A pulse-quickening novel about a tempestuous age-gap relationship at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall has won the top prize for translated fiction. The German author and her translator discuss how it entwines the personal and political
‘Even in Germany the East German stories are under-represented’ … Jenny Erpenbeck and Michael Hofmann at the International Booker prize ceremony at Tate Modern.‘Even in Germany the East German stories are under-represented’ … Jenny Erpenbeck and Michael Hofmann at the International Booker prize ceremony at Tate Modern.
Erpenbeck started writing the novel after the noise of the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 had died down. “What you try as a writer is always to get out of sight, to have your peaceful writing,” she says. “Writing has a lot to do with emotion, and also personal history. Reflection is a process, it’s not done quickly. If you write about something, you look at things in a different way than when you are just experiencing them.
“Even in Germany the East German stories are under-represented,” Hofmann agrees. “There’s a sort of feeling that we’ve done the east. The east isn’t interesting. I’m East German myself and that feels like nonsense to me. Kairos is a book out of its time. It takes time to assimilate things, to understand them, to be ready to talk about them.”
“The idea was to write about my experience of the time,” the author says. “It was high time to tell my and my friends’ stories. Many friends were kind of relieved, they had the feeling that they were seen in the book.” She wanted to capture how things looked and felt, details such as how the streets of East Berlin “immediately began to smell like Chanel No 5”. Her stories may be intimately personal but her characters cannot escape their history.
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