Katharina, 19, exchanges looks, a smile, with a middle-aged man on a bus in 1986 East Berlin. When they get off, he keeps pace with her, even when a catching heel causes her to stumble. They arrive together at his destination. She turns and says it’s shut already and he says, “Shall we have a coffee?”, and she says yes. Later, Katharina says that the Greek god Kairos “is supposed to have a lock of hair on his forehead, which is the only way of grasping hold of him”. To grasp a moment, an opportunity, a passing chance. For what?
Hans, 53, is a well-known writer and radio journalist. He is married with a teenage son. He has a waning affair with a colleague. Katharina is just starting out on a theatre career. He is obsessed with her youthful openness, her body. She is fascinated by his good-looking worldliness, the diet of Duet cigarettes with Rotkäppchen Sekt followed by schnapps. Soon, they cannot be without each other. “It will never be like this again, thinks Hans. It will always be this way, thinks Katharina.”
She stalks him when he goes on holiday with his family. They have sex on an adjacent beach while his wife and son swim. “Why a love that has to be kept secret can make a person so much happier than one that can be talked about is something she wishes she could understand … Perhaps because a secret is not spent on the present, but keeps its full force for the future? Or is it something to do with the potential for destruction?”
The affair deteriorates but Katharina is unable to let go under the grip of Hans’ cruel manipulations. He sends her tape after tape, using his honed interview techniques to demand answers from her to demeaning questions. She swims in self-abasement.
There is a sense that the novel is, at least partly, autobiographical. Erpenbeck, who won the 2024 International Booker Prize for this novel, says she set her story at “the end of the system that I knew, that I grew up in – this made me write”, after a distinguished career in theatre and opera production. She merges the urban actualities of late-1980s East Berlin and the lifestyles of the DDR almost seamlessly with the drama and corruption of the affair. Hans embodies the stink and decay of the tobacco-smoked fabric covering the calcified socialist regime and the years that came before it. Katharina knows nothing else and she is unconvinced that what lies west across the Wall would be any better. A visit to her grandmother in Cologne reveals the revolting excesses of capitalist consumerism.
The Wall comes down, Mercs and Beamers replace Trabants. The first neon sign is for Coca-Cola. The cynically named organisation Treuhand (Trust) dismantles East German industry and sells it off to western investors.
Katharina’s first choice of work in the new world is, perhaps, a tad too symbolic. At the beginning of the novel, she receives boxes of Hans’ papers after his death and she shoves them aside, unopened. At the end she decides to go through them after all and she, and we, discover the deeper meanings of the affair.
Some critics have tipped Erpenbeck as a future Nobel prize winner for her ability to fuse the personal and the historical, the fate of a people, without didacticism. Kairos is the culmination of her past work and suggests they could be right.
Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, translator Michael Hofmann, (Granta, $27.99) is out now.
