East Berlin, July 11, 1986. Hans, 54 years old, novelist, writer of radio programs, and Katharina, 19 years old, typography student, meet due to one of those coincidences (which Lezama Lima would call “concurrent”), on a bus . How it happened so that Tomás and Teresa met in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, there were several coincidences that caused the meeting. The most notable of all is that the bus driver, who was already moving with Germanic discipline, was kind enough to stop and pick up the young woman so that the chain of connections could begin to be weaved. Hans and Katharina look at each other, just because they look at each other, a couple of times. Then, because they were going to do it, they abandon the bus at the same stop and, since it is raining, they take refuge under the bridge where the tram runs. When it clears, each one walks towards their destination along the same route and… that night their improbable love story begins and, for a time, they manage to see the kind face of Kairós, the Greek god of opportunity, the one who brings things right. the right moment (and then takes them away) and shares control of time with Cronus.
Kairos (2021), the most recent novel by the German writer Jenny Erpenbeck, published in 2023 by Anagrama and which has just won the Booker International Prize, is, in essence, the story of a love woven from a vulgar opportunity that could not have have occurred and that flows in a period that could have been a few moments and turned into several years. A passion that is born, grows, sickens and dies. A fervor marked by the great difference in age and status between the characters (Hans, married, with experience in affairs, is ten years older than Katharina’s father) and by the ways in which one of the lovers subjugates the other, with strategies that will move from the ecstasy of a compact happiness to the most overwhelming and petty cruelty. A love that begins as devastating and then dilutes as the world that seemed eternal and in which it developed is diluted: that of a country that, even without knowing it, was already dying without remedies and that was called the German Democratic Republic.
If the love story that the novel supports is similar to many other stories of difficult loves full of sexual and psychological violence, Kairos It begins to be something different due to the context of the time in which its plot takes place. But it will be more distinguished by the daring narrative strategies that Erpenbeck uses, with games of perspectives between one character and another and by a choppy narrative that introduces comments on matters unrelated to the strict development of the plot, with which the writer manages to go beyond the sentimental adventures that the characters suffer and introducing touches of the world that welcomes them.
But the intensity and depth of the love plot is so powerful that, as the novel progresses, the peculiar social moment in which the characters move barely turns out to be a backdrop that does not influence in a particularly decisive way in a narrative that revels in in sentimental history. For this reason, of that universe that was the German Democratic Republic in the years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, only some of its particularities, specific events, such as Katharina’s trip to Cologne (the west, the Federal Republic) and the passing temptation to stay in that other country.
Like isolated shots we are hearing screams of discontent coming from outside and warning that a gigantic historical process has been launched that will be the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe.
However, Jenny Erpenbeck seemed to have saved her most revealing arsenal of the historical time in which the romance occurs for the last quarter of the novel, just as the relationship between Hans and Katharina is painfully dissolving. Like isolated shots we are hearing cries of discontent coming from outside and warning that a gigantic historical process has been launched that will be the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe. Then this almost submerged historical context comes to the foreground and becomes the main theme of the novel in the days before an event as critical as the fall of the Wall (it is only mentioned) and, above all, the trauma of the beginning and the realization of a German reunification that not only altered the lives of citizens, but did so in a humiliating way for the inhabitants of the east. The moment in which the protesters’ posters underwent an important mutation, from the still socialist slogan “We are he people!”, to the great national claim of “We are a town!”.
With the respectable literary skill of not turning her work into a political statement, Jenny Erpencek cannot fail to make a political reading of the process that concludes with the elimination of the socialist system in the east and the reunification of the country, which occurs as a voracious invasion of economic and social conquest. Thus, while Hans loses his job and his way of life is disrupted, Katharina feels at the beginning of that turbulent 1990 that she had never started a year with such uncertainty. They are just another citizen of a world that, in a few months, ceases to exist as if swallowed by a historic tsunami that brings them freedom. But freedom can also be trauma.
Only at the end of the novel – and I think not with sufficient narrative skill – does the author hint at what the dark role of the Stasi, the all-powerful secret police of the GDR, meant in the lives of citizens. She perhaps postponed and even obscured that information to avoid narrating the techniques of that agency in the almost trite way that we have already read, although in my opinion she did it in such an oblique way that it is barely recognizable.
But without any doubt, Kairos It is a literary commitment with a remarkable capacity to delve into the dark essences of human feelings and, also, into the intertwinings of a society that believed itself to be healthy when in reality it was deathly ill.
![Cover of 'Kairós', by Jenny Erpenbeck, published by Angle Editorial in Catalan.](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/v2/IYD6B7NW6JBDPIWJ7U2IVPNVRE.jpg?auth=20ab2cbad3efc70a9569c96b827da671c8e13d29446115ee36b1587de6e7b4fe&width=414 414w)
Jenny Erpenbeck
Translation of Lourdes Bigorra Cervelló
Angle Editorial, 2023 (in Catalan)
384 pages. 20.90 euros
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