Kairos

“A long time ago, the papers in his boxes and those in her suitcase were speaking to each other. Now they’re both speaking to time […] what is forgotten just as creased and yellowed as what, dimly or distinctly, one still remembers.”

This passage establishes the symbolic function of the boxes, which contain the mementos and keepsakes of Hans and Katharina’s relationship. Key to the symbolism is the fact that Katharina has her own keepsakes in a separate container, which implies that the boxes represent only Hans’s recollections of their time together. By viewing those objects through her perspective, the novel offers a more nuanced glimpse into their relationship.

“With all her fears, her hopes, everything that can’t be foreseen and that she doesn’t want to foresee, it helps that she knows that knife and fork should be laid down on the right of the plate, side by side, to indicate that she has finished with them. Face-to-face with the man sitting opposite—a great happiness, a great unhappiness, and a question mark—she appreciates that this is the beginning of her life, for which everything so far has been mere preparation.”

This passage establishes Katharina’s character motivations. As a young person, she is eager for life to begin and to prove that she is sophisticated enough to face it. She proves this to Hans, whom she perceives as being so sophisticated that he can validate her attempts to prove her maturity. She is thus drawn to prove herself as an adult in his presence, despite their wide age difference.

“It will never be like this again, thinks Hans. It will always be this way, thinks Katharina.”

This passage at the end of Hans and Katharina’s first night together exposes the difference in their perspectives. Hans’s belief that the joy of their first night will never happen again speaks to his preoccupation with death and endings. On the other hand, Katharina’s conviction that their joy can last forever speaks to her optimism, as well as her youthful naivety.

“Why a love that has to be kept secret can make a person so much happier than one that can be talked about is something she wishes she could understand […] Perhaps because a secret is not expended on the present, but keeps its full force for the future? Or is it something to do with the potential for destruction that one suddenly has?”

The first reason Katharina supplies for her enjoyment of secrecy reflects her hopefulness that the best is yet to come for her and Hans. The second reason, on the other hand, invites a recognition of the sudden power she has over Hans and even her own family. This is her first taste of adult power, and her newfound potential for destruction deceives her into thinking she is on equal footing with Hans, even though Hans is the one who dictates the terms of their relationship for his own benefit.

“Odd, really, the anthem of a Socialist country starting with the most Christian word there is: Resurrected, he says, more to himself than to her.

I don’t think it’s odd, she replies. It’s just the way it is. You can only make something new after some thoroughgoing destruction.”

Hans and Katharina’s discussion of the East German national anthem foreshadows the turn their relationship takes in the second part of the novel. Inasmuch as the anthem reflects the formation of East Germany from the ruins of Nazi Germany, Katharina’s remark that new things are created in the wake of destruction will resonate with Hans’s destructive behavior in the wake of Katharina’s infidelity. This passage therefore hints at Katharina’s openness to Hans’s cruel methods.

“As she walks slowly down the stairs, she holds the page in her hands and reads: You ask, when did they meet? / A moment ago.—And when will they part?—Soon. / So love seems a support to lovers. Has he gone back to his room and already put the book back? The page she is holding will always be missing from it. That gap, she thinks, is the first trace of her in his world.”

This passage functions as a callback to the novel’s framing device, the boxes and the keepsakes they contain. As Hans collects various items to remember his relationship with Katharina, Katharina receives and holds on to gifts that speak to her perspective. Jenny Erpenbeck presents this as an alteration of Hans’s world—without Katharina, the book would have remained intact. Because they have met, Hans has chosen to deface a book in order to acknowledge and hold on to Katharina’s presence in his life.

“For her aunt, uncle, and cousin, therefore, these unfortunates are a normal sight. To make the ordinary extraordinary, Hans said, was art. Did these people really have a choice of not begging?”

Katharina’s trip to Cologne radicalizes her against the cultural values of a capitalist economy. When, for the first time, she sees unhoused people begging, she is shocked by her relatives’ lack of empathy for them. The capitalist system normalizes the presence of destitution so that people like Katharina’s relatives fail to see it as an injustice, and even fail to see it at all. Hans’s statement speaks to the value of art as a means of defamiliarization—a means of making people see what has become so commonplace as to be invisible. Similarly, Katharina’s status as a stranger in the West allows her to see what her relatives cannot.

“Katharina thinks of the masks and the costumes she saw in the store. Is it only possible to really be yourself when no one knows who you are? And if the fulfillment of desires here is only a matter of the price, doesn’t all desire convert into the one desire, for cash? Perhaps that was why people were actually ashamed of themselves, and why such a shop was put in the station district, and why customers hid themselves behind such a heavy door when they patronized it.”

The other major byproduct of Katharina’s trip to West Germany is that she experiences sex and identity as commodities for the first time. She theorizes that the shame attached to the sex shop—evidenced by the heavy door and the out-of-the-way location—is not sexual shame, but shame at the commodification of sex. In the capitalist system, even the most intimate desires can be reduced to economic transactions. This realization emboldens Katharina to become more sexually adventurous when she returns to East Germany, ostensibly to prove that the freedom of identity and interpersonal relationships can be divorced from capitalist valuation.

“As long as she has questions for me, she will love me, thinks Hans […] With Hans by her side, she will never be bored again, she thinks.”

This passage alludes to the codependency that defines Hans and Katharina’s relationship. As an aging intellectual who finds no appreciation from his family, Hans relies on Katharina to assert his value. Katharina, on the other hand, relies on Hans for his experience, which she believes opens her up to the larger world. The latter is important to establish as one of the factors that lead to their breakup following German reunification. Hans will stand for the world in Katharina’s eyes until the world opens up to her.

“Along with the ancient pleasure palace, then, everything that the building had had to offer across German history was also demolished. Was that destruction an end—or just a transformation?”

As Hans reflects upon the loss of landmarks that marked the East Berlin of his youth, he also reflects upon his oblivion as the member of a generation that has nearly faded away. Hans sees the replacement of the buildings as a metaphor for his own eventual death. This ambivalence extends to his feelings about Katharina, who represents the new generation replacing his own.

“[T]here’s nothing quite so titillating as what’s possible. More than what actually happens? Much more, he says, because it’s only the imagination that has everything, and no deficits.”

Hans rationalizes the introduction of his sadomasochistic sex games into the relationship by emphasizing the way such games empower the imagination. This appeals to Katharina as someone who is drawn to possibility, but it also allows sex to function as an affirmation of her identity. Even if Hans causes her pain, Katharina awaits the possibility of his tenderness to prove that the infliction of pain was a performance.

“Every single day, Katharina realizes that she and Hans have long since ceased to be two separate beings, they are completely and utterly one […]

How was it possible that Hans knew her better than she knew herself?”

Katharina begins to subconsciously absorb Hans’s habits as a way of affirming his influence on her. This passage reveals the extreme form this takes, in which Katharina convinces herself that Hans knows her better than she does. She trusts Hans’s capacity to define her more than she trusts her ability to define her own identity, illustrating the centrality of Identity and Power in the Context of Romantic Love.

“You are what she used to be, and maybe one day you’ll be what she is now.

[…]

It’d probably be better for you if you weren’t so utterly dependent on him.

[…]

They give us just a piece of their lives, while for us they’re all there is.”

Katharina’s friend André tries to disabuse her of the notion that she will understand who she is through her relationship with Hans. By pointing out that Katharina is destined to become one of Hans’s ex-lovers, he encourages her to disentangle her identity from Hans’s reaction to her. Key to this is his assurance that even she doesn’t know Hans fully, stressing that she doesn’t define his identity by responding to him. This once again demonstrates the importance of Identity and Power in the Context of Romantic Love as a theme.

“Without his marriage, there wouldn’t be the danger, the secrecy, the circumstances that give rise to yearning […] And probably, if Hans were honest, the other way around as well. Wasn’t Ingrid […] in her desperation more beautiful and desirable than she’d appeared to him in a long time?”

Hans is incapable of choosing between Katharina and Ingrid because they not only fulfill differing needs, but enhance each other’s abilities to supply those needs in ways that satisfy him. His love for either woman is thus dependent on their ability to meet his needs, making each one insufficient on their own. This passage stresses the problematic quality of Hans’s perception of love and relationships.

“Order is the fear of disorder. A kind of fear. His too. Was he just looking for a more attractive mirror for himself in her young flesh? In his solitude, someone who can answer back to him? Or did he really share all that out of love? She was the cause of his banishment. Love, love, love, he says to himself, all at once the word seems quite empty.”

While they are living together, Hans makes a more active attempt to influence Katharina’s character, supplying her with cultural objects that align with his tastes. This symbolically reflects East Germany’s relationship to its cultural sector, as the state seeks to influence artists to produce work that aligns with state goals. By placing Hans’s desire for control against the backdrop of the history of East Germany, Erpenbeck interrogates the authenticity of East Germany’s solidarity for the workers it claimed to serve.

“Truth, says the set designer Klaus, needs to be properly engineered if it is to be effective.”

This passage foreshadows much of the second part of the novel as it calls into question the artificiality of the notion of truth. Klaus’s statement evokes the prerogatives of political propagandists: Truth is not inherently emotionally compelling. It must be aestheticized—and possibly distorted—in order to achieve a political impact. As Katharina navigates Hans’s cassette tapes, she similarly navigates questions about the nature of truth by either accepting or questioning the assumptions that underlie Hans’s criticism of her character.

“Did it take his discovery to open her eyes to the monster she truly is? Would she otherwise have carried on with the relationship in Frankfurt, as Hans claims? She doesn’t believe so, but now that the circumstances have changed, she can’t prove it […] Which of her feelings is genuine, and which does she perform for him—or for herself? What is inside, what is outside?”

Katharina reckons with the system of reliance she has built in her relationship with Hans. Because she trusts entirely in his assessment of her, she immediately doubts her ability to assess her own motivations. She cannot tell the difference between her authentic feelings and the things she does to appease Hans, which complicates her need to affirm her identity.

“It’s not nice of him not to have simply forgiven you. Doesn’t her mother understand that the greatest gift Hans can give isn’t forgiveness but the thorough inspection of the wreckage? That’s the only way anything new and lasting can begin, hopes Katharina.”

When Erika calls Hans’s cruelty out, Katharina quietly rebuts her by recalling her earlier thought on the need for new things to arise from what is broken. At this point, Katharina views Hans’s cruelty as a necessary ingredient for both the strengthening of her character and the renewal of their relationship. Having experienced abusive relationships herself, Erika knows better.

“The new was born bloody, and who will wipe the blood off it? […] The abolition of a pitiless world through pitilessness. But when does the phase after begin? When is the moment to stop the killing?”

While in Moscow, Hans cannot stop thinking about the brutal legacy of socialism in Germany. This passage marks a moment of doubt in his reflection, especially in the context of his collaboration with the Stasi. Hans collaborated because he believed that violence was necessary to sustain the work of the socialists, but now that he is nearing the end of his life, he wonders whether the violence achieved anything at all.

“Strange, she thinks, that time, which is invisible, becomes indirectly visible in terms of unhappiness. As though unhappiness were the costume of time. But at the same time, she thinks, this unhappiness isn’t just a wrapping, it has its own interior, a creature that, once it’s born, follows its own roads and has its own time. It’s strange, she thinks, that almost a year has passed, and she has been wholly unable to affect Hans’s disappointment.”

This passage represents a turning point in Katharina’s trust in Hans. She agreed to his cross-examination on the assumption that it would strengthen and renew their relationship. She has been conscious of the time that has passed since his cross-examination began because of the discomfort it inflicts on her. This also makes her aware of Hans’s unwillingness to look past his desire for revenge against her, signaling that her assumption was illusory.

“On the platform stand the old ones with tears in their eyes, wanting to believe that the young people are going to carry on their work when they are gone. Even though they themselves have organized all the displays that so move them. The spontaneous banner-waving and the spontaneous chanting, the spontaneous singing and the spontaneous blue shirts. They are looking for their reflection in a void generation. Doesn’t anyone here have an opinion of their own? How are such people going to renew society from the roots up?”

This passage manifests The Generational Divide Against the Backdrop of History as a theme by juxtaposing two generations of protestors against one another. Where this theme has previously been focused on the differences between Hans and Katharina, this passage depicts the ways the older generations see their failure in the dissatisfaction of the newer ones. Although they chant the same slogans and songs, their apathy indicts the older generation for failing to improve the world.

“Where there used to be a perspective, now everything knots itself into one confused tangle of possibilities. What once was familiar is now in the process of disappearing. Familiar good, familiar bad. Including the defective or the inadequate, which Katharina is fond of, perhaps because it comes closest to being the truth. Instead, now, perfection is marching in […] Smooth flawless surfaces will render obsolete and forgotten everything that is ephemeral.”

Hans has spent the novel quietly mourning the disappearance of the East Berlin that defined his youth. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the imminent dissolution of East Germany, Katharina finds herself experiencing something similar, accelerating the decay of the world she knew until it is replaced by the reunified Berlin that West Germany creates.

“Do the Wessies really believe in money as a measure of worth? think the young things, and shake their heads, and their long, dangling hair worn loose shakes along, adding to the expression of their puzzlement. We’re young, let’s be beautiful too, they say, what’s the point of a lace bra when we’re old and wrinkled. Who knows if we’ll even live that long. The important thing is no sign of guilt on the face.”

This passage depicts the cultural shift from socialist values to capitalist values among Katharina and her peers. In a capitalist system, people see their youth as an ephemeral quality, something that needs to be valued before it fades away. This contrasts with Katharina’s perspective when the narrative began. Long before the collapse of East Germany, Katharina was eager to mature and leave her youth behind.