The Hindu Lit for Life | International Booker-winning author Jenny Erpenbeck’s obsession with betrayal

Jenny Erpenbeck discusses winning the 2024 International Booker Prize, her love for music, and the fall of the Berlin Wall.

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:

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.

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.

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.