moralizing commentary from on high. In other words, she wrote a novel, not not an emotional instruction book that tells the reader how they should feel. The author mercifully refrains from nudging the reader to be “outraged’ about power imbalances. There is no hand-wringing about the “inappropriateness”of the relationship. What is appropriate and inappropriate is left for the characters to decide. Erpenbeck understands– and too many today do not– that the artist’s job is to show, not tell.

The relationship begins with a chance encounter on a bus. Spontaneity and chance are the origin of desire. Kairos: the time for critical decisions, in ancient Greek. Does she approach him? Does he respond? The aleatory begin of their affair reminded me of Nicholas Mosley’s Hopeful Monsters, as did Erpenbeck’s emotionally restrained prose, but whereas Mosley concentrates on the forces carrying people from place to place, into and out of each other’s lives, Erpenbeck focuses on the fraught entwining of inner life with inner life and both with the world in which they find themselves. Katharina, young and naive wants Hans’ life to absorb her own; Hans, older, urbane, a veteran of many affairs wants her close and not close, wants her to be his although he refuses to be hers. The emotional breaking point is reached when Katharina, working at a theater in Frankfurt-am-Oder, succumbs to a young co-worker’s advances and sleeps with him. Hans– despite having earlier broken off the affair (humiliating Katharina at the train station in Frankfurt)– is consumed by the jealously only a late middle aged man can feel at the thought of his young lover in bed with a younger, stronger, more vigorous man. He rekindles the romance. To spite her? because he does really love her? both? But he still will not leave his wife and son. She indulges his mildly naughty demands: she dresses in her schoolgirl-like Pioneer uniform and allows Hans to spank her with his belt. Does she desire to be punished? Does he desire to punish her because she slept with the young man? or is he punishing himself through punishing her for his guilt at his father’s Nazi past? or his own complicity with the regime that allows him perks and privileges?

The answer is “yes” to everything in all the ambivalence and contradiction between past and present, love, desire, and obligation, of the human, all too human wanting ‘a’ and not wanting ‘a,’ of wanting ‘a’ and ‘not-a,’ and not wanting ‘a’ and ‘not-a.’ Erpenbeck’s confidence as a writer lies in her not simplifying things. She leaves the reader wrestle with the ambiguities and obscurities of intersecting lives in a moment of impending social collapse.

The first time they have sex, soon after first meeting on the bus, Hans plays Mozart’s Requiem. Kairos: the decision has been made. The Mozart metaphor is obvious: they are doomed, their society is doomed. Obvious though it maybe, it establishes an effective frame around the narrative. Their passion is as intense as Mozart’s dark tones and as hidden as the body in the grave. Once their society collapses and Katharina and her friends flock across the now smashed wall to shoplift clothes they realize that the “Wessies” freedom might not be the profound political-philosophical ideal it was sold as being. Erpenbeck, who was born in East Berlin also treats the political side of the narrative with a light touch. She avoids both is overt nostalgia for the East and triumphalist celebration of the West. What she does do brilliantly is let people’s complex emotions shine through. Without any obvious effort on Erpenbeck’s part the reader is dizzied by the kaleidoscopic options suddenly opened up to the citizens of the East– but we are also chilled at the cold brutality with which the intelligentsia of the East (of which Hans is a leading member) are dismissed as if they had never had a thought, penned a word, or conducted an experiment worth sharing. Brecht’s early death perhaps serves again as a rather obvious metaphor for a society that died before it had a chance to fully develop. Katharina attends a few meetings of young reformers who wanted to use the opening created by glasnost and perestroika to democratize their system. But these young democratic socialists are run over in the stampede of the majority to the shopping malls that would anesthetize them while their factories and research institutes were closed, their real estate bought up at pennies on the dollar (or pfennings on the mark), and their society dismantled. There was no dies irae, just a quick bang as the wall was smashed down and then a whimper as West absorbed East like an amoeba extending its pseudopod around a food morsel.

But before the East collapses the novel gives those of us who grew up on the other side in the midst of the Cold war a glimpse into the inner and daily lives of citizens of the East. When I was younger I was fascinated by the question of how people lived behind the Iron Curtain. I took great pleasure in finding out what seems obvious now but was not when all we had to judge the daily lives of people was capitalist propaganda that portrayed life beyond the Berlin Wall as grey, drab, humourless, and emotionless. “Sure the Russians are good at hockey, but did you hear they operated on Tretiak’s legs so that he was more flexible?” But it turns out that people on the other side of the wall were just like those of us on the West: they fell in love and had sex with people they weren’t supposed to fall in love and have sex with, they did the same terrible job negotiating the contradictions and ambivalence of love and desire; they drank wine and listened to Mozart. Katharina had a pet guinea pig when she was a girl (which, even three decades after the wall came down, genuinely surprised me– I never imagined that kids would have had pets– propaganda works!). She used to roller skate in the summer and she finds paint for her new apartment; Hans goes to the Baltic for sea vacations with his family every summer. affirmed their

Seeing that a visitor was shocked at the simplicity of his home, Heraclitus said “come in, for the gods dwell even here.” Erbenbeck shows us that human beings lived even there, behind the Iron Curtain. She even humanizes Hans’ complicity with the regime. It turns out that his privileges were a result of his agreeing to spy on members of the artistic community. Finding that fact out after his death, Katharina suddenly sees the interrogations that Hans subjected her to when she returned to Berlin from Frankfurt in a new light. But it is not the light we might expect. She does not see Hans’ truth as the Stasi operative beneath the jilted lover. Rather, she sees the human being beneath both desiring the impossible– to know, fully and completely, another human being. Reminiscing as she looks through his file, she tries to remember what they were doing on the day that he decided to quit spying. “May 13, 1988, is when she wrote him her reply to the third cassette: I want you to know me through and through, skin and hair and everything beyond. If only “I’d known that I was your mirror image. But he can neither see her nor hear her, and he can’t replay either.” (294).

-that carries through even after final disclosure that hands had privileges like pasport that allowed him to trae to ewest more fwquently and afford to spend afternons and evening drinking and dining in cafes because he was spy- but erpenbeck briloiantly uses that to analogse their relationship, all relationships perhaps- an intense effort to get to know the othe rperson toi strip them right down– soemtimes to humilate but above all to know- the terrible fraughtness of human affairs, personal and politicla

portrait she paints of the relationship is brilliant even thoughboth main characters can be repellently needy and in hans case controlling– does he whip katrain for their mutual pleasure or to punish himself through punishing her for his guilt about his fathers nazi past and his own complicity with the regime- in post war germany espeially the persoanl and political the family past and ones own present cannot be neatly seperated and guilt — actual and inherited must have been an intense driving force