Erpenbeck
[This page by Augustus Haines]
Jenny Erpenbeck
Jenny Erpenbeck was born in East Berlin in 1967. Erpenbeck’s father was a physicist and writer who had published several books and her mother was a translator of Arabic literature. Her paternal grandparents were active figures in GDR cultural life as well. Her grandmother, Hedda Zinner, was an actress and writer who published under the name Elisabeth Frank. Her grandfather was Fritz Erpenbeck, an accomplished writer and actor, who played a role in Slatan Dudow’s and Bertolt Brecht’s film Kuhle Wampe (1932).
Erpenbeck initially completed an apprenticeship with a bookbinder before she turned her focus toward the theater. During the final years of the German Democratic Republic, Erpenbeck studied drama at the prestigious Humboldt University. She undertook additional studies in concert directing and conducting at the Hochschule für Musik ‘Hanns Eisler’ in Berlin. She has extensive experience in the practical side of the theater as well having worked in stage production, props, and costumes at the Staatsoper Wien. Her first play premiered in Graz in 2000. In 2007, she began writing a regular column for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
Her career as a writer began in 1999 with the publication of her first book Geschichte vom alten Kind which was met with widespread positive reception. The same book appeared in English translation as The Old Child and Other Stories in 2005. Since then, she has won numerous prizes for her prose such as the Hans Fallada Prize, the Thomas Mann Prize, and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. She remains one of the most important contemporary German authors. She recently served as visiting professor in the Department of German at New York University in the United States. She now lives between Berlin and Graz where she writes full-time.
Jenny Erpenbeck’s novels and stories frequently confront themes of memory, time, reconciliation with the past, emotions, the quotidian, precarity, and the legacy of the former east. Her life and adolescence spent in the former GDR permeate many traits and habits of her characters and their perspectives. In an interview with The Guardian, Erpenbeck says ‘My own experience of what East Germany was like is changed by every book I read. To me, it’s always interesting to look at what is happening on the periphery.’ This highlights her emphasis on the personal perspective and dynamic nature of memory with regard to her former homeland. Erpenbeck is often praised for her linguistic style. Michel Faber observes that ‘Erpenbeck’s German is poetical, almost incantatory, taking full advantage of the portmanteau words and Rubik’s cube grammar of that language.’ Her complex but approachable style would otherwise be a challenge for translators, however, Erpenbeck’s novels are widely available in English and in other languages. Many of her works have been translated by Susan Bernofsky.
Jenny Erpenbeck’s 2010 novel Heimsuchung (Visitation) positions the narrative of 20th-century Germany within the walls of a house on a lake outside of Berlin. Heimsuchung chronicles the quotidian and mundane elements of daily life as they relate to the inhabitants of the house. She cleverly situates the stories against the backdrop of the Weimar Republic, the National Socialist period, the former GDR, and the Berlin Republic. In this novel, she evokes questions regarding the intrinsic connections between space and memory and the continuities and discontinuities in German history. Heimsuchung is a short novel of under 200 pages that consistently captures the density of emotion and historical records retained in the house. Shortly after its German debut, the book appeared in an English translation by Susan Bernofsky.
In 2016, Erpenbeck published what is perhaps her best-known novel, Gehen, ging, gegangen which was shortlisted for the Deutscher Buchpreis. The success of this novel coincided with a sharp influx of migrants and asylum seekers traveling from the Middle East and elsewhere to Europe. In Go, went, gone as it is known in English, Erpenbeck chronicles the unlikely friendship struck between a German pensioner and former classics professor and a group of migrants from Africa. The protagonist, Richard, comes from the former GDR and seeks meaning in his mundane routine retired life. As Gary Baker puts it, the refugee men are an object of fascination for Richard who views them as the antithesis of his own life. Their ‘lived vulnerabilities’ are more foreign than their language and customs for Richard who has lived a calculated and strategic life even into retirement. Baker refers to the experiences of the refugees as a sort of ‘violence of precarity’ inflicted upon them from former colonial influences. Through this lens of a privileged European male, some perspective is certainly lost. But as several reviews have concluded, without the careful and formidable Richard we would have no sense of belonging and comfortability from which to compare the refugee experience. Thus, the question of narration from Richard’s perspective serves as a point of juxtaposition.
Erpenbeck’s thematic continuities between the history of the family, the state, notions of Heimat, and expressions of emotion culminate most articulately in her 2008 novel Heimsuchung. In this short novel, Erpenbeck situates the personal firmly within the public. She blends the story of the family and the individual experience within the narrative surrounding a house. The short novel is vaguely biographical and centres around the lake house owned by her grandparents. The history of the house, its occupants, and the region by which it is surrounded stands simultaneously distant and intrinsically connected to the broader context of 20th Century German history. A Deutsche Welle article points out that ‘for some Germans, the term “Heimat novel” brings to mind shiny supermarket paperbacks, not quality literature’ but in Heimsuchung Erpenbeck conveys the complexity and nuance of the term Heimat. The title is difficult to translate: a Heimsuchung is a visitation by an uncanny, otherworldly spirit, or an affliction; but the etymology implies a ‘search for home’ or ‘searching the home’.
Erpenbeck’s Novels
Geschichte vom alten Kind (1999) | The Old Child
Tand (2001) | Trifles
Wörterbuch (2007) | The Book of Words
Heimsuchung (2010) | Visitation
Aller Tage Abend (2012) | The End of Days
Gehen, ging, gegangen (2015) | Go, Went, Gone
Kairos (2022)
Other Works in German
Kein Roman: Texte 1992 bis 2018 (2018) | Not a Novel: A Memoir in Pieces
Katzen haben sieben Leben (2000) | Cats Have Seven Lives
Leibesübungen für eine Sünderin (2003) | Physical Exercises for a Female Sinner
English Translations
Jenny Erpenbeck. 2018. Visitation, trans. by Susan Bernofsky (London: Portobello Books)
Jenny Erpenbeck. 2019. The Old Child and the Book of Words the Old Child and the Book of Words, trans. by Susan Bernofsky (London: Portobello Books)
Jenny Erpenbeck. 2020. Not a Novel: A Memoir in Pieces, trans. by Kurt Beals (New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation)
Jenny Erpenbeck. 2017. Go, Went, Gone, trans. by Susan Bernofsky (London: Portobello Books)
Jenny Erpenbeck. 2014. The End of Days, trans. by Susan Bernofsky (New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation)
Further Reading in German
Sonja Dickow. 2019. Konfigurationen des (Zu-)Hauses: Diaspora-Narrative und Transnationalität in jüdischen Literaturen der Gegenwart (Stuttgart: Springer, 2019)
Further Reading in English
G.L. Baker. 2018. ‘The Violence of Precarity and the Appeal of Routine in Jenny Erpenbeck’s Gehen, Ging, Gegangen.’ Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies (2018)
Heike Bartel and Elizabeth Boa (eds). 2006. Pushing at Boundaries: Approaches to Contemporary German Women Writers from Karen Duve to Jenny Erpenbeck. German Monitor 64 (Amsterdam: Rodopi [Leiden: Brill], 2006)
Necia Chronister. 2018. ‘Conceiving of a Realfictional Body: Material Feminisms and Jenny Erpenbeck’s Geschichte Vom Alten Kind (1999)’ The German Quarterly (2018)
Mary Cosgrove. 2012. ‘Heimat as Nonplace and Terrain Vague in Jenny Erpenbeck’s Heimsuchung and Julia Schoch's Mit der Geschwindigkeit des Sommers’, New German Critique 39.2 (2012), 63-86
Axel Goodbody. 2016. ‘Heimat and the Place of Humans in the World: Jenny Erpenbeck’s Heimsuchung in Ecocritical Perspective’, New German Critique, 43.2 (2016), 127-51
Robert Lemon. 2018. ‘Vectors, Vanishing Points, and Vicissitudes in the Works of Jenny Erpenbeck.’ World Literature Today (2018)
Christiane Steckenbiller. 2019. ‘Futurity, Aging, and Personal Crises: Writing About Refugees in Jenny Erpenbeck's Gehen, Ging, Gegangen (2015) and Bodo Kirchhoff's Widerfahrnis (2016).’ The German Quarterly (2019)
Weblinks in English
Erpenbeck interviewed by Philip Oltermann in the Guardian, 2020
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/jenny-erpenbeck-is-keeping-time
Erpenbeck interviewed by Lauren Oyler in the New Yorker, 2021
https://lithub.com/a-world-beyond-our-skin-jenny-erpenbeck-and-the-potential-of-fiction/
Robert Rubsam, ‘A World Beyond Our Skin: Jenny Erpenbeck and the Potential of Fiction’ (essay, 2021)
Weblinks in German
https://www.dw.com/de/jenny-erpenbeck-heimsuchung/a-44458433
https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/jenny-erpenbeck-kairos-abgesang-auf-die-ddr-100.html
