Historical Fiction - or Literary Politics - or Just Literature ?Jenny Erpenbeck

I keep reading about Jenny Erpenbeck, and her novel Kairos made waves this year. Reading  ‘It was high time I told our stories’: Jenny Erpenbeck on her International Booker winner Kairos made me wonder what would an American version look like?

Kairos recounts a tempestuous (today it would be called “toxic”) affair between a 19-year-old woman, Katherina, and a married writer and radio presenter, Hans, who is 34 years her senior. Most of the slim novel is set in East Berlin between 1988 and 1992, though the story is bookended by contemporary scenes that explode everything in between. “On the one hand it is a love story, on the other hand it’s a political story,” Erpenbeck explains. “I tried to let them speak to each other, to interweave the historic events with a private problematic love story.”

“If you want a very short version,” Hofmann interjects. “It’s a book about duress.”

Set against the dying days of the German communist dream, the affair which begins so ardently becomes abusive, descending into violence, cruelty and surveillance as Hans becomes increasingly jealous and controlling. It is no surprise that the novel has been widely taken to be an allegory of the demise of East Germany. “I think the word allegory is a catastrophe for the book because you think one party is going to be one thing and one party is something else,” Hofmann says. “A more accurate way of describing it would be more like the interpenetration of personal and political.”

My imagination fails me. That is because I am an American. We have not lost our country. And, for all I despise Donald J. Trump, his Presidency does not compare to the fall of the Berlin Wall. What his second Presidency might mean for our future may be a different story. No, the closest I can come for Americans is the aftermath of the Civil War in William Faulkner, and the costs of freedom in Toni Morrison's Beloved.

sch 6/19