Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos is a novel of love—her first. It is also the first of her many celebrated fictions to explicitly take on a latent idée fixe of her literary career: the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany. The sudden collapse of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in 1989 left Erpenbeck—born in 1967 to a family from the East Berlin cultural elite—without the only homeland she had ever known. Of reunification, she said in an interview with the writer Peter Frederick Matthews, “From one moment to the next, all our accumulated knowledge was no longer of use.”
Read Full Article »
