But readers also feel sympathy for Hans whose social cachet is crumbling along with the communist state to which he migrated as a young man, as an act of penance for his childhood zeal for the Hitler Youth.Įrpenbeck muddies the waters by weaving the thoughts of the lovers together so that, she tells me, “you cannot make such an easy distinction between the victim and the one who is doing wrong. Her submission to his escalating sadism and mind control becomes increasingly disturbing. As the couple lie together on Hans’ marital bed for the first time Katharina thinks: “It will always be this way.” He thinks: “It will never be like this again.”Īt first, Katharina is more than willing to read Hans’ books, listen to the music he selects and wait patiently when he ties her naked to his bed and leaves the room. The title is a Greek word for a lucky moment which must be seized, and the story begins at the moment when 19-year-old Katharina – an apprentice bookbinder – meets a man 34 years her senior at a bus stop in the rain. I didn’t even dream of it.”Įrpenbeck’s fourth novel, Kairos (heavily tipped to land her the Nobel Prize for Literature) takes readers back to the GDR of the late 1980s. But children are very accepting of their world and the rule was rigid: don’t cross. We heard the sounds of West Berlin, of course. There was no traffic, so the asphalt was free for roller skating.
“I felt very safe at this dead end, at this peaceful end of something,” she says.
But, speaking via Zoom from the Berlin apartment she shares with her husband (conductor Wolfgang Bozic) and their 21-year-old son, she recalls the closed state of her childhood with open affection. It’s an interesting comparison for a woman born and raised in East Germany, right beside the Wall marking a heavily armed border she was forbidden from crossing. You become interested in secret connections…” “It’s a time when you question which people you belong to. “Becoming an adult is like crossing a border,” says 56-year-old novelist Jenny Erpenbeck.
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