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A review by wmbogart
Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck
The framing here, wherein Katharina is left to “sift, sheet by sheet” through Hans’ files, sets the tone immediately. Kairos reads by and large as an excavation; the reader is left to sort through reflections and reminiscences. The heart of the text is not in the initial actions of Katharina or Hans, or the then-current concerns around German reunification, but in the recollection of those initial moments; in what those moments might have meant, in the desire to relive or forgo them, in the futility of comparing them to a more dismal present.
The “foundational” moments in Katharina’s relationship with Hans are straightforward and quickly developed. Early interpersonal tact, as in Hans’ conscious decision to “walk past her, [but] not too close” and in the public forgoing of a kiss in favor of “an exchange of glances” gives way to bursts of lyricism as their seemingly mutual desire is fulfilled in a series of firsts. A bill is retained as “a museum piece,” diaries and written correspondence are kept and poured over, and anniversaries of earlier milestones are recognized and celebrated. The end result, for better or worse, is that these moments and images are “etched permanently” into the memories of the couple, or rather into the shared memory that soon threatens the notion of the individual outside their coupling.
A closer reading, on the part of the reader or in Katharina’s hindsight, reveals the “foundation” to be hollow. There’s an implicit paternalism on Hans’ part embedded in his inner monologue from the beginning. He writes “so as not to confuse Katharina” and wonders if he “[might be] expecting too much of her” as he subjects her to trivia and his own cultural inclinations. He speaks “more to himself than to her,” an early indication of the true nature of his desire: to compartmentalize, shape and treat Katharina as an extension of himself.
Hans’ “power” does not preclude his own vulnerability; he is in genuine, overwhelming awe, at least initially. He tellingly stutters in relaying to Katherina: “I-I will remember the picture of you in this mirror as long as I live.” Katharina responds assuredly. “So will I.” Their state of infatuation is mutual, but the specifics of that infatuation, and the power in their relations with one another, differ wildly.
It might be more accurate to say that they are infatuated by the memory, by previous instances rather than by each other. Their dissolution into one another is a byproduct of their mutual obsession with those memories. Both struggle with the distance between those early days and the present, and with the loss of the possibilities and the imagined futures posited by that initial desire. In stunning prose, Hans fears that “all the memories he took such trouble to create will just be the altimeter for his plunge back into normality.” Their desire to preserve those early moments is pathetic, and rendered more melancholic in the framing narrative’s further distance in time. The relationship, the reader recognizes, was always mired in an illusory history, in a compulsion to archive and relive rather than an earnest desire to live or progress with one another.
Ultimately, Hans is never able to see Katharina as a self-actualized person. She too loses sight of herself, and the novel is filled with concerns that she is being subsumed. This is mirrored in the larger concerns around East Germany’s eventual capitulation to commerce and the West - “two different sets of time, two everyday realities, two competing presents, one serving as the other’s netherworld.” Katharina wonders if “it [is] called no-man’s land because someone wandering around in it no longer has any idea who she is?” In the larger political moment and in her relationship with an increasingly abusive Hans, she understandably struggles to maintain a vision of herself removed from her surroundings. The meeting of two forces, Hans and Katharina or East and West Germany, results in an uncertain void, a dialectic that makes clear the tension and unsustainability of the current situation.
Erpenbeck uses a kind of cross-cutting, dialectic literary device throughout the novel; often developments in a piece of music (Pirate Jenny, Candy Says) are alternated against inner monologues or conversations between characters. Eventually that music is replaced by spoken-word cassettes, and delusional, spoken-word accusations are cross-cut against political and organizational concerns around the fall of the Berlin Wall. I do think some of the dialectic underlining is a little too obvious and unfortunate, particularly the section about a trusting “Hans 1” and a skeptical “Hans 2.” The novel’s themes are sketched out and emphasized in nearly every sentence, with little room to breathe, but the prose is strong enough and the ideas are developed to the point where it’s (mostly) justified.
The “conclusion,” as with the rest of the novel, is bleak. A possible alternative, her tryst with Rosa, is described in similar terms to her initial infatuation with Hans, “as though there were no more [separation] from the other, nothing of self and nothing of other.” Rosa cautions Katharina that “no one can completely dissolve in another” and that “what’s left over is what’s interesting.” That positive dialectic, lost on Katharina at the time, is instructive.
Finally, one last, larger dissolution in the union of currency between East and West. East Germany as it was is dissolved, its memory gradually lost in the reunification. This is rendered tragically, in the rapid proliferation of capitalism, joblessness and poverty, but if we take Hans and Katharina’s dissolution as a model, the reunification too can be read as unsustainable. “The landscape between the old that is being abolished and the new that is yet to be installed is a landscape of ruins.” Though we may not see it at the time, those relationships and bodies and countries and situations that appear fixed and rigid are always in flux, always in that state of being abolished.
“Something begins, something ends - or finds its fulfillment. But in the meantime, time pours into life, is braided into it, grows into it, entwines itself with it, but is never one thing: never indifferent, always taut, always strung between a beginning of which one is not aware because one is too busy with life, and an ending which is in the future, and hence in darkness.”
The “foundational” moments in Katharina’s relationship with Hans are straightforward and quickly developed. Early interpersonal tact, as in Hans’ conscious decision to “walk past her, [but] not too close” and in the public forgoing of a kiss in favor of “an exchange of glances” gives way to bursts of lyricism as their seemingly mutual desire is fulfilled in a series of firsts. A bill is retained as “a museum piece,” diaries and written correspondence are kept and poured over, and anniversaries of earlier milestones are recognized and celebrated. The end result, for better or worse, is that these moments and images are “etched permanently” into the memories of the couple, or rather into the shared memory that soon threatens the notion of the individual outside their coupling.
A closer reading, on the part of the reader or in Katharina’s hindsight, reveals the “foundation” to be hollow. There’s an implicit paternalism on Hans’ part embedded in his inner monologue from the beginning. He writes “so as not to confuse Katharina” and wonders if he “[might be] expecting too much of her” as he subjects her to trivia and his own cultural inclinations. He speaks “more to himself than to her,” an early indication of the true nature of his desire: to compartmentalize, shape and treat Katharina as an extension of himself.
Hans’ “power” does not preclude his own vulnerability; he is in genuine, overwhelming awe, at least initially. He tellingly stutters in relaying to Katherina: “I-I will remember the picture of you in this mirror as long as I live.” Katharina responds assuredly. “So will I.” Their state of infatuation is mutual, but the specifics of that infatuation, and the power in their relations with one another, differ wildly.
It might be more accurate to say that they are infatuated by the memory, by previous instances rather than by each other. Their dissolution into one another is a byproduct of their mutual obsession with those memories. Both struggle with the distance between those early days and the present, and with the loss of the possibilities and the imagined futures posited by that initial desire. In stunning prose, Hans fears that “all the memories he took such trouble to create will just be the altimeter for his plunge back into normality.” Their desire to preserve those early moments is pathetic, and rendered more melancholic in the framing narrative’s further distance in time. The relationship, the reader recognizes, was always mired in an illusory history, in a compulsion to archive and relive rather than an earnest desire to live or progress with one another.
Ultimately, Hans is never able to see Katharina as a self-actualized person. She too loses sight of herself, and the novel is filled with concerns that she is being subsumed. This is mirrored in the larger concerns around East Germany’s eventual capitulation to commerce and the West - “two different sets of time, two everyday realities, two competing presents, one serving as the other’s netherworld.” Katharina wonders if “it [is] called no-man’s land because someone wandering around in it no longer has any idea who she is?” In the larger political moment and in her relationship with an increasingly abusive Hans, she understandably struggles to maintain a vision of herself removed from her surroundings. The meeting of two forces, Hans and Katharina or East and West Germany, results in an uncertain void, a dialectic that makes clear the tension and unsustainability of the current situation.
Erpenbeck uses a kind of cross-cutting, dialectic literary device throughout the novel; often developments in a piece of music (Pirate Jenny, Candy Says) are alternated against inner monologues or conversations between characters. Eventually that music is replaced by spoken-word cassettes, and delusional, spoken-word accusations are cross-cut against political and organizational concerns around the fall of the Berlin Wall. I do think some of the dialectic underlining is a little too obvious and unfortunate, particularly the section about a trusting “Hans 1” and a skeptical “Hans 2.” The novel’s themes are sketched out and emphasized in nearly every sentence, with little room to breathe, but the prose is strong enough and the ideas are developed to the point where it’s (mostly) justified.
The “conclusion,” as with the rest of the novel, is bleak. A possible alternative, her tryst with Rosa, is described in similar terms to her initial infatuation with Hans, “as though there were no more [separation] from the other, nothing of self and nothing of other.” Rosa cautions Katharina that “no one can completely dissolve in another” and that “what’s left over is what’s interesting.” That positive dialectic, lost on Katharina at the time, is instructive.
Finally, one last, larger dissolution in the union of currency between East and West. East Germany as it was is dissolved, its memory gradually lost in the reunification. This is rendered tragically, in the rapid proliferation of capitalism, joblessness and poverty, but if we take Hans and Katharina’s dissolution as a model, the reunification too can be read as unsustainable. “The landscape between the old that is being abolished and the new that is yet to be installed is a landscape of ruins.” Though we may not see it at the time, those relationships and bodies and countries and situations that appear fixed and rigid are always in flux, always in that state of being abolished.
“Something begins, something ends - or finds its fulfillment. But in the meantime, time pours into life, is braided into it, grows into it, entwines itself with it, but is never one thing: never indifferent, always taut, always strung between a beginning of which one is not aware because one is too busy with life, and an ending which is in the future, and hence in darkness.”