For This Writer, the Personal and Political Are Inseparable

THINGS THAT DISAPPEAR, by Jenny Erpenbeck; translated by Kurt Beals

Jenny Erpenbeck has become one of Germany’s best-known and most-venerated writers, winning the 2024 International Booker Prize for her novel “Kairos” and frequently mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize. This is not without irony.

Born in East Germany in 1967, to a family that included founding members of the Socialist Unity Party, Erpenbeck was studying theater at university when her country was dissolved and absorbed into the Federal Republic of Germany. To this day, with few exceptions, the political, economic and cultural establishments of the Federal Republic are dominated by those from the former West rather than the former East. Erpenbeck, however, has risen to global fame by making her East German culture and history a cornerstone of her work.

In 2009 — the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall — Erpenbeck published “Things That Disappear,” a collection of feuilleton pieces she had written for The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. With its philosophical observations about everyday life compressed into brief anecdotes, the feuilleton is a venerable literary form, practiced in Germany by the likes of Joseph Roth, Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer. (The closest American example might be The New Yorker’s Talk of the Town columns.) Now available in English in Kurt Beals’s translation, “Things That Disappear” shows Erpenbeck to be a worthy inheritor of this tradition.

The 31 things that disappear in “Things That Disappear” include: socks in washing machines, drip catchers, the custom of helping a lady into her coat, the proper way to bake a Splitterbrötchen, flower beds on Friedrichstrasse, the former East German parliament building, Erpenbeck’s son’s nursery school, the minds of elderly friends and youth itself.

The personal cannot be neatly separated from the political. “Things disappear when they are deprived of their means for existence,” Erpenbeck writes, “even if the reasons for their disappearance are infinitely far removed from the things themselves.” Take, for example, those drip catchers, the small rolls of foam attached by elastic bands to the spouts of coffee pots to prevent drips on the tablecloth during, as Erpenbeck recalls, family reunions. When the Wall came down, and East Germans were able to travel to the West, they stopped going to family reunions and instead went to Italy, bringing back “espresso makers in their luggage.”

Erpenbeck did not share in the general euphoria immediately following reunification, nor did she recognize her country as the dull, gray, totalitarian nightmare it was portrayed as in Western media. Many of the pieces in “Things That Disappear” are edged with resentment toward Western condescension and hypocrisy. In “Stolen Goods,” which recalls the early days of a unified Germany, a West Berlin shopkeeper complains about the shoplifting girls from the East who “don’t know what gratitude is” and were “completely ruined by the Russians.”

In “Safe Conduct,” Erpenbeck describes how the courtyard of her apartment building was once open to families hosting cookouts and “foreign children who ran around in knee socks.” But as the area turns into “a good neighborhood,” the building’s owner begins closing off the entrances to the courtyard, preventing residents and nonresidents alike from moving freely through the property. “After all, the Wall had fallen, thank God,” Erpenbeck comments, acidly.

The other pieces are suffused with nostalgia for the world of her youth. How much of this nostalgia can be attributed to the normal passage of time and how much to the fact that her home country no longer exists is the question that hangs over Erpenbeck’s fiction, from her debut novella, “The Old Child” (1999), to “Kairos” (2021); it also informs her “memoir in pieces,” “Not a Novel” (2018).

“Things That Disappear” ends with a piece titled “The Author,” which reads, in its entirety: “Surely, you’ve also heard the theory that the author is disap …” I’ve heard no such thing about Jenny Erpenbeck.

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