‘Kairos’ by Jenny Erpenbeck    (2021) – 294 pages                                Translated from the German by Michael Hoffman

Hans and Katharina – their eyes meet on a bus in East Berlin in 1986, and they fall in love.

“They were both on the 57 bus at exactly the right moment.”

Katharina is 19, and Hans, a somewhat famous writer, is 53 and married with a family. What could possibly go wrong? Her mother and her friends are skeptical, but Katharina is entirely swept off her feet. Hans’ wife Ingrid is busy with their son Ludwig, so Hans and Katharina have plenty of opportunities to be together and sleep together.

Despite nearly everyone’s doubts about this May-December relationship, for the first half of ‘Kairos’ the love affair between Hans and Katharina seems idyllic.

But reality intrudes eventually, and this idyll comes upon some very rough times. As ecstatic as the first half of the novel is, the misery of the second half exceeds the ecstasy.

There are times when Hans is busy nearly all the time with his wife and son, so Katharina spends more time at the theatre where she now works. There is a young man named Vadim who has shown some interest in her. They gradually get closer and they have sex one time.

Later Hans discovers a scrap of paper buried on her desk which she wrote describing the feeling she had when Vadim kissed her breasts for the first time. After he reads the note, Hans will never forgive her, calls her a whore. But Katharina hangs on desperately to what was once their love. She allows Hans to use her in sadomasochistic ways (“Yes, she wants him to hit her.”), but he will still not forgive her for that one night. Hans records his thoughts about her on a cassette several times.

“You deserve to go to hell for tossing our miracle in the shit.”

The backdrops for this less than idyllic romance are the final years of East Germany, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the reunification with West Germany. There are many tidbits about German history, especially music and philosophy, that I found quite interesting but were ultimately overshadowed by the intense personal suffering.

As a reader, I felt that ‘Kairos’ could have been shortened to good effect. Both the ecstasy and the agony seemed to drag on for too many pages. Too many scenes between Hans and Katharina seemed repetitive.

Grade:    B

‘Go, Went, Gone’ by Jenny Erpenbeck  (2017)  –  283 pages                                               Translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky

“Where can a person go when he doesn’t know where to go?”

One of the main reasons I read fiction is curiosity about my fellow humans.

‘Go, Went, Gone” tells the story of Richard, a retired, widowed professor in Berlin, who discovers a whole new world of people outside his door.  Near his home, he discovers a group of African refugees, all of them men, who are protesting their treatment by the German authorities.  These refugees are treated by German society in general as nothing more than a problem and to be ignored unless and until they cause any disturbances.  They are moved from school building to office building to warehouse.

In German society where work is so important, these African refugee men are not allowed to work, not even to wash dishes. That is one of these men’s biggest complaints, that they have nothing to do all day long.  Some of them were skilled metalworkers in Libya or Niger or elsewhere, and others had different jobs.

“People have no respect, no empathy for other people; they have no sense of who other people are.  There’s a kind of withering away of the human sensibility, and that leads to the collapse of just about everything.”  – James Purdy

Yet these refugees were treated just as poorly in other European countries. Of Italy, one of the refugees says, “In the subways the Italians get up and sit somewhere else if I sit next to them.”

Richard gives these black men who are stranded in Germany with no place else to go the most important gift anyone can give them, an interest in their lives.  He listens to their stories of their harrowing times while still in Africa.  Many of these men had led relatively comfortable lives when suddenly all was upset by unrest and violence.  They were forced onto unseaworthy boats, and for one man, Rashid, he watched both his children drown when the boat capsized.  Rashid escaped.

The Germans tend to treat the disruptions in these men’s lives as something totally foreign outside of themselves, completely forgetting all the disruptions to Germans resulting from World War II and the division of Germany afterward.  Richard lived in the Eastern sector of Berlin and recalls how he was treated as a second-class citizen when Germany was reunited.

An immigration lawyer tells Richard that two thousand years ago the Teutons in Germany were quite hospitable.  In his book ‘Germania’, Tacitus wrote of these ancient Germans: “It is accounted a sin to turn any man away from your door. The host welcomes his guest with the best meal that his means allow.”

Some writers go overboard with special effects to win over their readers.  Instead Jenny Erpenbeck is one writer, like perhaps J. M Coetzee, who is confident enough in her technique that she remains resolutely unflashy and austere in presenting her story here. Also the lives of these refugees are necessarily plain and austere as they are prevented from doing anything useful and are moved around from building to building.  Perhaps the story Erpenbeck is telling here is so important it goes beyond artifice. “Go, Went, Gone” is not a fun or happy read, but the world is not always a fun or happy place.

In the final Acknowledgements section, Jenny Erpenbeck expresses her deep gratitude to the thirteen African refugees she had many good conversations with.  It shows in her writing.

Grade:  A