German writer Jenny Erpenbeck won the British Booker Prize for her novel “Weather” together with her translator Michael Hoffmann. The international Booker Prize honors foreign language works that have been translated into English. This year the distinction was awarded to the German author Jenny Erpenbeck who borrowed the title of her book “Weather” from Greek mythology. Kairos was the god of favorable timing. It is the second time that the author has won the prestigious award, which comes with a cash prize of 58,000 euros. In 2015 he was honored with the same award for “Aller Tage Abend” which has been published in Greek under the title “The end of the world”.

In the justification of the decision for this year’s award, it is stated that the book is “excellent because it is beautiful and at the same time unpleasant, personal and political. Jenny Erpenbeck connects generation-defining political developments with a devastating, violent love affair.”

A story of love and politics

The story of Katarina and Hans takes place in East Berlin during the last years of East Germany. The couple couldn’t be more motley. A 19-year-old student and a married writer, 34 years her senior. Despite the fact that they both love art and music, their relationship is toxic. In the end, they not only face the wreckage of their relationship, but also the ruins of a utopia, that of the socialist East German state.

Jenny Erpenbeck, born in 1967, is herself an East German. He was 22 when the Wall came down and knows first hand what it’s like to see the collapse of East Germany, which he describes so vividly in “The Weather”. He quickly found himself in a new country, the Federal Republic of Germany, where the people were not very interested in the history of their brothers from East Germany.

For her and for many of her fellow East Germans, the question arose: who are we and where are we going? And it quickly became clear that they were not equal partners with the West Germans.

As for her book, which won the internationally renowned Booker Prize, the response in Germany was limited. And this is no coincidence, he said speaking to the newspaper “Die Zeit”, because as he reported, not a single member of the review committees of the year “Kairos” was published was of East German origin.

History is the subject of her literary work

The history of the former East Germany is, however, a topic that preoccupies her literary work in general. She made her debut in 1999 with the novella “The Story of the Old Child”. Her other works have been translated into Greek, such as “Skyvala” (Tand, 2001), “Word Game” (Wörterbuch, 2004) and “Test” (Heimsuchung, 2008, “The end of the world” (Aller Tage Abend, 2012), “The passers-by” (Gehen, ging, gegangen, 2015). She has been awarded important awards, such as the Thomas Mann Prize and the European Strega Prize. In 2017 he was awarded the Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.

Jenny Erpenbeck is still concerned with issues such as the temporary and reversals. In her novel Test, for example, the residents of a house live through a series of successive upheavals: the Weimar Republic, National Socialism and the Third Reich, World War II, the end of East Germany and the fall of the Berlin Wall. But “Kairos” also describes the fate of many people against the background of politics and seems to succeed in building a bridge between East and West Germany. Because it is true that even so many years after the reunification, people’s relations have not been fully normalized.

Edited by: Maria Rigoutsou