Jenny Erpenbeck, Kairos (2021)
Because I am a terrible snob, I picked up Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel Kairos after learning that it had been awarded the Internation Booker Prize in 2024. I had heard of the author but knew little about the book and its content. Reading it on the iPad in German was convenient but also deprived me of any haptic sense of how deep I was in the narrative. Soon, this disadvantage vanished as the novel gripped me, granting me voyeuristic access to a disastrous relationship that was not entirely outside the sphere of my own possible experiences, and immersing me in a cultural landscape that was - and in some ways still is – mine. I read it in two sittings, neglecting other work I had to do.
This is a third-person narrative but the framing device - letters, diaries, and mementos found in cartons - lends it the feel of an epistolary novel or even a diary. I would probably resist the creakiness of this construction elsewhere, but here it opens a perspective that is both inside and slightly outside a relationship between an older man (mid-fifties) and a young woman (nineteen) producing one of the most painful narratives I have read in recent years. Whether this is an autobiographical account or not (it certainly feels like it), my visceral response - muttering “dump him already!” with increasing frequency – is surely fueled by the resonance with my own experiences as a reluctant citizen of the same erotic and cultural space.
The extreme age difference that the protagonists see as an inconvenience but never as an ethical problem, is the first and most glaring issue. As a male reader in my late sixties, I am as convinced now as was in my mid fifties that no circumstances – not even in the protagonists’ artificial socialist paradise in which only culture (music, theater, fine arts) seems to matter – can normalize such an age gap (almost 40 years!) in a relationship. Despite the young woman’s freely given consent, the man’s self-indulgence is as unforgiveable as his regression. I cringe at the couple’s romanticization of their affair even as he maintains his marriage and other relations from which she remains excluded. There are signs of the man’s creeping alcoholism and sexual immaturity, and when the woman has an affair with a collaborator her own age, his desperate sadism and self-destruction come into full view.
As I write this, I realize that I am in danger not only of reveling in my own righteousness but also of reiterating what the novel already knows. Less obvious – accessible primarily on an experiential level – is the dubious, ultimately oppressive role “high” culture plays in holding this sorry couple together and, simultaneously, propping up the waning GDR. Nowhere is this clearer than in the male protagonist’s playing and mansplaining of classical music to the young woman – playing records, no less, thus borrowing someone else’s effort. Most adolescents – I hope – have been guilty of this hermeneutic gesture (Just listen! This is why Starless and Bible Black is the greatest song ever written!) and then wondered why a girl wouldn’t want to spend more time listening to music together. Here, the man uses rather obvious pieces (the Aria from Bach’s Goldberg Variations, for example) to create “this is our song” moments, much like a Swiftie might today. This music, alongside the literature, theater, and poetry that are constantly invoked, is treated as unquestionably great – as classical – not only in the sense that the young woman does not counter it with her own musical or poetic experiences but also in the overarching sense that this is the music of the state, of the entire bloc.
I can still recall my palpable feeling of humanist pro-GDR and pro-Soviet sympathy in the 1970s and 80s. The Soviet Union had borne the brunt of Germany’s genocidal terror, and yet, to put it in an image, Svyatoslav Richter played Beethoven and Schumann to Russian factory workers during the war. In the 1960s and 70s, pianists and violinist and cellists from the Soviet Union were practically unrivalled - not just in their technical brilliance but in their soulful interpretation of German classical music. Badly engineered but cheap LPs of these extraordinary musicians were easily available in the West. Later, in the 1980s, it was the theater in the GDR that nourished our suspicion that the ideals embodied in these classic artforms were preserved more faithfully in the East than in the venal West. This position is shared by the protagonists and everybody else in the novel. Everybody is convinced
that trading their freedom to travel and to speak for the custodianship of classical culture is not only a fair, but a necessary trade.
What had never occurred to me before reading Kairos is that with the decline and fall of the GDR these two pillars – heterosexual masculinity as cultural mansplaining and high culture as a transgenerational ideology of the state –collapsed as well, and collapsed overnight. I cannot imagine how bewildering that must have been. In the early 1990s, I met academics who had been dismissed from their positions as professors of history or philosophy because their Marxist-Leninist frame of explanation was no longer accepted, and they were, of course, extremely bitter about their downfall. But only a novel – not a film, not a memoir – can capture the raw intimacy of this experience. I am torn between compassion, revulsion, and just a little bit of Schadenfreude. And I am aware that all of these reactions are wrong.
