The Last Dinosaurs: On Jenny Erpenbeck’s “Things That Disappear”

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On YouTube and Instagram, there’s a genre of video I sometimes get recommended: furniture restoration. They follow a common format. First, discovery: a disused piece, perhaps an end table or a mid-century modern chair, is found on an online marketplace or abandoned roadside and spirited back to a studio. Next, breakdown: its tattered leather degloved, leprous wood-finish stripped, bent or rusted hardware disinterred and discarded. Afterwards—sometimes superficially, sometimes like Theseus’s ship—it’s reconstituted. In a series of cuts, the wood is polished and the leather buffed, freshly whittled dowels tapped into place. The videos all end, of course, with a reveal of the piece, newly resurrected. A slow montage from every angle, sunlit.

The promise of these clips—and of those where blackened rugs are powerwashed to a virginal state; where rusted tools are purified with lasers or acid baths; where antique oil paintings are restored or derelict Japanese houses rebuilt; even where Patrick Bateman-lites perform “Sunday resets” of their penthouses by steam-cleaning all the furniture, polishing every surface—is that we really can, with hard work and ingenuity, triumph over entropy. Those things we love, those things that, as H. D. Thoreau and Tyler Durden both observed, sometimes come to own us: we can save them. Moth and rust don’t have to corrupt.

Jenny Erpenbeck’s latest non-fiction work, Things That Disappear, is organized around the unpleasant antithesis: everything fails us, eventually. Or dies, or goes out of style, or just calcifies and crumbles, whereupon the gentlest winds of history blow it away like funereal ash. A sampler of disappearing things from this book, ranging from the mundane to the abstract: pastries and coffee apparatuses; parents and old friends; palaces and sites of atrocity; social etiquette and historical mores. At the most rarified levels: memory, history, the person one used to be. It’s all contingent, though we spend much of our mortal career convincing ourselves otherwise.

Erpenbeck’s oeuvre explores these ontological contingencies—of the self, of the nation state, of the tenuous, sometimes treacherous relationship between the two. A novelist and opera director, she achieved international recognition with 2015’s Go, Went, Gone, about a widowed German classics professor who begins visiting and interviewing African refugees in Berlin after their hunger strike is broken up. Last year, she won the International Booker for 2021’s Kairos, a bittersweet (significant emphasis on bitter) love story set during the GDR’s decline, in Michael Hoffmann’s lyrical English translation. Born in East Germany and present for the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, Erpenbeck grew up amidst these historical and ideological ruins. Things disappeared or were disappearing, the shambles of successive political eras. 

In an older essay, “Homesick for Sadness,” she writes of walking past buildings still bearing words like “Dairy” or “Coal Merchant” in the Third Reich’s Gothic font, themselves existing alongside subway entrances sealed with the erection of the wall: portals to nowhere, debris and newspapers settling in them for thirty-odd years. She stands on the site of her former primary school, itself reduced to concrete rubble, and recalls the first line of the East German anthem: Resurrected from the ruins, faces towards the future turned. That promise of utopia—along with its Socialist posters and the particular blue tile from the girls’ bathroom—lies somewhere amidst the debris.

Things That Disappear, mostly comprising pieces penned for a column in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, is something like cultural rubble, a jumble of one-to-three page essays to be picked through. Each sketch takes a particular thing or concept (“Junk,” “Stoves and Coal,” “Men”) and extracts some larger philosophical or poetic point from its near or total disappearance. An essay called “Disassembly” frontloads the existential premise undergirding the book:

We are only guests on earth, we’ve known that for a long time, but even before we vacate the premises altogether, we are guests time and again, as if for a trial run: in other people’s apartments, summer houses, hotels. Before we vacate the premises altogether and all our baggage inevitably falls away, we have the opportunity to transport our earthly belongings to this place or that, as we please.

The anecdotal hinge—the “disassembly”—is Erpenbeck’s vacating of a house where she spent four summers. It involves taking apart a treehouse, packing away clothes and shoes, unscrewing a hammock from a resinous tree. At the end, she remarks that the home has assumed the impersonality of a deserted hotel room, as seen through a cracked door. A series of nesting equivalencies: hotels, we know, are by design contingent; houses we typically furnish as though permanent; and life itself—well, we do our best not to think of it as a terminal condition. We furnish our lives with material treasures and avoid thinking about the moving out process. Erpenbeck’s deft, metaphorical “ostranenie”—the Russian formalists’ term for artistic “defamiliarization”—makes one think about it.

Elsewhere, Erpenbeck editorializes not at all. One of the most limpid essays, “Warsaw Ghetto,”  simply describes the site where a Jewish ghetto once existed. All that remains are two apartment houses, the courtyards of which have a Virgin Mary encased in glass, children disporting, the wafting smells of urban life. The houses themselves are in disrepair:

The roughly two apartment houses that remain from the Warsaw ghetto are reinforced with iron beams that span the courtyard, there are nets and boards to catch any falling tones, balconies without floors jut out from the facade, and the plaster is long gone. These roughly two apartment houses with their bare brick walls have been standing like this for over sixty years, but at some point they’re bound to collapse.

Where the smaller part of the ghetto existed is a nine-story hotel that Erpenbeck is staying in, complete with glass elevators. 

As the essay proceeds, her vision becomes dialectical, superimposing history on the present. That slight, sloping differential between the sidewalk and the houses exists because the Germans razed the oldest buildings. That beautiful park with the big chestnut trees? That’s where “the historian Emmanuel Ringelblum climbed out of the sewers to hide on the Aryan side.” And up there, on the balcony of Milastrasse 18, where geraniums grow and the curtains are a bleached white—that’s where the last fighters of the ghetto uprising killed themselves. Here, the critical act is simply Erpenbeck holding history in her mind and projecting it like a magic lantern. Perhaps that’s one way to forestall disappearance.

Some pieces take a very specific thing, like a commodity, as their object. “Drip Catcher” is nominally concerned with the rolled bits of foam that once adorned the necks of coffee carafes at German family reunions, meant to protect tablecloths from stains. Why did these disappear? Apparently, because children born at the end of the war stopped planning family reunions, instead traveling to Italy and returning with espresso makers. So drip catchers quietly shuffled offstage, just as backyard carpet hangers vanished when wall-to-wall carpeting was introduced, “after the Persian carpets had been bombed away, when there was no money to buy new ones, and the men who used to carry the rolled-up carpets down the stairs for cleaning had been killed in the war.” 

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The Buddhist sees the moon in a dewdrop, the poet the universe in a grain of sand. A cultural historian discerns an epoch in a carpet hanger. This was the theorist Walter Benjamin’s disposition, whose final, unfinished opus was a study of the Parisian Arcades (Passages) and all the commodity debris therein. He believed commodities were like fossils, their patterning an impression made by the social forces of their day. And he wanted to excavate them as such, to brush them off and examine them closely. He writes of the arcades:

Just as there are places in the stones of the Miocene or Eocene Age that bear the impression of huge monsters out of these geological epochs, so today the Passages lie in the great cities like caves containing fossils of an ur-animal presumed extinct: The consumers from the preimperial epoch of capitalism, the last dinosaurs of Europe.

In the commodity desiderata of a just-bygone era—faded fashion posters, coiffed mannequins, gaslight fixtures—Benjamin saw a whole cultural orientation captured in amber. The implication here being that our social values and ideals are not only conceptual or philosophical but material, patently manifest in what we produce, how we (or international workers) produce it, and to what end it’s put. Observing different post-war and post-Wall disappearances, Erpenbeck echoes Benjamin:

​Just as each thing, no matter how simple, contains within it all the knowledge of its time […] whenever a thing disappears from everyday life, much more has disappeared than the thing itself–the way of thinking that goes with it has disappeared, and the way of feeling, the sense of what’s appropriate and what’s not, what you can afford and what’s beyond your means.

We lose things and with them ways of being. At the same time, we gain new things and new ways of being, some better, some far worse, more alienating and immiserating. The material losses can be banal, like drip catchers and carpet hangers. Or they can be dramatic, like when the automobile superseded the American train—or when we all took the phones off our walls and put them in our pockets. And our collective losses run deeper than products or technologies. When speaking of disappearances, it bears mentioning that in our natural world there’s an ongoing extinction event: the sixth. As insect populations drop, forests grow quieter, leaves of trees staying unnaturally pristine and unperforated. Things disappearing can mean the appearance of an elegiac, ominous silence. 

It’s difficult to clock in the flux of the present—each of us piloted about by our finicky desires, often simply for the immediate, ahistorical thinginess of things—but all of these disappearances and renovations add up. It would seem that a culture, no less than a mid-century modern chair, can get the Ship of Theseus treatment: rebuilt with a new part here and another there until, finally, it is both itself and not. 

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There is an episode from Go, Went, Gone that I thought of while reading this new book. It’s when the protagonist, Richard, spends Christmas Eve dinner with Rashid, a Nigerian refugee who had been living in Libya. Richard recalls a Christmas past when his now-deceased wife left the roast goose on a window sill and it disappeared. He muses that Germany’s reunification had not changed the lot of the poor. (As Benjamin writes aphoristically in the Arcades papers: “As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.”)

Over the course of the evening Rashid recounts fleeing Tripoli when Boko Haram attacked. He had been at home with his children when his wife called from work asking for help getting home, but barricades prevented him from reaching her. He and his two children, aged three and five, wound up at a barracks, where they spent five days before being forced onto a boat. When someone attempted to jump out and swim back to shore, they were shot.

Adrift toward Italy, things started to disappear: food, water, a compass, any sense of direction. Five days total without food and water. When all hope seemed lost, a rescue boat came. Supplies were tossed to the refugees, and in the scramble and the rocking of the refugees’ boat, it capsized:

Within five minutes, not more, in only five minutes, hundreds and hundreds of people died. The people I’d just been sitting next to, people I’d just been talking with.

Among them, his children.

But he survived, clinging to a rope, and reached Italy. There, he learned his wife had made it to a UN office that day, surviving the attack. She would later divorce him, remarry, and get pregnant. As a coda to this grim story, Rashid, a fabricator of gates, draws, on a ruled pad Richard brings him from his study, a schematic of the final one he sold, “a gate that surely still guards the entrance of some property in Libya.”  

In particular, I thought of this episode when Erpenbeck writes, as quoted earlier and the emphasis here mine: 

Before we vacate the premises altogether and all our baggage inevitably falls away, we have the opportunity to transport our earthly belongings to this place or that, as we please.

It is a statement that I’m certain Erpenbeck knows is highly qualified today. And so too, Things That Disappear is, I think, best read in conjunction with her other books. If it at times seems slight or scattershot as a freestanding book, it slots nicely into an oeuvre that captures with startling lucidity a modernity characterized by unrest, upset, and dissolution. To achieve this historicizing vision is to see in a local, provincial loss—a metaphorical teacup unsettled against its saucer by a faint tremor—evidence of a cataclysmic earthquake elsewhere. 

It is, and should be, an unsettling vision.