{"id":36182,"date":"2024-04-26T14:15:47","date_gmt":"2024-04-26T14:15:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/2024\/04\/26\/a-novelist-who-finds-inspiration-in-germanys-tortured-history\/"},"modified":"2024-04-26T14:15:47","modified_gmt":"2024-04-26T14:15:47","slug":"a-novelist-who-finds-inspiration-in-germanys-tortured-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/2024\/04\/26\/a-novelist-who-finds-inspiration-in-germanys-tortured-history\/","title":{"rendered":"A Novelist Who Finds Inspiration in Germany\u2019s Tortured History"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"text-align:center\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1050\" height=\"549\" src=\"https:\/\/i3.wp.com\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2024\/04\/19\/world\/00-germany-erpenbeck-profile\/00-germany-erpenbeck-profile-facebookJumbo.jpg?fit=1050,549&amp;ssl=1\" class=\"attachment-post-thumbnail size-post-thumbnail wp-post-image\" alt=\"A Novelist Who Finds Inspiration in Germany\u2019s Tortured History\" title=\"A Novelist Who Finds Inspiration in Germany\u2019s Tortured History\" \/><\/div><p> <br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">She became a writer because her country vanished overnight.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Jenny Erpenbeck, now 57, was 22 in 1989, when the Berlin Wall cracked by accident, then collapsed. She was having a \u201cgirls\u2019 evening out,\u201d she said, so she had no idea what had happened until the next morning. When a professor discussed it in class, she said, it became real to her.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">The country she knew, the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany, remains a crucial setting for most of her striking, precise fiction. Her work, which has grown in acuity and emotional power, combines the complications of German and Soviet history with the lives of her characters, including those of her own family members, whose experiences echo with the past like contrapuntal music.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Her latest novel to be translated into English, \u201cKairos,\u201d has been a breakthrough. It is now on <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/thebookerprizes.com\/the-booker-library\/prize-years\/international\/2024\" title=\"\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">the shortlist<\/a> for the International Booker Prize and considered a favorite to win the award late next month. Her previous novel, \u201cGo, Went, Gone,\u201d is a moving tale of a lonely East German professor, adrift in united Germany, finding parallels with the African migrants who have survived a sea journey only to find themselves adrift in Germany, as well.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">In 2017, James Wood, The New Yorker\u2019s book critic, called \u201cGo, Went, Gone\u201d underappreciated and <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/culture\/2017-in-review\/four-books-that-deserved-more-attention-in-2017\" title=\"\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">predicted<\/a> that Ms. Erpenbeck would win the Nobel Prize \u201cin a few years.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">During an interview in her book-stuffed Berlin apartment, where she lives with her Austrian husband, a conductor, Ms. Erpenbeck talked about her life growing up in East Germany. She said the East was largely misunderstood by West Germans \u2014 belittled, patronized and often ignored. East Germany is too often reduced, she said, even in respected films like \u201c<a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2007\/02\/09\/movies\/09live.html\" title=\"\">The Lives of Others<\/a>,\u201d which was made in 2006, to the hyperbolic clich\u00e9s of a totalitarian state with everyday life dominated by a fear of the secret police, or Stasi.<\/p>\n<div data-testid=\"imageblock-wrapper\">\n<figure class=\"img-sz-small css-1189og3 e1g7ppur0\" aria-label=\"media\" role=\"group\"><figcaption data-testid=\"photoviewer-children-caption\" class=\"css-1ybnr6m ewdxa0s0\"><span class=\"css-jevhma e13ogyst0\">Jenny Erpenbeck\u2019s latest novel to be translated into English, \u201cKairos,\u201d is a contender for the International Booker Prize this year.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">In fact, she said, there was a \u201ckind of freedom\u201d in East Germany, where the ideology of equality meant less stress, competition and greed, and where there was comparatively little to strive for in a society that had only a few options for consumer goods.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cThere are some kinds of freedom that you wouldn\u2019t expect to have surrounded by a wall, but it\u2019s also a freedom not to be forced to expose yourself and shout out all the time about how important you are and what you have reached, to sell yourself,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">She grew up in Berlin and studied theater first at Humboldt University and then at a musical conservatory. Before attending college, she worked as a bookbinder, which required her to take the tram to work each day at 6 a.m.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cI learned a lot for my whole life,\u201d she said, \u201cto get a real impression what working with your hands means, and how hard life is when you get up early in the morning.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">She became an opera director before the sudden transformation of her world turned her into a writer, she said. She struggled to understand the implications of losing a way of life and system of beliefs to which her own grandparents and parents had given so much.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cThe end of the system that I knew, that I grew up in \u2014 this made me write,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">The rapidity of the change taught her \u201chow fragile systems are,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cIt leaves you with a deep distrust in all systems,\u201d she said. So many lives were broken and \u201cbiographies cut at once, so you could make a comparison, a gift for a writer.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">After the wall fell and West Germany absorbed the East, it treated its citizens like bankrupt, misguided, foolish younger siblings, she said. The West offered each East German 100 marks to begin their western consumer lives. Ms. Erpenbeck said angrily that she had never taken the money.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cI\u2019m not a beggar,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Her parents and grandparents were party intellectuals. Her grandmother, Hedda Zinner, was Jewish and antifascist. She became a Communist in 1929 and left Germany for Vienna and Prague as soon as Hitler was elected. She was an actress, then a journalist and novelist. With her husband, Fritz Erpenbeck, a locksmith, journalist and theater critic, she emigrated to the Soviet Union in 1935, then spent 12 years there before returning to the new East Germany after the war, to build a socialist state.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">That entitled them to a house on a street reserved for prominent supporters of the new state, Ms. Erpenbeck said. In 1980, Ms. Zinner was awarded the country\u2019s most important honor, the Order of Karl Marx. She died in 1994; her husband died in 1975.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Ms. Erpenbeck\u2019s mother, who died in 2008, translated Arabic; her father, born in the Soviet Union, is a physician who became a philosopher.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Her grandmother\u2019s experiences deeply informed Ms. Erpenbeck\u2019s novel \u201cThe End of Days,\u201d published in English in 2014. The story imagines the possible lives of a young Jewish woman born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, who dies and lives again several times through the arc of German and Soviet history. Like the writer\u2019s grandmother, the character ends up as an honored East German artist whose life has been made hollow by her country\u2019s collapse.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cShe had this idea that we can make this country our own in a good way, to change socialism from inside, instead of changing it from outside as part of the opposition,\u201d Ms. Erpenbeck said of her grandmother. Inside the family, \u201cthere was a lot of criticism of the system, but it was not like we would leave the country or throw a bomb somewhere.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">In family archives, she said, she found her grandmother\u2019s letters to the authorities about matters great and small, including ways to improve the system or warnings about the rise of neo-Nazism. \u201cShe was very committed, and this was the work of her life,\u201d Ms. Erpenbeck said. \u201cBut the idea of the country was better than the country itself.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Written in 2021 and published in English last year, \u201cKairos\u201d is, on the surface, the story of a young woman\u2019s obsession with a manipulative older man, a married East German intellectual of middling importance at the state radio broadcaster who has consequent privileges. A detailed, complicated and sometimes perverse six-year love affair tracks the growing maturity of the young woman, the moral decline of her lover and the last years of East Germany.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">The intellectual is based on someone real whose betrayals, as revealed in his Stasi file, are worse than those in the novel, Ms. Erpenbeck said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cKairos\u201d is both compelling and upsetting; the themes of manipulation, betrayal, degradation and cynicism are constant undertones to these deeply imagined lives. The novel ends with the revelation of the Stasi file of the man. Though his political commitment to socialism after the Nazi period is real, it degrades over the years as he gives in to the authoritarian state and his own selfishness.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Her own Stasi file, Ms. Erpenbeck admitted, was a great disappointment: It was only two pages, and most of it detailed a high school crush.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cMy own file is so cute,\u201d she said. \u201cI would have liked to have had a bigger and more interesting file.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Art must be free to explore what is hidden or shameful, she said. She is deeply troubled by efforts to judge the past through today\u2019s political and ideological lenses. The intimidation of writers, the censorship of older literature and the new form of \u201cdemanded language\u201d \u2014 though not from the state \u2014 reminds her of Stalinism, she said.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cThe big difference, of course, is that you\u2019re not being put into prison for what you say,\u201d she said. \u201cBut there are certain sentences you cannot say without an aggressive attack by the media.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Her fascination with social censorship and secrets is reflected in her love of the \u201cSpoon River Anthology,\u201d the 1915 book by Edgar Lee Masters that gives the dead in the cemetery of a small Midwestern town their honest say \u2014 about their own hidden tragedies, crimes and hypocrisies.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cI\u2019m drawn to dialogues with dead people,\u201d she said, smiling. \u201cTo think of them as still alive, just as you are. Letting the dead talk gives them a big freedom to tell the truth, which is not given in daily life.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<p><br \/>\n<br \/><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2024\/04\/26\/world\/europe\/jenny-erpenbeck-east-germany-kairos.html\">Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>She became a writer because her country vanished overnight. Jenny Erpenbeck, now 57, was 22 in 1989, when the Berlin Wall cracked by accident, then collapsed. She was having a \u201cgirls\u2019 evening out,\u201d she said, so she had no idea what had happened until the next morning. When a professor discussed it in class, she [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":36183,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2024\/04\/19\/world\/00-germany-erpenbeck-profile\/00-germany-erpenbeck-profile-facebookJumbo.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2302,18168,3913,5524,39185,15402],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36182"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36182"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36182\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36184,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36182\/revisions\/36184"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36183"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}