Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck

Author:Jenny Erpenbeck [Erpenbeck, Jenny]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780811229357
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2023-06-06T00:00:00+00:00

I/ 27

Will her love prove sufficient, and above all will it last long enough for Katharina still to be his when the book is finished? She supplied him with the occasion to embark on a book, but the soil from which his writing grows has nothing to do with her, he realizes, once the memories begin to surface from the mire of forgetting. Of course, he knows that the ruins and hopes of the past must stand in some relation to the ruins and hopes of the present, when they suddenly loom up like that. And probably that’s why he hasn’t managed to get out of the postwar era for a long time now in his writing. He talked about it with Müller as well. Because Müller, to universal astonishment, has decided to revive his first play, Scab, from the 1950s, at the Deutsches Theater, and the premiere is to be in January. He wants a production with the simplicity of a funeral inscription, he says. Can you bury what once was? No. Hans agreed to write a piece for the program. As an eighteen-year-old he believed that the ending carried a seed of the beginning, and now it looks as though it were the other way around. The question that divided him and his father at the time is still awaiting an answer. His father, who owed his career to the hatred and greed of the Fascists.

The Reich University of Posen takes its intellectual and political stance in matters of teaching and research from the line laid down by Reich Marshal Hermann Göring in his direction of the Foundation of German Thinking and the Eastern Territories, of which this University constitutes a part. Principal among our duties is the constant examination of the intellectual caliber of our political work in the East. Following his father’s appointment to Professor, his parents had given a lavish dinner at their house, the grown-ups all drank Rotkäppchen, and the housekeeper had mixed him a Pomeranian children’s punch in a glass retort, which held the ice cubes in a separate blown chamber to one side on the inside. A Pomeranian jar. The term had persisted in his mind, even though he had seen no such thing for decades now. What in this jar was inside, and what was out? He remembers how the question used to exercise him. A Pomeranian jar. Intellectual, material, and ethical securing and Germanizing of the German Lebensraum in the East. For weeks Hans has been sitting in the Archive of the Staatsbibliothek, the big gray heap on Unter den Linden that still carries the scars of April 1945 on its walls, he’s been leafing through the time he was a child. One wing of the library was bombed in the War and is a ruin to this day. Aged eight, he had been allowed to stay up as long as he liked, i.e., until he fell asleep on the chaise longue in his father’s study. He leafs through newspapers his parents will have read over their afternoon coffee.

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