Review of Things That Disappear by Jenny Erpenbeck – A Changing Study of Transience | Articles

CIne Erpenbeck wrote the pieces collected in this compact but diverse book for a column in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung; Published in German in 2009, it now appears in an English translation by Kurt Pilz, following the huge success of Erpenbeck’s novel Kairos, which won the 2024 International Booker Prize.

It is interesting and instructive to consider what German newspaper readers made of this column in the early years of the new millennium, nearly two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall. While Erpenbeck adopted some of the model’s traits – seemingly passing observations about everyday life, such as a slight annoyance at the difficulty of locating appropriate sources – com.splitterbrötchena simple pastry now offered to a more elaborate and affluent clientele – has continually expanded and complicated it. In that characteristic tone of boredom and mild skepticism that journalists hope to attract time-pressed but frustrated or nostalgic readers, Erpenbeck smuggles in metaphysics, politics, and history.

As in her novels, her attention is drawn to the irrefutable power of coincidence. As a child and teenager, she was from East Germany. As she enters adulthood, she finds that her country no longer exists and that her personal, familial, social, and political history has been compressed into the sudden moment of emergence. If the collapse of the Berlin Wall was an easily understood symbol, dramatic in its intensity and immediacy, what happened to the places and people in the hours, days and years that followed? Using more abstract philosophical terms, what is the state of a thing after it has disappeared, a person after its death, a state renamed and reconstituted, or a changed identity?

Emergency tells us it depends. Which com.splitterbrötchenFor example: a simple sweet “rather mixed together, as if the baker had gathered all the leftover dough together” is now a much more refined affair, involving layers of puff pastry and techniques and processes, whereby the dough is pressed with the thumb “to let the air in.” “air!?!” Erpenbeck shouted. “For the first time, this word amazes me disappears “At its core there is something active, which is that there is a subject in the word.”

The pieces are necessarily short, and Erpenbeck leaves it to the reader to elaborate on what she is referring to, only occasionally making it more explicit, as in the matter of the disappearance of the drip catcher—a once-ubiquitous, low-tech gadget deployed to save East German tablecloths from coffee spills, now obsolete as coffee pots have been replaced by Italian espresso makers.

These local concerns are full of irony and humor, but many of the pieces address larger, more important absences. When Erpenbeck visited the site of the Warsaw ghetto, describing a modern hotel where “glass elevators go up and down inside a glass tube” and chestnut trees flourish only in areas outside the reconstructed area, she revealed an unforgettable detail: “There is often a little slope to the right and left of the sidewalk, overgrown with grass and shrubs, and the buildings themselves are a little higher,” because they were built on the ruins and foundations of old houses that had been burned to the ground by occupying forces. Germans.

Writing in miniature requires form and material: something tangible to evoke an image, to solidify an idea. But Erpenbeck is equally interested in how these profound changes affect thought and emotion, and how they redraw mental landscapes and inner lives. She thinks of the people she lost—R, whose charged razor she picked up from the hospital the day after he died, or her grandmother’s gnarled hands—and she thinks about how her own instinct for conservation was shaped. She develops a habit, she tells us, of trying to capture aspects of the “perfectly alive” people around her and imagining them as pieces of film, “as if I could pre-select my memories and memorize them, so that I could remember them for sure later.”