We all live with boundaries, but few of us feel that as keenly as Jenny Erpenbeck, who grew up in the Pankow district of East Berlin, a stone’s throw from the Wall. Now a leading novelist of a unified Germany, she explained several years ago that when the Wall came down in 1989 and the East German state collapsed (she was 22 at the time), a ‘border’ was created between two halves of her life. ‘Without this experience of transition, from one world to a very other one, I would probably never have started writing.’
It will never be like this again, thinks Hans. It will always be this way, thinks Katharina
Set in her old neighbourhood in the dying days of the GDR, her novel Kairos tells the story of the love affair between Katharina, a 19-year-old woman, and Hans, a writer who’s 34 years older, married, with a teenage son.
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