Beware, this is a very, very depressing book. Kairos is dark and foreboding. It will upset you from the start, and it will not leave you feeling any better when you are finished. But it will prod you to think, it will rattle around in your brain like an unwelcome guest who does not know when to leave. I predict it will challenge you to ponder how you would behave more than any other book you are likely to read in the near future.
Kairos is the claustrophobic story of an affair between a 19-year-old woman and a married man more than 30 years her senior. Nothing unique in that situation. But this clandestine relationship unfolds against the backdrop of the last years of the German Democratic Republic before the sudden collapse of the Berlin Wall. This too is familiar territory — from novels like John LeCarre’s The Spy who Came in from the Cold and Ian McEwen’s The Innocent to popular movies like The Lives of Others. What makes Kairos different from anything that I have read about this period is the microscopic view it provides of the dysfunctional relationship between Katharina and Hans and the larger vision of reality that emerges.
Their initial meeting is a completely chance encounter on a bus in Berlin as they shove to board it and escape the rain. They spy each other immediately and within a few pages are sleeping together. Hans is a married broadcast journalist who seems to have found a secure niche for himself despite state control of the press, while Katharine is a student in theater arts. Literary May-December romances are not uncommon, but the rushed and secretive meetings between the two lovers quickly move into less comfortable terrain. Katharine becomes increasingly insecure and less assertive in her interactions with Hans. Violent sadomasochistic behavior intrudes into their space, and Hans becomes more domineering and demanding. This is not a fuzzy tale of two star-crossed lovers who pine longingly for one another; this is obsessive territory. Over time, distrust and suspicion and mutual cruelty invade the lovers’ trysts. When Katharine leaves Berlin for a period of academic study in Frankfurt, it triggers exaggerated accusations of betrayal by Hans. He blames Katharine for being unreliable and not fully committed to their relationship and calls into question her loyalty to him. There is lots of sex and coded signals and furtive meetings to avoid detection by Hans’ wife and son. But the mood becomes chillier and more tense with each turning page. Eventually, the political uprising across Germany and Eastern Europe ruptures the novel’s narrow field of vision and alters the contour of their illicit relationship.
The novel is bracketed by two efforts at historical reconstruction, accomplished by mining written records from the period. This highlights the power of literary narratives to frame our lives, something that Kairos accomplishes so successfully. The plot is spare but Jenny Erpenbeck has created a novel that is very thick with the lives of the two characters, and it is that richness of texture and intimacy, disturbing as it might be, which causes the book to reverberate in your memory long after you put it down.
Why is that? What Kairos accomplishes better than other books I have read in recent memory is its ability to bring to life the impact of our social and political environment on our inner lives. The tautness of Erpenbeck’s writing, the novel’s ominous and suspicious atmosphere, are a direct reflection of what it might have been like to live in East Germany after the Iron Curtain descended and the Berlin Wall was erected. The East German domestic spy service, the notorious Stasi, infiltrated everyday life. Anyone could be an informer and everyone could be informed on. Petty offenses against the Communist party, minor disagreements between colleagues about policy, and trivial comments among friends about current affairs could quickly escalate into charges of treason, of being an enemy of the state. No one knew exactly what could provoke a summons to a closed room interrogation and a prison sentence.
It is in this stultifying environment that Katharine and Hans’s relationship takes shape and it is against this sweeping historical background that we confront and must try to understand their thoughts and actions. Katharine is young but seems deadened by life on the dreary East German side of the Berlin Wall with its brutalist architecture and its color spectrum ranging from shades of gray to shades of gray. For her, even a destructive relationship with an older man, a spiteful and hurtful one at that, may have provided a glimmer of hope for a “real” life. Hans has survived under the Communist regime and achieved a modicum of fame and fortune. But we can only speculate on the cost. Erpenbeck makes it clear that the price was high. The humanity of both main characters has been stunted by their reaction to living in a police state and by internalizing the distrustful depersonalizing actions of the government’s internal espionage apparatus. I suggest that Erpenbeck’s accomplishment is to show how the political environment can influence personal patterns of behavior.
How would we have held up if forced to live under such conditions? Would one have had the courage to speak truth to power or would one have hunkered down, kept a low profile, and avoided confrontation with the state? What would we have resorted to in order to protect ourselves and our job, family, and friends? Could we have maintained our humanity and dignity? Katharine and Hans lived with these unbearable dilemmas every day and their personalities were gradually warped under the relentless pressure.
It is easy to devalue the lives of others living in the former East Germany or Soviet Union, or current China or Iran, where men and women are forced to remain in countries that interfere with the freedom to think and express oneself and where every thought and action is under surveillance. But it would be a mistake. We should not lose sight of external factors in this country that threaten our individuality and our humanity. Whether it is political uniformity and social tribalism or blind use of the tools of artificial intelligence, we too must recognize and address the social forces that could impact on how we interact with the world and behave to one another. Like the Stasi in East Germany, these forces have the real potential to diminish our stature as moral agents.
Neither main character in Kairos is easy to identify with and it is hard to muster sympathy for the plight of either one. But our distaste for Katharine and Hans is tempered by the knowledge that their souls have been distorted, damaged almost beyond repair, by a state that has flattened the complexity of human individuality into a file of incriminating notes based on informer reports. I suspect it may be especially hard for a woman to read this book and suffer along with Katharine as she is manipulated and physically and psychologically abused by Hans. But one cannot escape the reality that Hans too is a victim. Quality literature like Kairos does not aim to rationalize human behavior. What it can do is contextualize fictional characters and in doing so make us understand what some of our fellow human beings are going through a little bit better and with a little more sensitivity.
Winner: International Booker Prize 2024
A Q&A with Jenny Erpenbeck and translator Michael Hofmann
KAIROS
Author: Jenny Erpenbeck
Publisher : New Directions; First Paperback Edition (May 14, 2024)
Hardback: 2021, Penguin Verlag
Paperback: 304 pages
ISBN-10 : 0811238539
Photo of Kairos from 1986 by Lucy Bruell
