Jenny Erpenbeck, 58, was born in East Berlin and began her career as an opera and theatre director. She published her first book, a novella, in the 1990s, later crediting the collapse of East Germany with her urge to write. Since then her novels, including Visitation, The End of Days and Go, Went, Gone, have made her one of Germany’s foremost authors, and in 2024 her novel Kairos won the International Booker prize. Her latest book, Things That Disappear, a collection of columns originally written for the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, tracks the impermanence of life and considers grief for things both mundane and extraordinary.
What drew you to write about disappearances?
After a while, a writer knows what his or her favourite subjects are. I guess mine is transition, and things that are lost or changed. Things can become something new as they change their nature, as it perhaps also is when someone dies. But some things, unfortunately, just disappear. In my experience, it’s not always that the bad things disappear, but sometimes also the good things. It’s also interesting to look at it from a historical perspective. When the reason for a thing has disappeared, the thing itself will also disappear. There’s a connection between history and the props of life.
What comes after a disappearance?
Some things might end up in a museum. I am very interested in the question: what is on display in a museum? It’s very clearly the things that disappeared in reality. They have a value in a museum because they disappeared in reality; they become precious when they are not sharing our lives any more.
Is this why you collect ephemera from the former East Germany?
I’m tired of being put into this East German corner all the time! The GDR [the German Democratic Republic] is part of the book, but things that disappear are also youth, men, mothers, certain parts of our vocabulary, a piece of cheese that vanished from the kitchen. But I understand that the disappearance of the country in which I was born has sharpened my awareness of disappearance in general. I’ve seen a whole system collapse and fade away, one country become another country. That has led me to how I look at things in the way I do now.
You’ve written that after the fall of the Berlin Wall, your childhood “belonged in a museum”.
Whether you like everything about it or not, the system you live under becomes familiar to you in a very complex way. So when everything – the leadership, the cultural life, the elite, the money, the things you can buy – changes all at once, your whole life experience is of no value any more.
Are you interested in portraying sentimentality or nostalgia in your writing?
Emotions have to be produced by readers. I don’t provide emotions. I try to stay in the background. After all, we all have to accept that we ourselves will disappear, one day, from the surface of the world. And even if you believe in being reborn, or that heaven or hell are waiting for you, you have to face the fact that we will leave the world that we knew. It is of no help if I say I’m very sad about it.
What kind of objects do you keep?
I keep things from friends who passed away – for example, a bowl or a scale for weighing letters. Perhaps the most interesting thing is from my grandparents. They left Germany behind when Hitler became chancellor in 1933 and emigrated to Prague. There they bought two canisters of olive oil, so that in times of need, they had it to cook with. They carried them to Moscow, and then later on even into the Ural mountains, then back to Moscow and Berlin. These two containers of olive oil are here on my bookshelf. I would never throw them away. They still have oil in them – they’re heavy.
What do you hope will happen to these items after you die?
I have a pre-contract with the archive of the Academy of Arts here in Berlin, so that they will get my manuscripts when I die. We have a son, and I really do hope that he keeps some things, but just in case he can’t, I asked the man who is responsible for our family’s stuff in the archive. And he said they only take two-dimensional things – flatware, as it is called. I couldn’t understand it because if I go to an exhibition about an author, I’m always more interested to see his pipe or his glasses than a manuscript that I could read at home in a book.
Which books had the biggest effect on you growing up?
Der Nachsommer by Adalbert Stifter – it means something like “The Late Summer”. He was an author from the 19th century, and I really liked him a lot. The language is incredibly rich. I also loved fairy tales, and as I got older, I discovered a publication of Grimms’ Fairy Tales in two volumes, which didn’t only contain the nice ones for children, but also the ones for grownups. Some of those are so cruel, and they have this absurdity and a strange logic. Those tales were very important to me.
Which German author do you think is underappreciated in the anglophone world?
Heiner Müller. He passed away [in 1995], but I’m still reading him and his plays. He was a great fan of Shakespeare and was always interested in the question of who is a victim and who is a perpetrator. Sometimes I will open his books to read the interviews he gave. You wouldn’t believe how rich those interviews are, not to speak about his plays and short prose.
What can we expect from you next?
I’m working on a book about my father. I don’t even know if it will be fiction or nonfiction. But I hope, after many trips away, that I can calm down now and sit down at my desk and get some writing done.
Things That Disappear: Reflections and Memories by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated by Kurt Beals, is published by Granta Books (£12.99). Order a copy for £11.69 from The Observer Shop. Delivery charges may apply
Portrait by Hannes Jung/laif