A centre-right German newspaper might seem an unlikely home for a Booker International-winning novelist’s essayistic experimentation. But Jenny Erpenbeck’s pieces on transience, decay and resilience, most of them first published as biweekly columns in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung from 2007 onwards, show it can be done.
The essays were first collected in book form in Germany in 2009. This new English translation by Kurt Beals introduces new resonances and ironies emerging from the nearly two decades that have since passed. What the noughties considered historically-minded caution – “Never tear out one of those tiled heating stoves, a man once told me. […] You always have to be ready to provide your own heat" – has come true: Germany reintroduced coal in 2022 after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine reduced gas supplies, forcibly evicting the entire Lützerath village to make way for mines. Erpenbeck’s references to 20th-century fascist history find freshly grim resonance in a year where Germany’s far-right AfD party has just topped a national poll, and where German authorities’ violent suppression of pro-Palestine campaigners has drawn widespread international condemnation.
The disappearing “things” in the title are not just objects, but all manner of entities and phenomena. The most interesting ones are often people: unsentimental junk removers, a woman pushing an empty pram in the Jewish graveyard near the crumbling Warsaw ghetto, a frail and elderly castle tender who now has a caretaker of her own.
Another writer might have made their craft the protagonist of each piece, but Erpenbeck’s role in shaping the narrative stays largely implicit until a piece near the end, A Better World. Here she emerges as an observer who does not always have the leisure to wax philosophical “when life’s wild circle is whirling around me with its two demented circular knitting needles”. The hum of daily tasks – “take out the trash, do the laundry, load the dishwasher, pack my suitcase” – is sporadically interrupted in block capitals: “WHAT ARE YOU WORKING ON? […] YOU’LL HAVE SOMETHING NEW FOR US TO READ SOON, RIGHT? […] WHEN IS YOUR NEW NOVEL COMING OUT?” Parenthetical crescendos bring another stamp of formal originality to a piece about the gradual shutting-down of pathways to Erpenbeck’s apartment courtyard. “(Right of way?) […] (Right of residence?) […] (Right of sausage?)“, they escalate playfully.
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She is wryly suspicious of the consumerism fostered by West German capitalist ideology, not to mention of that worldview’s condescension towards East Germans: “These same girls used to have to line up at dawn to get hold of even one copy of The Aesthetics of Resistance by Peter Weiss – and now that they can buy any book they want, they start stealing!" Erpenbeck’s most celebrated novel, Kairos (2021), had no illusions about the collapse of the GDR, either; here is a writer who has seen things fall apart, only to live through further false promises.
Junk details the ironically expensive “minimalism”, at base yet another mania to acquire, that is now blurring Berlin’s identity into a characterless conglomerate “from Vienna to Tokyo, and from Tokyo to New York”. Rhenish, Bavarian and Swabian blow-ins can live rootlessly in Berlin, while it’s more complicated for the increasingly priced-out Germans who are actually from there: “Maybe the brothers and sisters they left behind have taken their place in dusty lairs in Rhineland, Swabia or Bavaria that are full of junk, just like mine, because Berlin is my home”. Captured subtly here, these post-Wall class tensions are deeply felt; whenever I visit friends in the gentrified former East Berlin neighbourhood of Prenzlauer Berg, I see graffiti against Swabians and none against non-Germans.
Much of the city’s character is conveyed through dialect that resists translation. Instantly recognisable Berlinese (“Also heute wird dit allet mit Bagger jemacht”) becomes casual speech that an English-speaker might use anywhere from California to Sydney: “Well, these days they’re gonna do it all with excavators”. There’s probably no better solution available. If Beals had chosen a specific form of inner-city English to stand in for Berlinese, it would have superimposed one place’s particularities over another’s – and nonfiction is not the place to make up one’s own stand-in slang, as Adriana Motti did, for instance, in her 1961 Italian translation of Catcher in the Rye. There is the odd moment of unnecessary wordiness in the English that creates ambiguities absent from the German original: “wie die Schlafstatt eines Menschen” (“like a person’s sleeping place”) becomes “like the sort of spot a person prepares as a place to sleep”. Overall, though, Beals’s translation is elegant and well-judged, with particularly fine work on a couple of tricky rhymes.
The most winking formal experiment comes in the very last chapter. I’m not sure if I’m allowed to “spoil” a book of essays by telling you what it is, but I’ll err on the side of keeping the surprise intact. Erpenbeck’s entropic musings have made me reluctant to squash anything before its time.
