[I read this 2021 novel in two unequal parts. I wrote about the first part before reading on to the end. Spoiler alert: If you read this running commentary, you will find out everything that happens in the book as I read it.]
12 October 2025
Box I, Chapters 1-20 (of 29)
This novel, published in German, won the International Booker Prize in translation two years later. Erpenbeck is writing about what she knows, life in East Berlin for a young woman aged nineteen in 1986, just as Erpenbeck was herself. The action only starts in that year, and is going to take us through the years up to and after the fall of the Wall—so the love affair between the woman, Katharina, and her much older lover Hans, is going to span some interesting political times.
The narrative takes in both their points of view almost seamlessly, a single paragraph sometimes skipping from one to the other in alternating sentences. Not that we are necessarily to take this as the objective truth. A framing device has let us know that Katharina is reading the first of two boxes of letters and other memorabilia of his, delivered to her by a woman in tears (who?) six months after his death in old age. Katharina had not gone to the funeral because she was staying in Pittsburgh with her husband, and had only visited his grave when she returned home some weeks later.
What we are reading is presumably the distillation of the memories these arouse in her. But there is never any direct reference to items in the box, so the narrative reads like a conventional love story. Except Hans’s thought-stream is implausibly close in nature to her own…. Are these his thoughts as imagined by her nineteen-year-old self, as newly-fledged and wide-eyed as her own? A lot of the box’s contents will be letters and other things she wrote to him at the time, as well as his own thoughts—he is a novelist who jots things down—so who knows?
As I said, it’s told conventionally once we’re past the couple of pages that form the framing device. For weeks, Katharina had let the two boxes clutter up the Berlin flat, but finally she takes down the dust-covered suitcase of her own stuff, and begins to read the first box. I assume she’s put it off because it’s going to be a painful ride—right from the beginning we know the affair was very intense, but it ends. Before starting to read, she even considers throwing it all out unread….
For the first half of Box I the relationship is so full of a shared, mutually supportive love that I quickly became suspicious. We don’t know what this narrative represents (see above), so we don’t know how much of it to regard as true. But through a series of happy coincidences that both Katharina and Hans are keen to talk about and re-live later, they meet on a tram, head in the same direction, and… spend the rest of the day, and night, together. It’s all lovely, despite his age, and the fact that he is married with a son in his late teens. She is nineteen, hoping for a career in the creative arts within the strictures of East Germany (she is currently having to learn to be a typesetter), while he is fifty-three and a published author. And I guess he won’t have reached that position by rocking any political boats. There isn’t a great deal of politics in their romantic little bubble, but he seems to be a conventional enough Party man. I might be wrong, but when he had a chance to put his name to a document protesting a musician’s exile, he only got as far as thinking about it. He didn’t sign.
Little clues like this emerge only around the edges of the story presented in the first half of Box I, the kind of wildly romantic affair most of us can only dream of. Both the lovers are excited and—are alarm bells ringing?—absolutely committed to one another. With Katharina, this is to be expected. She has only had rather desultory relationships with young men so far, and is just giving up on a man who has left her waiting, again, just before she meets Hans for the first time. He, on the other hand, is a middle-aged man, so it is more of a surprise to read of how obsessed by her he seems to be. When he isn’t with her, he is thinking about her. When she goes for a long-planned trip to Budapest with a woman friend, he immediately writes her a letter she will read when she arrives back in Berlin, moons around the places they have walked or had their first coffee… and so on.
But…. As time goes on, in those spaces that appear behind the apparently robust fabric of their love, we find out more. And not only about him. I don’t think her commitment, so far, is ever in doubt—and maybe his isn’t either. Maybe, in middle age, he is finding a part of himself he had thought no longer existed. As it is presented here, it really looks like a possibility, this time, that an extra-marital affair might be the real love he hasn’t felt for anybody, perhaps ever. Because, reader, there have been plenty of affairs. Of course, we don’t find this out straight away. It’s a part of Erpenbeck’s skill that she feeds us this information bit by tiny bit. But, in the marriage to a woman he routinely describes as central to who he is—and to his status as a writer in Berlin—he has had at least two affairs, each lasting years. In a recent chapter (I’m well beyond the halfway point in Box I) Katharina has just seen how upset one of these lovers is when she sees her with Hans. We are bound to wonder whether that affair was still going on when he first met Katharina—and suspect that it was.
In other words, Katharina certainly doesn’t know Hans as well as she thinks she does. And maybe the differences in their outlooks are a lot bigger than she thinks. She, growing up in an East Berlin in which there are constant reminders of how things are in the West, does whatever she can to compensate for the austerity of the East. During her first ever trip to the West, to Cologne for her grandmother’s birthday, she buys as many clothes as she can, astonished by the cheapness of everything. Don’t get me wrong—Hans and Ingid, his successful wife, live in an upmarket apartment with plenty of nice things, like his excellent sound system. But he, apparently at least, is OK with things in the East. He was born before the War, and would have been conscripted if he had been two years older. Obviously, he speaks and behaves as though everything is better now. But if Hitler hadn’t lost, who knows how he would have behaved?
And meanwhile, there are other things that begin to make those little alarm bells ring much louder. The most astonishing of these is to do with unconventional sex. In Cologne, Katharina challenges herself to cross the ‘one frontier to breached’—to discover Western pornography. Erpenbeck has her see, somewhat implausibly, every last bit—‘all there is for a human to see.’ After most of a long paragraph of ultra-graphic description—she must be in the shop for a long time to see so much—comes this: ‘Excitement stabs her in the belly like a butcher’s knife.’ Hmm.
We realise later that this is preparing the reader for what happens when Katharina returns to Berlin. Hans is on holiday on the Baltic with Ingrid and his son, and he can’t make private calls from there—so their reunion is special. (I hope I’m remembering the sequence of things right.) The sight of her brass bed, which she takes him to while her mother is out of their flat, makes him think of—guess. He asks her if it would be OK for him to tie her up, naked, and she agrees. He does it, checking with her all the time that it isn’t hurting—and then he goes out of the room long enough for her feet to get cold. He comes back and soon things become more normal. But my God.
A lot of other things happen in the 100-odd pages I’ve read, like Ingrid’s discovery of Katharina’s letter to him. She throws him out, so he has to go and live in the flat of a friend who is currently living abroad—and, reader, he is going to have to live on 500 marks per month (or week—how would I know?). I don’t know how much that is, but it means he’s going to have to live on far less than he usually does—and we realise that his lifestyle, the one he is so used to, is entirely dependent on her income. No wonder he’s willing to go through the torture of a seaside holiday away from Katharina, no wonder he never talks seriously about leaving his wife.
[Pause]
Simply writing about him now, I’ve started to think of him as a weak and needy. He is dependent not only on his wife, but on the women who let him fantasise about his own importance. It’s no accident that Katharina, from the start, is impressed by his status and cleverness—not realising that these are only possible for him because of Ingrid and the way he can be a big fish in his little world. Meanwhile, his mooning about the place like a lovesick adolescent, and his constant reinforcement through a kind of shared mythologising of the affair when he is with Katharina, fits into this idea. He makes it real for himself because it’s all he has. Ingrid is his provider and, in an emotional way, so are his lovers. Including, presumably, Katharina. Hmm, again.
The rest of Box I, all of Box II, Epilogue
I needed to read the rest of the book for a discussion group. And, basically, those alarm bells were warning the reader—if not Katherina, who seems deaf to them—of the catastrophic turn the relationship will take. She even ignores the horrors as they are taking place, over the next three years at least, because the ultra-insecure Hans feels the need to force her into feeling the most terrible guilt simply for behaving like a normal human being. The details are both sadistic and sordid, often at the same time, to the extent that I know I’m not the only reader who found their story almost impossible to read at times.
What also becomes clearer in Box II is Erpenbeck’s wider project. For the first 100-odd pages of the novel, up to where I had read last time, it is first and foremost a story of an intense, increasingly worrying love affair. Pretty soon, though, and even before the end of Box I, it’s as though Hans is coming to represent the most undesirable aspects of East Germany. I thought about him as a Party man almost from the start and, increasingly, one who enjoys the privileges of the elite. He is keen to praise its traditions and its heroes because these are what retain for him his comfortable place in society. If the State is backward-looking, self-aggrandising, and with a keenness to mythologise its past… well, so is Hans. Like the country, he remembers how things were before the War, and before it was lost. Whereas Katharina is a child of a very different time. She’s from the younger generation that the Old Guard want to convince, or coerce, into perpetuating a system that only really works for the elite.
In fact, the world of politics in general, and Hans’s political background in particular, form an important parallel thread in Box II. More than a thread. Fairly early on in this section we start to get details of his childhood, and his early adulthood after the War. His family had moved westwards from eastern Europe, middle-class Nazis, and the young Hans understands little. We realise, although it doesn’t figure in Hans’s memory, that a fully-furnished house they move into had belonged to a Jewish family. His memory is also pretty discreet about his membership of Hitler Youth, and we are left with the impression that he would have become a good Nazi had the War been won. But, after his father is offered a professorship in West Germany after the War—a direct result of his understanding of Nazi history in the East, gained from within—Hans throws in his lot with the Communists. At eighteen, renouncing his father, he moves to East Berlin to become a loyal, useful Party man. (File that away for much later. To the Epilogue, in fact.)
But that’s in Box II, and I need to rewind. During the nine chapters that make up the last part of Box I, Katherine is becoming more independent—whilst ascribing all her new-found belief in herself to Hans’s good influence. He, of course, is very happy to take the credit, and seems to have been able to pull the right strings to get her the internship that allows her a new freedom. She works in a theatre in Frankfurt an der Oder, learning about production design—but staunchly making the hour-long train journey as often as she can to spend the night with Hans in Berlin. At the theatre she often finds herself working on tasks with a young designer, Vadim, and almost from the start they share an unspoken mutual attraction. For weeks and months, she scrupulously avoids any behaviour she considers a betrayal of Hans. She doesn’t even recognise the possibility that her adoration of Hans could be anything but a lifelong commitment—and, reading between the lines and the narrative’s evasiveness, we can see better than she can how much pressure Vadim is putting on her.
And, reader, guess what. Finally, the young woman spends a life-affirming night and day with the young man. Of course she does, never doubting for a moment that her own deep love and commitment to Hans remains unchanged. She doesn’t write about it in her diary, the one she has no qualms about Hans reading… but she does write it on a scrap piece of paper that she leaves lying about on the desk in Hans’s borrowed apartment. And this age-old novelistic trick, the fatal discovery by the betrayed partner, is what ends Box I. She’s gone to buy some cake, one of their simple shared pleasures, ‘while Hans is ferreting about for an empty bit of scrap paper. He finds one, but it has some writing on it.’
How bad can it be? We’ve seen how increasingly controlling Hans is becoming by now, constantly wanting to add layers of confirmation to their mutual commitment. As the narrative presents it, Katherina is never in any doubt, and there are references to how much ‘she loves him’ on what feels like every page. She has been very happy indeed for him to book what they call a ‘honeymoon’ in Moscow the following year, after her year-long internship is over. Of course they will still be together, sharing the never-ending replays and re-living of their earliest times together. Is the reader already beginning to see how her so-called love might be something else entirely, the product of a middle-aged man’s manipulation of an impressionable young woman’s feelings?
Before the fateful discovery of her misdemeanour—he makes her call it a sin—his controlling tendencies had only emerged incrementally. So, for instance, his wish for her to share his own taste for high culture had seemed harmless enough—three pieces by Bach, Mozart and Chopin become ‘their’ tunes from day one—but now we recognise how manipulative it is. He wants her to see herself and him as inseparable parts of the same being, thinking in the same way, and he uses the language of romantic love to achieve this. It would explain his implausibly wide-eyed infatuation with her that I never quite believed in. (I’ll come back to later evidence that I’m not wrong.)
But that scrap of paper makes him realise he has let her out of his grip too fast. What we get, immediately, is a strategy of extreme corrective measures that make the first part of Box II such a difficult read. By way of his new policy of naked authoritarianism, he pretends to be doing only what will save their relationship—which, he constantly reminds her, is as essential for her continued happiness as it is for his.
Did I make the link straight away between his methods and those of the East German state? Definitely not. His vicious mind-control is a recognisable aspect of abusive relationships, and that’s how I was reading it. But, I was thinking, doesn’t Erpenbeck take it much too far? I know, for instance, that some readers give up at this point in the novel. For something like 50 pages, Katherina seems to accept all his cruelty with no sign of wanting to defend herself. And it really is cruelty that reaches the level of sadism.
With hindsight, the similarity to Stasi tactics becomes clear. Not only does Hans force her, through a kind of ritual humiliation, into admitting her guilt. He hypes up the seriousness of it into a sin, a mortal transgression, that he says might be impossible for him ever to forgive. Immediately, she considers resorting to self-harm. Perhaps she could split her skull in two by crashing it against the edge of the table in the café where he’s asking her how she could ‘do such a thing to us,’ and telling her, ‘if I am to get involved with you again, I have to understand who you really are.’ What cruel nonsense, we think—this comes, without warning, only two pages into Box II—but she swallows the blame. And from now on, the implied threat is always there. He can’t pretend the sex with Vadim didn’t happen, so she will have to accept everything he needs to do to make herself acceptable to him.
Part of her ritual humiliation is to be a letter to Vadim to end the relationship, dictated by him. He makes it a squalid mix of self-abasement and denial of anything wholesome in the relationship, including insulting references to his lovemaking. ‘It will hurt him,’ says Katherina. ‘It’s meant to. It’s about securing an outcome.’ Some time later, we realise he’s decided to test the effectiveness of his methods. He will visit her by train in Frankfurt, and they will spend the night together. Except, as soon as she meets him on the platform, he tells her he’s going back to Berlin on the same train. I didn’t cotton on that this was a test, seeing it as simply another example of his sadism. But it definitely is a test, because he calls her next day, after she’s spent an almost hallucinogenic 24 hours of suicidal misery. And when he arrives, they both behave as though nothing has happened.
But the mental cruelty is only the half of it. There’s also the literal sadism of their sexual relationship. There was that alarm bell ringing quite early in Box I, when he ties her up naked and leaves her until she’s shivering with cold before coming to her rescue. And there was another clue as to how this might go when Katharina herself feels that stab of excitement ‘like a butcher’s knife’ as she looks at pornography in the West. This is before he ties her up, and… and, well, what? She makes no objection to his fetish, allowing herself to be complicit. Erpenbeck doesn’t describe the extent of their sado-masochistic sex as it escalates. Hans has the upper hand now, but he doesn’t rush it. He starts by showing her what sound like mildly pornographic photographs of, for instance, a bare-bottomed maid being whipped by her mistress. Katharina doesn’t object to these—and soon she is getting an erotic thrill from carrying around Berlin an almost identical whip, wrapped as a gift, when Hans delays an upcoming tryst with her.
All we know is that during the next months he goes far beyond whipping her, and there is never any hint that she is unhappy with this. She has left Frankfurt after only six months, unable to bear the tension of any more time in the same building as Vadim and wanting to secure her hold on Hans. She moves into that flat he’s borrowed, and for the next six months he lets her fantasise about becoming a real homemaker. She is devastated when they have to move out because the owner will be back in two days. Two days! It isn’t at all clear that Hans didn’t know before this, but his negotiations with Ingrid for a return to the family home suggest he might have known all along. He seems indifferent to Katherine’s feelings as she is forced to go back to live in her lonely flat.
Not that their life in the borrowed flat has been a domestic idyll. She pretends it is but, for instance, a regular chore is for them both—or sometimes just Katharina—to get the groceries on the lists Ingrid gives Hans. And he marks the monthly ‘anniversaries’ just as carefully as before, but with the twist that now he always reminds her how nothing is the same after what she did with Vadim. But… it’s now, nearly 50 pages into Box II, that there’s the first glimmer of recognition from Katharina that Hans might not be entirely right. He asks about Vadim, tells her she’ll never be free of him, and when she tells him that’s nonsense he tells her to drop it. She thinks, ‘Basically it’s Hans himself who in his unending engagement with the past is compelling her to think of Vadim.’ Alleluia. But it’s only the tiniest hint of protest, and over the next months it’s clear that if there’s any man she’ll never be free of it’s Hans himself.
But, finally, this is when the book starts to move away from the claustrophobia of their destructive mutual dependence. Katharina has been spending time with an old friend, Rosa, who becomes more and more of a support for her. They even discover that they can offer one another sexual comfort although, as we might expect, Rosa finds another, more committed partner. Katharina, after all, has never hidden her commitment to Hans. Is this before or after the time for that long-planned ‘honeymoon’ to Moscow comes around? Predictably, Hans makes her stew as he reminds her how hard will be for him to forget… etc. etc. But he plays another game in Moscow, appearing to be as loving and mindful of his duty as her mentor as before the catastrophe. She swallows it, the city he takes her around becoming a Communist wonderland of luxury hotels, brightly red-starred monuments and high-end shops catering for the elite.
Does this new-found concord carry on after their return? What do you think? But by now, after a stop-gap job as a theatre receptionist, Katharina has a place on an art degree course. And history is catching up with Hans and the East German elite. Which, finally, is when I began to find the book really interesting. Political unrest in the mid- to late 1980s is forcing the politicians into seeking something they have no idea how to find. This isn’t the usual background context that finds its way into historical novels. It becomes central to what the novel is about, as Erpenbeck starts to give us a genuinely imaginative insight into what it must have been like for East Berliners in the late 1980s. These were people who weren’t only paying lip-service to a system, but one that they remembered from when it genuinely seemed to promise something new for ordinary people. Security, housing—Katharina had been appalled by the homelessness in Cologne—and a philosophy based on equality, not exploitation.
Of course, things in East Germany had long since departed from such an ideal, and the presence of a prosperous outpost of the West just over the Wall made it hard to accept that Communism represented the best of all possible worlds. This is what Katharina had grown up with, why the West represented for many, at one level at least, a better option. But Erpenbeck is careful to dispel the notion we have in the West that the East Germans had simply been waiting for the Wall to come down to let them out. Throughout the novel, the reader is given the sense that the East had always been more serious-minded about matters beyond material prosperity—Hans exploits this with Katharina by flattering her sense of cultural sophistication—and, Erpenbeck insists, the East Berliners didn’t simply want to be absorbed into the Western capitalist system. They wanted to replace a corrupted, elitist Communism with something more like the ideals of the past.
Ah, the past. Katharina realises that Hans’s obsession with it goes far beyond his constant memorialising of key dates in their shared lives. And, like Hans, the system is going to have to cope with new realities that have no regard for what came before. As we reach the later chapters of Box II, after the Wall has come down, this is what happens more and more. Almost everything in East Berlin is regarded with a kind of pitying disdain by the West Germans, and there is little respect given to anyone, whatever their status before. Erpenbeck gives us a concrete example, when the creative industries like broadcasting—which is where Hans really makes his meagre living—are subject to what feels like an arbitrary winnowing of staff. High-profile employees, like everyone else, have to wait in line to give their names, by way of an open phone receiver, and discover if they are wheat or chaff. Hans is chaff.
So we finally realise it. This authoritarian, cruel relationship has morphed into a political metaphor. It strikes me as a definite flaw that for almost three-quarters of the book it’s the details of the relationship that take centre stage, and at a literal level Hans and Katharina’s behaviour often seems lacking in plausibility. It makes much more sense as a metaphor, which was clearly always Erpenbeck’s plan for the novel—so why does she leave it so late for the penny to drop for the reader? It’s only once we’ve reached the end of the Epilogue that we realise that Hans’s style of brainwashing Katharina isn’t just a metaphor, it’s East German policy. The young have to be taught to revere the system, otherwise the Party will lose credibility. Katharina, and all the others, need to be taught how to see the clothes that the emperor isn’t wearing.
What we see, for most of the novel, is that the brainwashing works. But not forever. Erpenbeck lets us know from the start that Katharina isn’t going to stay with Hans, but we don’t know exactly how, or why, it comes to an end. Katharina had last seen him, we know from the Prologue, four months before she hears of his death. That was when he had asked her to come to his funeral, and she had said she would. But she’s in Pittsburgh, presumably on a visit, and she doesn’t go. Instead, she sends flowers and listens to what we later realise are ‘their’ tunes on YouTube. She visits his grave when she can, six weeks later, and hears that the same pieces had played at the funeral. We don’t get the connections when we first read about them in the Prologue, but we do by the end. Something between them was never completely broken. Bless…
…except there’s that Epilogue. She is reading a long Stasi file on ‘an informal collaborator with hostile contacts.’ It tells the story of how this man was to infiltrate potentially dangerous groups and befriend individuals both in order to report back and, perhaps, try to nudge them back into right thinking. Perhaps. But, as his bosses understood, he would expect ‘personal advantage’ to come his way, and that he had a ‘flair for conspirative work.’ Even better, in another file, Katharina reads how one of his favoured techniques for deflecting suspicion was ‘to counter that with countervailing suspicion.’ Ah. We realise that only now, in the time of YouTube and its constant interruptions for commercials, does she realise the truth behind that altered the course of her life. You couldn’t make it up.
[Pause]
So, what do I think?
We can read it for you wholesale 