Before she started writing novels in the late 1990s, Jenny Erpenbeck directed modernist operas, beginning with Béla Bartók’s rendition of “Bluebeard.” It’s a strange work, dramatically spare, musically complex, and broadly interpretable. Unlike most tellings of “Bluebeard,” Bartók’s only opera is sympathetic toward its villain. There’s violence in this world, but no one is shown committing it; instead, bloodshed is a shade cast on everything—piles of gold, even the clouds—and like victims of fate, its two characters are left with nothing to do but to uncover it and stand there, dismayed.
Erpenbeck directed the opera in 1994, six years after she started her studies as a theater student in East Berlin and five years after the wall came down, an event she often alludes to or directly reenacts in her fiction. The way a first novel can work later on as a cipher for a writer’s obsessions to come, “Bluebeard’s Castle,” Erpenbeck’s first creative endeavor made public, is dense with her inclinations, especially her treatment of violence as ongoing and inevitable, a background to characters’ daily lives.
It could be read as glib, as was the case with Ilya Kaminsky’s polarizing poem, “We Lived Happily During the War,” where bombings and lying in bed are flattened onto a level plane, or with Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You, where questions about privilege are asked by characters eating grab-and-go sandwiches. Both works express the narrators’—and perhaps the authors’—helplessness when faced with the remote structures undergirding inequality, and both are wry about it.
Erpenbeck, on the other hand, treats her characters’ helplessness as deeply felt and tragic, an attitude she might’ve developed as a young person leading up to reunification or during her years directing operas, beginning with Bluebeard’s Castle. Written around 1908 and first performed a decade later, the opera follows a wary Judith as she visits her new husband’s castle for the first time. In a stone hall, the two quibble: it’s too dark, Judith says; why not let some light in, perhaps by opening one of these seven rather ominous-looking doors? But Bluebeard is reluctant. There’s built-in dramatic irony here; the audience knows Bluebeard is famous for killing his wives, so as Judith opens each of his doors, hoping to illuminate the space and instead revealing a torture chamber and an arsenal, little exposition is needed, and the opera is free to flourish more as a sensorium than as a proper drama.
Like the story, Judith and Bluebeard’s exchanges are minimal. “Open, open,” Judith repeats. “Frightened? Frightened?” Bluebeard asks again and again. “Kiss me, kiss me!” he implores later on, after his wife reveals a treasure chamber and a garden covered in blood. “Ask no questions! Ask no questions!” he repeats. Why can’t you love me without trying to uncover all of my secrets? goes the implied refrain. Isn’t there such a thing as intimacy without total transparency? Bluebeard so much as asks. Judith doesn’t see it that way; in her mind, because she loves Bluebeard, it follows that she must open all the doors of his castle. One understands why a young director from the GDR would gravitate toward such a story.
The staging of Bluebeard’s Castle was so straightforward, it was dismissed as insufficiently theatrical by the judges of the contest for which Bartók first completed it. But musically, it was layered, performed in multiple keys. As Judith approaches the castle’s fifth door, which looks onto Bluebeard’s kingdom, a polytonal swell rises up, and the stage is lit up as if from the world beyond.
Still unsatisfied, Judith opens the castle’s sixth and seventh doors, hiding Bluebeard’s tears and, finally, his former wives, not dead exactly but immortalized as goddesses of dawn, noon, and twilight. They dress Judith in a crown and jewels so heavy she can’t help but obey their directives, joining them as Bluebeard’s final beloved, a goddess of midnight trapped behind a locked door, leaving her new husband alone in his unlit castle for eternity.
Five years after staging “Bluebeard’s Castle,” Erpenbeck published her first work of fiction, a novella called The Old Child. It, too, is a gothic fairy tale with violence rendered texturally, not with clear-cut, villainous perps. The book sets the stage for the rest of her career, which began with short works that, Sebald-like, compact history’s violent course into dense mood pieces.
The plot of The Old Child follows a young woman who seems to materialize on the street, with no family and no memories. Her hope, we learn, is to pass as school-aged in various cloistered institutions, a foster home and a classroom studying Brecht. While most of her peers dream of graduating into the so-called real world, the old child maintains an illusion of docile ignorance so that she can stay at the school and live freely: free from harm, and, more importantly, she feels, free from doing harm to others.
Other children bully the old child, but they do this as a collective, a system reacting to an agent that’s disrupted its order. Eventually, though, the old child is incorporated, trusted not to act willfully, but to sit in silence. This is fine by her for a while, but she keeps getting sick, and eventually she notices that her classmates are happier when she’s not around.
The narrator is far away from her point-of-view, not exactly sympathizing with her plight, but telling her tale matter-of-factly. From this vantage, Erpenbeck is able to craft an ambivalent metaphor for the socialist state of East Germany. Though fable-like, the novella is far from didactic; there’s mention of institutions, of invaded privacy, and, on the other hand, of competition (which the old child abstains from), but there’s not a straightforward moral code assigned to characters as they traverse these camps.
During a particularly rough bout of illness, the narrator notes, almost marveling, that thanks to the school’s orderly system of caregiving the child receives “appropriate treatment as a matter of course.” Elsewhere, on the schoolyard, the narrator describes the child’s inability to keep up with the less regimented rules of social life; when she tries to agree with her classmates’ views, they’re “repelled by the inferior manner in which the girl is parroting” them, and “start looking for a new one to replace it with.” Even within the institution’s walls, they want more than anything to stand out, to act as willful individuals; it’s only human, Erpenbeck suggests, a metaphor for GDR youth just before reunification.
Eventually, when she gets sick enough that she’s taken away from the school and to a hospital, the old child loses weight, and this thinning out reveals her real age; she’s a woman of thirty, an amnesiac who’d forgotten where she came from. Her mother, a hazy, ominous presence until then, arrives just as the girl—now a woman—comes to, but it’s too late to go back, to reunify; “I don’t remember you at all,” the old child says.
Nearly one decade and several shorter stories later, Erpenbeck published her first novel, Visitation. Another experimental work with gothic elements, its chapters each follow a different resident or visitor to a lakeside home during the twentieth century. Some points of view recur, like gentle refrains; the property’s gardener grounds us now and then with the banality of maintenance that is so much of life as he measures, prunes, empties, pulls, waters, harvests, stores, rakes, burns, saws, and splits.
His attentions are interrupted by short scenes of senseless violence. In one, a Jewish family must sell the house as they plan to leave the Third Reich for Brazil. It may sound melodramatic, even gratuitous, to narrate the moment one of their lifeless bodies is thrown into a pit. But Erpenbeck doesn’t have a voyeur’s eye. She’s not unflinching; she’s not a journalist, but an opera director-turned-novelist with an affinity for modernism. She incants; with musical repetitions, she lists everything that’s “taken back” from humanity with this one death: “the backflip on the high bar that the girl could perform better than her schoolmates is taken back, along with all the motions a swimmer makes, the gesture of seizing hold of a crab is taken back, as well as all the basic knots to be learned for sailing.”
In another short chapter, a woman hides in a closet as an armed Russian soldier sweeps through the house. When he discovers her, it seems like he might rape her; instead, she’s the one to initiate sex, which ends with her pissing on the soldier against his will. The scene makes consent hard to delineate: Did the woman rape the soldier? Or did she act on him because she was afraid for her life, his presence so threatening that she was moved to act violently? Is the intention to harm even traceable here? (The soldier, for his part, is given a sympathetic backstory, the loss of his family at German hands detailed at the start of the chapter.)
In the early part of her career and in Visitation especially, Erpenbeck uses nonlinear narrative structures to complicate the simple logic of cause and effect. Following a single house and its inhabitants over the course of centuries—wear and tear, marital spats and avoidances, and more than one war—makes conventional plot, which involves causality, impossible. These residents don’t always have much to do with each other; the Jewish family preparing for their move to Brazil aren’t friends of the architect’s wife, for whom laughter is a coping mechanism for her unwanted childlessness. What the characters share is literally textural; they look out the same stained-glass window, and they notice the words “Air Raid Defense” stamped on the house’s grating, even “in the middle of peacetime.” Like a lighthouse in the distance, these objects anchor us as fate carries us swiftly along.
Like her modernist predecessors, Erpenbeck writes directly about time’s relativity. One character wonders whether there’s a German tense for when the past feels like the future, and another muses that a mosquito they’ve found pressed between books “will outlast time and times, and one day it might even be petrified, who knows.” This movement from exalted philosophizing to almost depressive bathos is characteristic of her writing in Visitation. We witness deep love and horrific trespasses, but we’re always brought back to the gardener and his hedging. This is the risk of spanning a century in one work: each character’s suffering feels less meaningful because, well, life goes on.
The scope of Visitation itself may be a relativistic force. Still, we’re worlds away from “We Lived Happily During the War,” if only by virtue of the space allowed by a novel, space Erpenbeck fills with particular textures and characters whose consciousnesses she accesses through the changing rhythms of her sentences chapter by chapter, in nimble free-and-indirect style. The gardener is almost staccato; the architect’s wife tells the same jokes again and again. In accretion, these different points of view are the novel’s heart, what we lose touch with when violence wrenches us from coherence.
Like in Kaminsky’s poem, some characters do experience violence and everyday grievances on the same plane. Whenever the architect’s wife “hears someone speak of the war she thinks first of the war that her own body began to wage against her just as the first bombs fell on Germany.” Though food supplies were limited, she gained weight. This comparison and its flattening effects may seem both true and petty, but in the scope of this novel it’s just one vantage point of many.
In contrast, the moment when a young pianist is killed by firing squad is shattering. “For two minutes she can feel the sand beneath her shoes along with a few pieces of flint and pebbles made of quartz or granite,” Erpenbeck writes as the girl revisits the lake by the house in her mind. “Then she takes off her shoes forever and goes to stand on the board to be shot.” This equivocation of Earth’s ordinary stuff—what we feel beneath our shoes if we’re in a noticing or imaginative mood—and death by firing squad is not wry, or a flat and familiar rendering of alienation under neoliberalism, or a sad but inevitable fact of life. With her cadences alone, Erpenbeck insists: it makes no sense; it’s not right.
Her next novel, The End of Days, is, like her earlier work, a formal experiment toying with the narrative convention of agency, of meaningful action. The scope again is sweeping: each of the novel’s five sections details the events leading up to or shortly proceeding a moment when the main character might’ve died. As a newborn; by her lover as a poor teen in the early days of Red Vienna; as a scapegoat during the Moscow trials; by accident in middle age, as a decorated writer in East Germany who slips and falls down the stars; and as a woman of 90 in a nursing home after reunification, attended to and mourned by her son, who laments that “these strange sounds and spasms”—his tears, or all expressions of grief—“are really all that humankind has been given to mourn with.”
The chapters are separated by what Erpenbeck calls “intermezzos,” traditionally a comedic break from a drama proper. Her intermezzos aren’t ha-ha funny, but they are moments of reprieve, when a far-away narrator observes what might’ve allowed for the heroine to go on living. Her mother might’ve saved her from overheating with a bit of snow found outside, or the Soviet officer might’ve placed her paperwork in a different pile on a whim. In each case, her survival is out of her hands, a matter of fate. Framing the most dramatic turning points of her life this way makes her individual efforts narrated in the chapters—to fight in the name of Communism or to write about it later—feel small.
These intermezzos make up a slim portion of the book, however. They’re more like reminders of the senselessness underlying most loss—most change even—than the story’s sole governing ethos. In The End of Days, Erpenbeck complicates her own pattern of collapsing history into a monophonic representation of melancholy, of violence without cause. That droning note first heard in The Old Child and Visitation keeps playing, but in the chapters themselves, a single character is given room to act.
Erpenbeck might’ve called these chapters operas seria. Without the intermezzos, they’d feel too melodramatic, too unaware of her heroine’s place in history, and too credulous of individualism and its adherent narrative structures. On the other hand, without the operas seria’s dramatic fullness, the intermezzos might make too much light of the narrator’s actions, regarding her attempts to change the course of things as futile and nothing else.
It’s true that by the end of her life, Frau Hoffmann, who’s unnamed until the final chapter, has little to show for her efforts. Her son’s ambivalence about the spoils of Westernization is pretty mild; and the women in her nursing home aren’t exactly itching to talk about her political fights or to dust off the books she wrote decades earlier; they’re caught reliving their own pasts as skiers and pastors. What remains, then, are relics: an antique her son brings her; a dusty volume of Goethe; a grandfather clock striking the wrong time every hour; and the novel itself, a catalog of how its character spent her days. Erpenbeck regards such objects with careful attention, as if to suggest they’re not nothing.
The epigraph for The End of Days is from Sebald’s final novel, Austerlitz. His influence, including his modernist-inspired temporal telescoping, is clear in Erpenbeck’s work. Both condense swaths of history; both use lyrical refrains and physical relics to give their otherwise broad, almost metaphysical stories some order; and both risk getting lost in such an expansive, fatalistic view. But The End of Days feels like a turning point in Erpenbeck’s work, where she adds to her melancholic, zoomed-out visions of history a particular character, not an archetype or a girl in a fable, but a woman who tried to do more than simply observe these forces, which if nothing else makes for a good story. “And now,” the epigraph asks, “where will we be going now?” What can the son of a communist raised in the GDR, with its “publicly owned enterprises” and “dialectics taught in school,” do but adapt to fast cars, tax returns, and Prosecco for breakfast? What can a novel do at the end of history?
Erpenbeck’s most recent book, Kairos, which won the International Booker Prize, is her most careful calibration yet between fate and choice, history’s sweep and characters’ will to stand apart from it. On one level, the novel is about an affair between Katharina, who’s 19 at the outset in East Germany in 1986, and Hans, who’s 53, writes state-sponsored radio programs, and plays Mozart and Bach and Chopin while the two of them make love. That the characters have names sets them apart from the blur of historical time, at least over the course of their story, which is backgrounded by student-led protests and eventually the end of the socialist state.
Neither character pays much mind to their political circumstances until the change has them surrounded in the novel’s final quarter. Even then, Hans signs a petition and Katharina walks out of a talk on counterrevolution; neither puts their body on the line for their country’s founding ideals or against their dictatorial manifestations. Instead, Erpenbeck uses Katharina’s and Hans’s shared private life as a melodramatic allegory for tensions between control and autonomy in their home state. Though things are consensual at first—Hans is married, and Katharina accepts this—they escalate into power games and psychological manipulation.
The frame story allows Erpenbeck to focus on her characters’ private lives and let history run its course, almost in the margins. In middle-age, her youth in East Germany and her abusive first love far behind her, Katharina receives two boxes of Hans’s belongings after he dies. She unpacks the letters, the relics, a lock of hair, the itemized lists, a dried flower that crumbles at the touch, and feels overwhelmed by what’s recorded, what’s arbitrarily left out, and how randomly it’s all organized.
Then the plot begins, and she tries to make some sense of their story: their chance meeting, the way her shoulder fit in his palm when they first slept together, the slip of paper he found revealing her one-time tryst with a boy working at her theater, the outsized, years-long humiliations he subjected her to afterwards, and his insistence that she was not to be trusted.
Katharina’s may just be one version of their affair, as the prologue and epilogue remind us; their story could be rearranged just like items in a box. Still, it’s Katharina’s version at this time of remembering, and if Kairos has an arc, it’s toward her will to act, to feel something other than the guilt and pressure Hans exerts, to question his version of events, to regard his violent control not as inevitable but as a force she can resist.
Like reunification, Erpenbeck suggests, Katharina’s isn’t a triumph without loss. The end of state overreach is also the end of hope for an escape from capitalism’s more pernicious crimes, at least for now. And when Hans dies, Katharina doesn’t attend his funeral, but she lights a candle in his memory. Her story stands in for the stories of the GDR’s many, and Erpenbeck lets that allegory, that polytonal swelling, overwhelm the page before shifting back into a single key.
Erpenbeck’s own arc so far gives some insight into what a novel can do here at the end of history. Her earlier, more experimental work follows dizzy, nameless protagonists, suggesting a belief in the death of character and in style over plot and agency. She hasn’t turned away from that more stylish approach to telling stories, but she’s added something to it: single, specific points of view, psychological depth, and even, on occasion, some willfulness and ability to act.
Madeleine Crum
Madeleine Crum lives in New York by way of Texas and the Gulf Coast.