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The German author reflects on borders, memory and her East Berlin childhood in a collection of essays shot through with anger
When the Berlin Wall fell, German author Jenny Erpenbeck was oblivious. In her essay Homesick for Sadness, she tells us: “I literally slept through that moment of world history, and while I was asleep, the pot wasn’t just being stirred, it was being knocked over and smashed to pieces.” Erpenbeck was initially sceptical about East Berlin’s newfound liberty. “Freedom to travel? (But will we be able to afford it?) Or freedom of opinion? (What if no one cares about my opinion?) Freedom to shop? (But what happens when we’re finished shopping?).” Later, she admits that her experience of this “transition” was what prompted her to write.
Erpenbeck’s refreshing frankness and incisive thinking permeate this collection. Written over two decades, Not a Novel includes snapshots of a happy childhood in the German Democratic Republic, literary criticism on writers she admires (including Hans Fallada, Walter Kempowski, Thomas Mann and Ovid) and meditations on her own work as a writer. We learn of her love of folk tales, how their “intensity” and “harshness” infiltrate her own fiction, and how music (she worked as an opera director) taught her “to give shape to the gaps between the words, those mute spaces, to give rhythm to the silence between the words. The pauses are part of the text, they may be the finest part…” Continue reading...