German writer Jenny Erpenbeck addressed an engaged audience at the recently concluded Kerala Literature Festival in Kozhikode. Erpenbeck, who won the 2024 International Booker Prize for her novel, Kairos, created history by becoming the first German to win the coveted honour.
Talking about her life in East Germany, Erpenbeck said that she is lucky to have been born into a family of writers who were very open minded. “My parents were very thoughtful about what is good and bad in society.” Erpenbeck’s mother was a translator who would translate from Arabic to German, and so, she grew up looking at the beautiful Arabic script and there were always lots of discussions about translations at her home. “There were always enough books in our house, there was a lot of reading and talking about books,” she smiled. Erpenbeck’s paternal grandparents were communists who were convinced that the system needs to be changed from within. “Some people might call it a privileged youth, but it really was a normal childhood,” she said.
Interestingly, as a child Erpenbeck wanted to be an archaeologist. “The experience of digging an ancient site once as a young child helped me look at different layers of time and the traces that people leave behind,” she recalled. After completing her schooling, Erpenbeck became an apprentice for book binding in order to later study book design. However, she later changed her mind and studied theatre science. Thereafter, she went on to work as an opera director. In the 1990s, she began writing along with directing. “I like the freedom in any piece of art, whether it is opera, music, art or writing. I consider language also as a way of music,” she said.
The word ‘kairos’ means a chance given to human beings which opens up some opportunity, and hence, one must grab it. About a torrid love affair between an older married man, Hans, and a younger woman, Katharina, the book is filled with various themes, including betrayal, control, politics and migration. Hans’s character is one that cannot seem to make a clear division between his being a passionate man and someone who uses his power to manipulate a younger lover. Over the course of the book, he gets more and more controlling, and uses guilt as a tool. It’s hard to tell whether he is a good or a bad character. For this reason, Erpenbeck believes that many women could relate to Katharina’s character. Given that art played a big role in Erpenbeck’s life, it’s no surprise that the two protagonists in the story are an artistic couple.
In 1989, she was a student in her twenties when the wall between East and West Germany was brought down. In a sense, she expresses that her childhood became a sort of “museum exhibit.” Even though she was somewhat involved in the demonstrations and discussions before it happened, it was all quite unexpected, and spoke of the fragility of systems created by human beings. Erpenbeck remembers that she was having a nice evening with her friends, and heard about it only the next day on the radio. “That was when we realised that something big was going on,” she said. Needless to say, there were many changes that followed. “All of a sudden, me and my friends started talking a lot about money, and how one would have to struggle to make a living,” she said. It’s also probably why she has collected a lot of memorabilia in her home from her childhood. “It’s like having time capsules so as not to lose memories,” she explained.
Talking about how her own past makes its way into her fiction, Erpenbeck believes it was an organic process. The novel, which is set against the backdrop of the collapse of the German Democratic Republic, finds its roots in the fact that Erpenbeck herself was about Katharina’s age during the time when the event occurred. “I referred to the diaries that I had written during that time. For instance, I remember that after the wall was gone, there were many westerners around. The smell of the city changed to Chanel N°5. It felt like everything will change from now on,” she said.
While it’s always a challenge to look at one’s own life as it were some material, it was interesting for Erpenbeck to look at the time when the wall fell. This led her to read many books about the demonstrations and the oppositional movement. “When I was living at this time, I was too young even though I attended demonstrations. Now, I could look back, and all of a sudden, I could understood all that had happened,” she explained. On how she seamlessly merges the personal with the political in her writing, Erpenbeck believes that “politics always becomes visible in private lives, so the two often get intertwined”. She further asserts that personal questions should be addressed in one’s writing, as it is all about the exchange of life experiences.
With Kairos, Erpenbeck has somewhat rewritten the historical narrative of East Germany. Next, she plans to write an autobiography of her father, of which she has so far penned about six pages.
Talking about her experience at the Kerala Literature Festival, Erpenbeck was fascinated by how many people in the state are interested in literature and celebrate it in the nicest possible way. “People came to the beach with their families, and so many students came from school. Even the city has so many bookstores everywhere. I was also impressed to learn about Kerala being close to communist ideas and dealing with the crises of it. All of this, feels familiar to me even though it is all so far away,” she said.
