Kairos

by Jenny Erpenbeck

If he’d been born a hundred years later, he wouldn’t have survived. Not as a Jew, and not as a thinker either.

How to endure the way that the present trickles down moment by moment and becomes the past?

And the concept of the nation, her

father had said, was only devised to mobilize people for war without having to pay them.

Everyone who participates in a revolution has his own reasons. And it’s only from outside that it looks as though all the principals are of one mind?

Never had Katharina begun a year with so much uncertainty. Will she and Hans be together in a year? Will her country even still exist?

In May, a rumor goes around the radio station that from August no salaries will be paid to regular freelancers. Hans sits down and writes a letter to Katharina: Did you ever actually like sleeping with me?

During the Nazi era, numerous German writers from Bertolt Brecht to Thomas Mann left their home. Now it’s the other way around: his home is leaving him, while he’s not going anywhere.

your hands are brown and sere like two Reclam paperbacks, your body is like the snow in a Berlin backyard in March, your shoulders are like two crocus bulbs on dry earth, your eyes are like two birds fighting over bread crumbs, your earlobes like the curtains in an abandoned house.