2024 International Booker Prize Winner

Following the conclusion of the Second World War, Germany, the catalyst of the war, found itself in shambles. With the death of Adolf Hitler and the unconditional surrender of Germany’s military leaders in May 1945, the once powerful and influential German state ceased to exist. This prompted foreign sovereign powers to take over the remnants of the old state. The Allied powers, in particular, gained control over Germany. With four different sovereigns seizing control – the United States of America, the USSR, France, and the United Kingdom – the victorious Allied powers agreed to divide Germany into four zones. The American, French, and British zones comprised the western two-thirds of Germany. The western third was controlled by the Soviets. Berlin, while surrounded by the Soviet-occupied zone, was placed under a joint four-power authority. Further, for administrative purposes, the former German capital was partitioned into four sectors.

Despite the partition into zones, the Allied powers were expecting a final peace term. However, the differences between the four Allied powers made it a challenge to convene a peace conference. In particular, the issue of German reparation was a thorny issue that further widened the rift between them. The Soviet Union was relentless in seizing German factories and full production. While the three other countries initially agreed to it, they soon started resenting it. More divisive actions stirred by the Soviet Union made it palpable that the Allied nations could not come to an agreement. The three countries then consolidated their control, ultimately resulting in the creation of the Federal Republic of Germany, more popularly referred to as West Germany in May 1949. In response, the Soviet Union established the German Democratic Republic, more popularly referred to as East Germany in October 1949.

Caught at the crossroads of the partition of Germany was its former capital. West Germany moved its capital to Bonn while East Germany retained its capital in Berlin. While it is surrounded by the Soviet Union sector, the partition of Berlin remained in place. As if to further emphasize the division, the Berlin Wall was built. For decades, until the fall of the Soviet Union and the ensuing reunification of Germany, the Wall was an enduring symbol of political and physical divisions. It was in the Soviet-occupied portion of Berlin that German writer Jenny Erpenbeck was born. Following the German reunification, Erpenbeck pursued a literary career that produced a plethora of novels, short stories, and plays. Her works also earned her several accolades across the world.

“Did you know that there was a belief among the ancient Greeks that at night the sun wandered from West to East under the earth, from one side to the other, right across the underworld, before surfacing the next morning? No, Katharina hadn’t known that either, and she imagines a dull, yellowish light slipping through clumps of soil, unremarked and unappreciated by anyone.”

~ Jenny Erpenbeck, Kairos

In 2021, she published her fourth novel, Kairos to wide critical and commercial acclaim. Juxtaposed with the twilight years of the German Democratic Republic, Kairos charted the love story of Hans and Katharina. The story commences in the present when Katharina learns about the demise of Hans. She received two large cardboard boxes of papers belonging to Hans. In a way, these letters served as a time capsule that catapulted her into the past and reminded her of their relationship. The setting was East Berlin. It was in July 1986 when Hans and Katharina first met while on a bus. It was a serendipitous first encounter perfectly crafted by the hands of Kairos, the Greek god of fortunate moments. In ancient Greek, Kairos (καιρός) meant “the right or critical moment” while in modern Greek, it means time or weather.

On the surface, Hans and Katharina’s story was the quintessential boy meets girl love story. However, theirs was no classic romance. On top of the brewing chaos as East Germany was approaching its inevitable dissolution, the age gap between the two protagonists was glaring. Katharina was 19 years old when they first met. She was a theater design student and was an apprentice at the state publishing company. Meanwhile, Hans was already 53 years old. He was a novelist and high-minded writer for radio who was headed to the Hungarian Cultural Center in search of a volume by the philosopher Gyorgy Lukacs. He was also married to Ingrid with whom he had a son. Youthful and the rest of her life before, Katharina was drawn into his intelligence and innate worldliness. Hans, on the other hand, was attracted by her youth.

The whirlwind romance was captured in the first half of the novel. They believed that they found their one true love in each other. Their romance blossomed with their shared interest in music; their first night together was suffused with the soundtrack of Mozart’s Requiem. Music is intertwined with history and other cultural touchstones. Apart from Mozart, they listened to Bach and Schubert. The vinyl records were relics of the past that added a poignant appeal to their story. They have an idyllic relationship. Hans and Katharina’s romance was intense and their intimate moments played like music. The air between the couple was electronically and sexually charged. The chemistry between the two lovers was palpable and undeniable. In the same manner that the two lovers got enveloped in each other, Erpenbeck reeled the readers in with the seductive beats of her writing.

As we get swept by their love story, we also get to learn more about the two protagonists. Born before the Second World War, Hans grew up in Riga and Posen. He moved to East Berlin after rebelling against his father. His father was a professor who believed in the Third Reich’s Lebensraum. Post-war, Hans’ father moved to West Germany where he was hired as a professor  “because in the Federal Republic of West Germany they felt they could depend on his knowledge of the history of the East.” While Hans overlapped with the Hitler Jugend, Katharina grew up in Socialist East Germany. She grew up in a regimented society witnessing “every phase that the Socialist state prepared for them — from the blue neckerchief to training in production and Russian classes, to harvest help in Werder — to make them citizens of the future.“

“She cannot remember a time in her life when she didn’t know that in Germany, death is not the end of everything but the beginning. She knows that only a very thin layer of soil is spread over the bones, the ashes of the incinerated victims, that there is no other walking, ever, for a German than 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.”

~ Jenny Erpenbeck, Kairos

Part of the novel’s seduction was Erpenbeck’s descriptive writing quality, which aptly captured East Germany’s atmosphere. The setting came alive with her masterful strokes. She captured the cultural landscape of East Berlin evocatively. As music permeates the story, the lovers go on clandestine walks and enjoy the atmosphere of East Berlin. Nostalgia brims the air as memories of a place lost to time rise to the fore. Hans and Katharina walk the readers through Café Arkade, Café Tutti, and the Ganymede restaurant. They tour the Palace of the Republic and the offices of the East Berlin Broadcasting Service. History and culture intertwine with their budding romance. In a way, Hans and Katharina’s romance is a vessel upon which these elements of contemporary Germany are examined. The story subtly confronts the memories of Germany post-Second World War.

At the onset, their love affair was doomed to fail. The odds were clearly stacked against them but, despite these odds, they managed to overcome them. Just when Katharina and Hans settled into the rhythm and comforts of routine, fate dealt them with its cards. Rather, they were slapped with several doses of reality. As the story progresses the fault lines lying underneath the surface of their relationship start to manifest and threaten to sow discord. For one, the stark dichotomy in the two protagonists’ ages underlined the several contrasts that pervade the story. Another was the political ideologies that molded them. Not only do they represent two generations but they also represent the clashing political ideologies prevailing in divided Germany. Katharina has also never been to the West. As the gaps between them widened, their sex got more intense and violent.

There was an imbalance in their relationship. It was also palpable that the relationship careened heavily in Hans’ favor. At the onset, he had a clear advantage and seized control of the relationship. He barred Katharina from making their relationship public. It was also palpable that Hans had a controlling nature. He was also masochistic and had no scruples about dictating the tempo of their relationship. Meanwhile, Katharina is increasingly becoming more obsessed with Hans. She was subservient to his diktats and simply allowed him to take the full rein. Still, no matter what she did, Hans could never be fully satisfied. She opted to look beyond his philandering but when she cheated on him once – albeit in a minor way – he punished her severely and even tried to reeducate her into submission. It was an increasingly toxic relationship but she could not seem to muster the energy to flee.

“You could never identify the mechanism if you trusted to appearance. To recombine everything that happened in your mind, persistently and repeatedly to exile yourself from your individual perspective, there was no other way of establishing what really went on. Emotion was gunk that would gum up your eyes and the whole of your thinking if you didn’t watch yourself. To slice away the emotion from yourself, and put it on a slide under a microscope, that was art in this bloody goddamed twentieth century. After the whole schemozzle.”

~ Jenny Erpenbeck, Kairos

In several ways, the fate of the relationship of Hans and Katharina mirrored the fate of East Germany. East Germany was built with the vision of being a utopia. For Katharina, their romance was a form of paradise. However, both were utopias that went wrong. Power dynamics tipped heavily to one side. Katharina, born in a different generation, was removed from the realities Hans witnessed. It was these realities that Hans tried to inculcate into his lover. He was effectively obliterating her youth, to the point of rewiring her ideals and eroding her dignity and values. Meanwhile, East Germany was slowly unraveling, descending toward its inevitable collapse. The economy was on the brink of a crash, prompting its denizens, particularly the younger generation, to flock to the West.

The younger generation of East Germans was disillusioned by the idea of utopia. They could not find any reason to stay. This disillusionment was also exemplified by Katharina and Hans. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the dynamics of their relationship also changed. Katharina picks up the pieces and moves on. On the other hand, Hans’ compunction for conformity made it a challenge for him to adapt to the changes taking place all over him. While Katharina was discovering a new world and broadening her horizon, Hans’ world was shrinking. But it was not only Hans who was having a challenging time with the reunification. Katharina was surprised by the poverty she witnessed in Western Germany but she managed to overcome the shock. The same cannot be said about Hans’ generation whose lives were turned upside-down.

The winner of the 2024 International Booker Prize, Kairos is a lushly layered novel from a writer touted by many as a possible Nobel laureate in literature. Erpenbeck, who herself grew up in the socialist section of Germany, wove a rich tapestry that vividly captured the inevitable collapse of East Germany through the turbulent relationship of Hans and Katharina. At the start, their relationship was idyllic but with the collapse of the Berlin Wall approaching, the intricacies and complexities of the novel’s characters’ love story were also approaching its inevitable collapse. What seemed like a quintessential love story transformed into an exploration of the cultural, political, and historical facets of what was once considered a utopia. Overall, Kairos is an engaging and atmospheric story fraught with nostalgia, deserving of the accolades it received.

“When she’s old, will she too have a husband who speaks to her on the phone, while his lover is on the balcony, waiting to be waved back in? If one knew the whole truth about everything, could hear what was unsaid, and see what was parked in the shadows – then would there be any sense in wanting anything at all?”

~ Jenny Erpenbeck, Kairos
Book Specs

Author: Jenny Erpenbeck
Translator (from German): ): Michael Hoffman
Publisher: Granta Publications
Publishing Date: 2024 (2021)
No. of Pages: 294
Genre: Literary, Historical

Synopsis

Berlin. 11 July 1986. They meet by chance on a bus. She is a young student, he is older and married. Theirs is an intense and sudden attraction, fuelled by a shared passion for music and art, and heightened by the secrecy they must maintain. But when she betrays him with a colleague, the relationship takes a darker turn – just as the GDR begins to crumble, ushering in a new era whose great gains also involve profound loss.

About the Author

Jenny Erpenbeck was born on March 12, 1967, in East Berlin to the physicist, philosopher, and writer John Erpenbeck and the Arabic translator Doris Kilias. Her paternal grandparents, Fritz Erpenbeck and Hedda Zinner, were also writers. In Berlin, she attended an Advanced High School and then completed a two-year apprenticeship as a bookbinder before working at several theaters as a props and wardrobe supervisor. From 1988 to 1990 Erpenbeck studied theatre at the Humboldt University of Berlin. In 1990 she changed her studies to Music Theater Director at the Hanns Eisler Music Conservatory.

After the completion of her studies, she spent some time as an assistant director at the opera house in Graz. In 1997, she did her own productions of Schoenberg’s Erwartung, Bartók’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle and a world premiere of her own piece Cats Have Seven Lives at the very same opera house. She also worked as a freelance director, directing different opera houses in Germany and Austria, including Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo in Aachen, Acis and Galatea at the Berlin State Opera and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Zaide in Nuremberg/Erlangen. At the same time, Erpenbeck commenced her writing, focusing mainly on shorter forms of prose and plays. In 1999, she published her debut novella Geschichte vom alten Kind (The Old Child). In 2001, her collection of stories Tand (Trinkets) was published. The novella Wörterbuch (The Book of Words) was published in 2004.

In 2008, she finally published her first full-length novel, Heimsuchung (Visitation). Aller Tage Abend (The End of Days) was released in 2012. The English translation of the novel won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2015. It was also shortisted for the International Dublin Literary Award in 2016. In 2017, Gehen, ging, gegangen (Go, Went, Gone) was published, followed by Kairos in 2021. Kairos won Germany’s Uwe Johnson Prize in 2022. The English translation of the novel was shortlisted for the U.S. National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2023. A year later, Kairos won the International Booker Prize, making it the first novel originally written in German to win the prestigious literary prize. On top of these accolades, Erpenbeck received the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2017, the Thomas Mann Prize in 2016, and the Strega European Prize in 2017.

Erpenbeck lives in Berlin with her husband, conductor Wolfgang Bozic, and her son.