Jenny Erpenbeck remembers the day she got a call saying she and translator Michael Hofmann had won the 2024 International Booker Prize. Neither of them was expecting it. Erpenbeck says she heard the name of the book, Kairos, and still didn’t realise she had won. The memory makes her laugh.
Kairos, translated from the German by Hofmann, tells the story of a relationship between Katharina, a 19-year-old woman, and Hans, a 53-year-old man. It is set against the collapse of East Germany, where Erpenbeck spent her childhood. It is a love story as well as a story about history. Weaving the personal into the political is classic Erpenbeck. On the sidelines of The Hindu Lit For Life in Chennai, the writer speaks about the fall of the Berlin Wall, her love for music, and the themes that run across her books. Edited excerpts:
Let us start with the fall of the Berlin Wall. You had said that it suddenly felt like your childhood belonged in a museum. Could you elaborate on that?
When it was clear that East Germany would be gone, everything I knew well suddenly became the past and I knew it would never be the present again. It was like falling into another time. It was interesting to live through a process of transition and watch how one state became another. People call it reunification. It was in terms of language and of a lot of the past that we had in common before World War II. But as far as the 40 years after the War were concerned, there was no past that we had in common to be re-unified. So, it felt like we were becoming another country but by staying in the same place, which was surreal.
Does that explain why you immediately started collecting things such as milk cartons and wrapping paper? Was it a desperate need to preserve everything that you associated with your life there and which you thought you may no longer get?
You cannot keep what is lost; what is lost is lost. The idea of a museum means that things are not of a value in your reality anymore; they are just kept for some reason. It is not sentimentality; it is more a reminder that you knew another world. If you look at the wrapping paper from the GDR (German Democratic Republic), the paper was of bad quality. It was not a society based on profit. There was just one kind of butter or oil, not hundreds. It reminds me of a world where money did not play the main role. Of course, that world ended, but the idea of it is something worth remembering.
You speak of Bach, Mozart, Clara Haskil, Glenn Gould, etc. in ‘Kairos’. You were an opera director once. How has music influenced your writing?
First, I should start with a cliche about East Germany which I want to put to sleep. Education played a big role in East Germany and so did art. I was brought up with lots of books, music, and culture. It was not all about being haunted by the Stasi. Art played a bigger role for us than it does in a capitalistic society. We could read between the lines of a book or understand what the director was trying to convey without being too direct in a theatre production. My grandparents were actors in the theatre, and writers.
My interest in music mainly came from my mother’s side. There was a moment when I fell in love with La Traviata by Giuseppe Verdi, so I started listening to the opera. When I met someone who had studied opera, I applied to study too, and I was accepted.
I would listen to all the pieces of Der Ring by Wagner — each was four to five hours long — and see the connections between the motifs of forgetting and hiding.
Language is a form of music too. It has vocals and sounds. Even when we read silently, we imagine the sound of the text and the speed. This is what you try to play with when you make music too.
You write about betrayal in ‘Kairos’. Katharina betrays Hans’ trust. In an earlier work, ‘The Book of Words’, the child’s father’s true profession is not revealed to her. Why do you think betrayal is a recurring theme? Is it a conscious choice?
I would say the theme chose me. I am obsessed with it. Sometimes you don’t know why you choose a topic. Now, as I am getting older, I have some clues as to why I chose this but I can’t tell you (laughs). I have to write. As Hofmann says, ‘Books know more than we do. There’s more in a book than you put into it.’
Michael Hofmann and Jenny Erpenbeck at The Hindu Lit For Life 2025 in Chennai. | Photo Credit: R. Ragu
In some of your books, the characters don’t have names. In ‘Visitation’, people are known by their professions — gardener, architect, etc. In ‘The End of Days’, there is a mother, grandmother, and so on. Why is that?
I don’t like names. It seems to me like some authors use names in a symbolic way to give an idea of what kind of a character it is. I hate that. In Go, Went, Gone, the publisher convinced me to give the characters names. I had to after a long fight. In Visitation, I only gave names to those who were killed, to remember them. I gave them real names that I found in my research. I gave names to those who profited from killing other people, too.
Your mother was an Arabic translator. Did that help you understand the art of translation?
I like translators a lot. They have a lonely existence and sometimes they are not appreciated enough. My mother would say when a review came out, ‘I am not even mentioned! Do they think this author writes in German?’ You need a lot of knowledge and experience with culture and society to translate any work. Translators are my best readers, they really know everything and look up everything. Also, translators are not well paid; it’s a scandal.
Is it true that your father stopped writing when the Wall fell and you began writing?
Not entirely true. The Wall fell and then he published one book. But he saw that society had transformed in a way that didn’t interest him anymore. His subject was lost and so he didn’t see much sense in his work. When he was young, he was interested in how society functioned in this new set-up; in family structures and how people cared for each other. In diaries, he wrote about women who were no longer dependent on their husbands, about craftsmen, and so on. When that society was gone, we felt like we were going backwards into a capitalistic society and he wasn’t interested in it. I wrote because I saw an older generation losing their jobs and facing an existential crisis.
radhika.s@thehindu.co.in
Published - January 23, 2025 09:32 am IST
