The 1993 revised edition of the popular German language primer Sprachkurs Deutsch 1 contains a small text about Germany, Austria, and Switzerland meant for simple reading comprehension. About German reunification it says pithily:
“The wall has fallen, but the deep economic differences, the social differences, the psychological differences are not going away as quickly as the GDR [German Democratic Republic] newspapers. The outer unity is an opportunity, the inner unity is a task. For [this] unity each one must make their contribution, spiritual and material contribution” (my translation).
Kairos
New Directions
Pages: 293
Price: Rs.599
When, for the 2024 International Booker winner, Kairos, Jenny Erpenbeck delves into her own diaries from younger days to bring to life a tumultuous period in German, particularly East German, history, through the micro-narrative of an implausible, sadomasochistic, exasperatingly claustrophobic love story, she knows that she is lending voice to a repressed history shared by millions for whom their vanished country is still alive in memory. Kairos can be interpreted as a writer’s contribution, both spiritual and material, towards accomplishing the task of an inner unity.
Cover of Kairos | Photo Credit: By special arrangement
Punctuated by a prologue, an intermezzo and an epilogue that give the story its historical frame, Kairos unfolds as an archaeological project that Katharina consciously undertakes by deciding to open boxes and suitcases containing “so much detritus” of her toxic love affair with Hans, a writer 34 years older than her, an enthusiastic member of the Hitler Jugend turned committed communist and “informal collaborator” of the Stalinist state.
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In 1986, at the beginning of Katharina’s story, she is 19, learning typesetting and hoping to study commercial art. But on Hans’ prompting, she goes on to do an internship at the theatre in Frankfurt an der Oder, as prep for applying “to study stage and costume design in Berlin”. As Hans puts it: “Wasn’t it much more interesting to work in theater than design eggcups and wheelbarrows all your life?” And so, he educates her in theatre, gives her Brecht to read…
National allegory
Right through the novel, Katharina’s psychological dependence on Hans as he continues to physically and mentally hurt her, relentlessly guilting her for betraying their love (he even dies on her birthday!), exasperates, at times infuriates, the reader. Page after page, the reader keeps waiting for Katharina—a fairly self-possessed, educated young woman with a supportive family—to break free of the manacles in which Hans’ “love” has shackled her, almost literally, given Hans’ proclivity for whipping her with his leather belt during sex. And chapter after chapter, the narrator piles on Katharina’s misery, leaving the reader trapped in a narrative that is painfully repetitive. Should the novel have been a good 50 pages shorter? Or is this what it felt like coming of age in the GDR of the 1970s and 1980s, with the idea of a democratic socialist state decomposing into “so much detritus” on a national scale?
Is this where the almost unbearable “love story” rises to a national allegory, with Hans symbolising the toxically paternalistic state and Katharina embodying a generation that shares the founding ideals of the state but is open to diverse forms of their realisation? Will she let go of Hans? Will the young people force the “politbureaucratic ancients” out of their comfort zone?
“We are not in favour of replacing politbureaucratic oppression with capitalist exploitation…. Socialism must find its own democratic form, but not lose itself.”
Eerie kind of Bildungsroman
October 1989. The GDR is moving inexorably towards collapse. The young voices from Katharina’s cohort of East German youth—as they desert a community service camp for harvesting “socialized cabbages” to get back to Berlin where “counterrevolutionaries” are being arrested—are refreshingly critical, very much in the spirit of anti-Vietnam/Prague spring/Students’ protests/even Tiananmen. One of the highlights of this otherwise bleak novel is the conversation among these young minds—students of art and theatre—during their “jailbreak” that puts the entire narrative of equating westernisation with democracy in proper perspective. They have already grasped the folly of looking to the West as the realisation of peace, justice, and democracy, while being equally critical of their own corrupt censorial state.
How then did the reunification—rushed through under Article 23 of the West German Basic Law, which meant the GDR territories (and people!) simply acceded to the Federal Republic of Germany—happen? Did East Germans relinquish their self to become their other even as their country disappeared? Should it have been done under Article 146 instead, which would have necessitated a new constitution for a reunited Germany with equal participation of all German citizens? What choice did the East Germans really have between a moribund socialism and the neoliberal redefining of the citizen as consumer? These are questions of recent German history that Katharina’s young co-travellers provoke.
The novel also works as an eerie kind of Bildungsroman—with a one-sided flow of value and cultural education from Hans to Katharina. It is full of music and is replete with references to political events, to German literature and philosophy, to the extent that even a student of German literature would be grateful that Kindle has a built-in wiki functionality. Hans the writer’s pronouncements bring forth the substantive relationship between sociopolitical reality, between history and discursive superstructural phenomena such as literature and theatre: a very palpable, relatable illustration of Marxist aesthetics, and also something that today’s reader and theatregoer misses out on, given the flaky understanding of our postmodern condition that seems to dominate any discussion on literature, art, theatre, or cinema.
Dark corners
There are references to giants of German modernity such as Brecht and Heiner Mueller. But perhaps the most telling allusion is to Georg Buechner’s early 19th century play on post-revolution dilemmas, Danton’s Death, a play that Katharina has watched eight times and knows “every word of the text” by heart.
“…Danton and Robespierre—the one whose head plops into a basket full of sawdust, and the one who beheads him, and whose own head lands six months later in the basket of sawdust. Interesting is it not, her father had said, that neither one did much to change the principle of man’s exploitation of his fellow man—the poor stayed poor, but no one noticed, because so much blood was flowing. I never saw it like that, Katharina had said…”
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About the genesis of Kairos, Erpenbeck has said she thought it might be possible to make a “museum in the form of a book”, a museum where she could have an exhibition of things from her own past, things from dark corners that one keeps avoiding, but also things from the daily routine of a world-city that was and a country that disappeared. Reading the novel is quite a walkthrough.
Finally the title: Kairos. It is another word for time, as in the appropriate time for something, unlike chronos, which refers to passing or sequential time. Kairos: A rhetorical term signifying the opportune moment to make a convincing argument. But also the name of the Greek god of good luck and opportunity—with a bald pate and a single lock of hair on his forehead—one has to recognise and get hold of him as he approaches. For once the moment has passed, it is gone forever!
Milind Brahme teaches German language and literature at IIT Madras.
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