Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck

By Philippa Tracy

Kairos starts with Katharina learning about the death of a former lover, Hans. She cites the ancient Greek, Kairos, “the god of fortunate moments,” when she asks, if it was a fortunate moment when she first met Hans? It is in Berlin, in 1986. She is just 19 and he is then 53, already 10 years older than her father. At the time, she is innocent and full of hope, believing, after their first sexual encounter, that nothing will ever change; he knows it will never be as good again. While the novel charts the gradual evaporation of hope and the disintegration of their personal dreams and ambitions, this is interwoven with the politics and history of the German Democratic Republic and its collapse.

When Katharina and Hans meet, she, at least, believes she has found everything she will ever need in a relationship. Even though he is much older, married with a child, and also in a relationship with someone else, she believes that they are meant to be together, two individuals merging and becoming “completely and utterly one.” Her memories of the days spent with him overlay all other memories. She longs for a child with him and they talk about baby names. Privately, he is more cynical. He is already looking towards the end that he knows, “likes to set its roots first imperceptibly, then ever more boldly, in the present.” He struggles with the memories from his youth, Germany’s Nazi past and his own guilt. For him, “as the German expression has it, hope is pushing up the daisies.”

When Hans’ wife finds out about Katharina, he moves in with her for six months. But the relationship is already, inevitably, in decline. He is a writer struggling to write, as he deals with his own demons. Hans is attracted to Katharina’s youth and her innocence. He also wants to control it. Katharina submits to his desire to hurt her with increasing violence. And even when Hans goes back to his wife, their bond remains strong.

The humiliation and abuse escalate when Hans finds out that Katharina has been involved with someone else, in Frankfurt. He punishes her by sending her cassette tapes detailing “her transgression” and his “disappointment and disgust.” He issues increasingly Stalinist instructions on how to respond to him and how to behave. Only with the end of the communist ideal, when the Berlin Wall comes down, in 1989, does something in the relationship really shift. While Hans loses his job, and seems defeated, Katharina looks towards her freedom.

This novel, translated from German by Michael Hofmann, won the International Booker Prize in 2024. It is a story about guilt and innocence and our complicated relationship with the past. The past is always present. Katharina says early on that “in Germany, death is not the end of everything but the beginning.” And for a German, that means walking “over skulls, eyes, mouths, and skeletons, that each step stirs these depths, and these depths are the measure of every path, whether one wants to or not.” This is about more than a failed love affair, that started with hope and ended as abusive and destructive. This is about memory and identity, as much as personal relationships.