Utopia gone wrong: identity and history intersect in Jenny Erpenbeck’s haunting new novel
It is about chance encounters and finding one’s place in a world on the cusp of disintegration.
- It is about chance encounters and finding one’s place in a world on the cusp of disintegration.
- Review: Kairos – Jenny Erpenbeck, translated by Michael Hofmann (Granta) Its title is one of two ancient Greek words for time.
- Where chronos refers to linear time, kairos refers to the most propitious time for an action or argument.
- Erpenbeck’s novel starts with its protagonist Katharina going through two boxes of papers that belonged to Hans, her former lover.
- He feels nostalgic for his childhood – a childhood marked by his ignorance of history.
The burden of the past
- It is clear that the previous inhabitants of their house had to leave rather quickly.
- Six-year-old Hans doesn’t realise they have been given the house of a Jewish family, but the reader cannot help but make this assumption.
- This is part of the purity and innocence he finds so desirable in her, physically and emotionally.
- It aptly summarises the paradoxical relationship of partitioned and reunified Germany with its Nazi past, which is both distant and omnipresent, almost tangible but not quite.
- After Katharina interns at a theatre in Frankfurt, Hans becomes convinced she has had an affair with a colleague named Vadim.
The mirror
- This is emphasised in the novel through the idea of reflection and the recurring image of the mirror.
- When Katharina visits her family in Cologne, West Germany, she has the following thought:
Each time Katharina is in the bathroom, she walks up to the mirror in the door, and each time she thinks, it’s not Hans’s mirror. - Each time Katharina is in the bathroom, she walks up to the mirror in the door, and each time she thinks, it’s not Hans’s mirror.
- Her almost final sentence is: “If only I’d known then that I was your mirror image.” As Hans’s mirror image, Katharina sees herself on some level as a collaborator and potentially a traitor for adapting her East German identity after the fall of the Berlin Wall.