Her first truly symphonic work, it covers a century, yet never leaves the same patch of earth, a lake house in Brandenburg, not far from Berlin.

In 2008 came Heimsuchung (which translates literally as “home searching” but was given the anemic title Visitation when it appeared in English in 2010). A series of dark, fairy-tale-inflected stories followed over the next decade. In America, our fights about history lately come out of a desire to flatten it, to clear the rubble, to find a clean narrative: 1619 or 1776? Erpenbeck ponders her own messy German birthright and sees a landscape of ruins to play in.īorn into a family of East German intellectuals and authors, Erpenbeck published her first book in 1999, a novella called The Old Child. She relies on leitmotifs-themes, objects, exact phrases recur through the narratives over time and space. Erpenbeck repeatedly constructs stories that span generations, letting history leak into and through them. In fact, after the Berlin Wall fell, and before she turned to writing, she worked in an opera house in Graz, Austria. It’s a truth that made Sebald digressively meditative and Grass revel in absurdity. Hans, the middle-aged East German author who is one of the main characters in Erpenbeck’s new novel, Kairos, describes the East Berlin of the 1980s very much in his author’s terms: Inhabiting a place where the past is visible everywhere, exposed and rotting, he concludes that “this devastation was the truth.” For these authors, history is not compressed strata layers of the past surround them, a constant atmosphere, felt and seen anytime they look around. In her professed “love of dirt,” she follows W. This is a very postwar-German sentiment, and Erpenbeck is a very postwar-German writer. But with the arrival of bulldozers to clear the rubble and erase the remnants, she was overcome by “grief for the disappearance of a place that was such a visible injury, for the disappearance of sick or disturbed things or spaces, which offer proof that the present can’t make its peace with everything.” When the school began to decompose, she felt the personal loss of a place that had once housed her childhood. In an essay called “Homesick for Sadness,” included in Not a Novel: A Memoir in Pieces, she describes how she felt when she learned that her GDR-era elementary school, which had been abandoned and left to crumble in the middle of Berlin, was finally being demolished. View Moreįor Erpenbeck, who ranks among Germany’s most acclaimed writers (and is frequently mentioned as a future Nobel contender), this love comes with an ethic, one that suffuses her fiction. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.

The bad beginning first edition