’Kairos’ review: Love and loathing in the shadow of Berlin Wall

Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel Kairos, winner of the International Booker Prize 2024, is named after a Greek god. “Kairos”, we read in Michael Hofmann’s lyrical translation from the German, is “the god of fortunate moments”. He “is supposed to have a lock of hair on his forehead, which is the only way of grasping hold of him. Because once the god has slipped past on his winged feet, the back of his head is sleek and hairless, nowhere to grab hold of.”

Luck and time, both fleeting and elusive, are shot through the fabric of this richly woven story of love and betrayal. What begins as an account of an intense affair between 19-year-old Katharina and Hans, a writer and broadcaster 34 years her senior, soon takes on an unexpected turn as the political ideologies of East and West Germany collide, causing the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

The attendant turmoil, together with an act of reckless indiscretion by Katharina, shatters the clandestine and already volatile relationship. As the two Germanys unite, Katharina and Hans begin to break away from each other, but not before a painful and prolonged trial, fuelled by toxic co-dependency, sado-masochistic rituals of cruelty and relentless mental abuse. To Hofmann’s credit, the suffocating air of Erpenbeck’s narrative, clogged with repeated rehearsals of manipulation and vertiginous time-frames, becomes viscerally affecting for the reader of the English text.

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If Kairos starts with Katharina learning about the death of her lover years into the future, the narrative quickly returns to their first encounter in the 1980s, bringing with it the urgency of the present tense. Flirtatious exchanges, soliloquies and observations are spliced with references to some of the cultural icons of East Germany: the playwright Bertold Brecht, the dissident poet and songwriter Wolf Biermann, and Hans Eisler, the composer of the anthem of East Germany, among a bevy of others. Even though the flow of the narrative is limpid and imagistic, unfolding against the backdrop of Berlin, Cologne and Frankfurt, the complex tapestry of personal and political allegiances makes Kairos a difficult novel to read, mostly in the best sense of the term.

Erpenbeck’s ingenuity lies in crafting a narrative style that seems to be continually disintegrating under the burden of thoughts, feelings and histories, both national and personal. The crumbling of the Berlin Wall, bringing together two nations, is a brilliantly counter-intuitive analogy to the rubble of promises that Katharina and Hans leave behind. If the former signifies a new beginning, the latter ushers in the end of an era of radical and (misplaced) idealism. In a telling moment, as Katharina inspects her mother’s kitchen after the reunification of Germany, she sees bottles of Coca-Cola, once only available in the West, lying around. A shadow of cynicism crosses her mind as she thinks, “Coca-Cola has succeeded, where Marxist philosophy has failed, at uniting the proletarians of all nations under its banner.”

The breaking of the Wall, in a sense, brought together people as much as it created new divisions in society. Yes, it ended the repressive regime of the Stasi, the East German secret police that kept citizens on a tight leash, denying them passports to travel abroad. At the same time, in the 1990s, as the Stasi files were made available to the public, the archives opened a Pandora’s box. Thousands applied to see the files, leading to discoveries of being spied upon by their families and friends.

Historian Timothy Garton Ash, a frequent visitor to East Germany as a doctoral student in the 1970s, wrote about the disturbing revelations contained in his dossier, code-named “Romeo”, in The File (1997), a riveting work of investigative journalism and meticulous archival research. The 2006 movie, The Lives of Others, provided an inside-out look into the inner workings of the Stasi and the human cost of their surveillance system.

Erpenbeck extends the narrative with her novel, where the key characters play hide and seek with each other, their secrets produced like trophies or trump cards at opportune moments. From Hans’ questionable past as a member of “Hitler Jugend” (the youth wing of the Führer’s party) to Katharina’s affinity with a fellow Russian student, Kairos is splintered with several inflection points, when the world turns murky even in the clear light of day. Yet, for the majority of the novel, the focus stays squarely on the asymmetric dynamics between Hans and his nubile lover. Katharina is tortured by the ethics of her relationship with Hans, its impact on Ingrid, his aggrieved wife, and Ludwig, their 15-year-old son. Hans, too, oscillates between a fierce attraction to Katharina and loathing of her, especially after learning about her accidental infidelity.

In the hands of a lesser writer, the erotic misadventures of Hans and Katharina would likely have turned into borderline insipid and, indeed, creepy. The trope of jilted love between star-crossed lovers with a skewed age difference between them is far from original. In fact, there are moments in Kairos that read like tired stereotypes. As the plot progresses, there are numerous scenes of tempestuous showdowns between a contrite and devoted Katharina and the serial philanderer Hans. There are just as many episodes of passionate make-up sex to put the two back on square one.

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And yet, a profound spirit of inquiry runs through even the most mundane moments in Kairos. There is a witnessing of history taking its course, having a ringside view into lives being upturned, systems being rebuilt, and fortunes changing. The Wall may have erected a physical barrier between Germans in the East and West, but it had also opened the floodgates of emotions. “Would there have been these innumerable letters without the Wall?” Erpenbeck writes. “Did writing have something to do with the abruptness of separation?” Kairos, it would seem, is her answer to this question.

A novel about “the abruptness of separation” between a couple, as well as two nations, Kairos doesn’t shy away from the wreckage of emotions left in the wake of the reunification of the Germanys. As the 1990s roll in, the joy of becoming one nation, one people, again begins to become muddied by the harsh reality of the collapsing economy of the former East and the gulf that opens up between people from the two sides, attuned to distinctive lifestyles, values and aspirations.

The breaking of the Wall was one of many fortunate moments for the past to heal itself in the present and build a robust future. But reality had other plans. “What one generation sought to forget imposed itself on the next as a taboo,” as Erpenbeck writes, “and what the older generation missed out on was performed, with a fifteen-year delay, by the younger generation, who never stopped to ask themselves why.”

Somak Ghoshal is a writer based in Delhi.