‘The Berlin Wall was there, but I didn’t feel as if I was in a cell. I also felt free’

Kairos is the god of fortunate moments, of critical timing and of opportunity so fleeting that it has led to his being portrayed as a figure in perpetual motion: the only way to catch him is to grasp the single lock of hair on his forehead. His name is also the title of Jenny Erpenbeck’s fourth novel, a meditation on how we assess whether those collisions of chance and circumstance are, indeed, genuinely fortunate. Would life have been significantly better, or worse, for the novel’s female protagonist, Katherina, if she had not locked eyes with the much older and undeniably married Hans on a bus one rainy afternoon in East Berlin in 1986?

We know from the novel’s prologue that, in terms of longevity, Katherina has emerged the victor of their long and painful affair and that, after his death, she will take possession of two boxes of documents and ephemera – a desiccated sugar cube, faded rose petals – that will plunge her back into their shared past and into that of East Germany. But whether it would have been better for them never to have met remains a complex judgment that Erpenbeck animates with immense subtlety and skill, in the process raising powerful questions about the history of her divided country.

“I’ve been trying to prevent myself from talking about the GDR” – or German Democratic Republic – “for 30 years,” Erpenbeck says from her home in Berlin. “I could see that there was something waiting for me, but I didn’t want to. Perhaps I was not old enough to write about it.” Part of the issue, she continues, is to do with weighing and separating the positive and negative aspects of the experience of growing up in East Germany. “And you cannot split them from each other so easily, or perhaps not at all. And this makes it so difficult to talk to others about this. Whenever I was asked to speak about the fall of the wall, I would say no. It’s as though it needs time.”

I discovered that the first step towards the so-called peaceful revolution started as the idea of changing our own society

At first she thought she might write a memoir, but something about the scale of the task daunted her, as though she would need “a museum in a book” to be able to encompass all the details – material, psychological, political and emotional – that formed part of her and her fellow East Germans’ experience. It was not, she realised, simply a matter of attempting to recapture the reality of her upbringing; it also required her to bring to life an entire lost society, complete with its ideas and beliefs and its sense of what the future might hold. It was in fiction, and in the story of a young woman beguiled by a seductive, urbane, witty but at times disturbingly controlling man, and in her eventual piecing together of the larger truth of their relationship, that she found her solution.

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Katherina is only 19 when she meets Hans. Erpenbeck, who is now 56, and directed opera before she began to write and publish fiction, was a similarly young woman when the Berlin Wall fell, in 1989. It is the sense of a crystallised moment that unleashes a cataclysmic series of events that she embeds into Kairos, and also how the apparent suddenness of a turn in history in fact represents a far lengthier and intricate process. As she began to research the period in depth, a similarly intricate picture emerged.

“I discovered that the first step towards the so-called peaceful revolution started as the idea of changing our own society,” she says, “so enabling us ourselves to change something in the way that we have in mind and to give us responsibility and to give us back the power over the things that needed to be organised newly. It was a great idea of getting back power. I think for the first people who started the process it was really the idea to keep socialism and to change it in a good way, simply said.”

At that moment, East Germans, already coming to terms with the passing of power from Erich Honecker, the long-time leader of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, to Egon Krenz, were experiencing the shocks of economic crisis, and increasing numbers were attempting to defect to the West. When it began to seem that the GDR would become part of a larger federal republic – not only that the wall would fall but also that Germany itself would reunite – the ground shifted once more.

“This self-empowerment was taken away again, like a second time, and this time in a sudden way, more or less, a relatively quick way. So this was very strange, because the rupture was not so much about the fact that what we knew had ended but more that what we gained in the short time between, let’s say, summer 1989 and January 1990, that this was taken away from us.”

I thought the dramatic stories have often been told, and sometimes they are in the way of really understanding how it felt like living in East Germany

As with all revolutions, peaceful or otherwise, the gap between an imagined future and messy reality is always difficult to negotiate. Those who began the process of change in the GDR were outnumbered by those who, in Erpenbeck’s words, “ran with open arms into the federal republic” and who, as the months went on, suffered a certain degree of disillusionment.

“I could see that for many of those who thought they would, just like in a fairy tale or in a dream, wake up in the federal republic and everything would be as if they had seen it in the advertisements on the TV, it was a very bitter waking-up to see that this process will cost them their jobs, they will have to change themselves to be able to keep up with a different tempo and different stress and a different way of moneymaking. Perhaps this was also a kind of rupture, to understand that for so many people that they understood then that it was no fairy tale that had happened to them.”

This is why Kairos’s analogy with the drama of falling in love and the slow unfolding of a long personal relationship becomes so potent; Erpenbeck, whose writing is propelled by suggestive, sinuous undercurrents of menace and trauma, is keenly interested in self-deception and its consequences. The East Germans of the late 1980s, she believes, “underestimated the pressure to change oneself from inside”, and many did indeed participate in a form of mass self-delusion that Erpenbeck found painful to contemplate.

She is fascinating on the way that the containment and isolation of living behind the Berlin Wall translated into a focus on intense private life that was, she thinks, a symptom of political depression; passion, not only of the romantic variety but also for art and music, became a way of channelling those disquieting energies, especially for the young. The question of how the generations speak to one another and reconcile their vastly different experiences is key to the novel. Hans himself was a member of Hitler Youth; he tells Katherina, “Violent exercise wasn’t my thing ... But I liked being part of the select.”

The wall was there and I could always see it, but it was not in the centre of my mind. You know, I didn’t feel as if I was in a cell; I also felt free, I had a normal life

Much of life in the GDR was inflected with the realisation that “the select” were orchestrating great control over one’s daily life. But Erpenbeck wanted to imply what that was like rather than depict it more crudely. “My idea was to write a book about East Germany without the wall and the Stasi” – the country’s ministry for state security – “in the middle of the book. I thought the dramatic stories have often been told, and sometimes they are in the way of really understanding how it felt like living in East Germany. Because the wall was there and I could always see it, but it was not in the centre of my mind. You know, I didn’t feel as if I was in a cell; I also felt free; I had a normal life.” She recalls, indeed, she and her friends laughing at Stasi agents waiting behind trees in the pouring rain; at times they were comical as well as frightening. But, as Kairos’s coruscating conclusion suggests, it was when you couldn’t see the Stasi that they were at their most devastating.

Nearly 35 years after the fall of the wall, German society is still absorbing and adjusting to the ramifications, not least because former East Germans still suffer social stereotyping and, some argue, poorer economic opportunities. Erpenbeck points to a current best-seller, The East: A West German Invention, by the literature professor Dirk Oschmann.

“The self-confidence with which the westerners stepped into the East never ended,” Erpenbeck notes, and it is certain that she will continue to survey the impact of history’s largest movements on the minutiae of people’s lives in her writing. She is at work on an “autobiography” of her father, a physicist and philosopher who has, she says, laughing, no interest in writing his own account of his life. She is also publishing a short book about the Austrian poet Christine Lavant, a reclusive near-mystic who lived, for most of her life, in a single room. As Erpenbeck demonstrates, it is possible to create piercingly insightful art from anywhere if you look closely enough.

Kairos is published by Granta Books