International Writers Scene: Jenny Erpenbeck (DE)

For many, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 represented a release for East Germans. With his bestseller Kairos, Erpenbeck examines the fall of the Berlin Wall as the collapse of a regime as well as a collapse of a population's sense of identity and belonging.

The moment as crumbling time

As a child of the GDR era, the regime features heavily in Erpenbeck's writing. Kairos is a magnificent and refined novel from GDR-era Berlin written by one of Germany's great contemporary authors. It is a story about all-consuming love and a regime in disintegration - and about a single moment that changes everything. In Kairos, the story of a young woman's relationship with an older, married man in East Berlin unfolds parallel to the disintegration of the GDR until its final dissolution in 1989.

With Kairos, Jenny Erpenbeck has burst onto the bestseller lists. This evening you can meet Jenny Erpenbeck for a conversation about how human life unfolds in times of political upheaval, and how love and society can fall in line with the development of history.

“It could have been a story about an older man's abuse of a younger woman. It is not; Erpenbeck gives us both Katharina's and Hans' perspective. It could have been a nostalgic idealization of the GDR. Neither is it; the novel is not blind to the failure of the communist state, but it does not recognize Western capitalism as the redemption, and in the manner of the novel, it lets us smell, taste, sense a world of life that was lost with the fall of the Wall.”

Actor

Jenny Erpenbeck

Jenny Erpenbeck is one of Germany's greatest living writers who, in addition to her writing, has also directed plays and operas. In 2024, she won the International Booker Prize for the novel Kairos , which the jury explained was "a beautiful and uncomfortable, personal and political book"