Date of Award

Spring 2026

Document Type

M.A. Essay

First Advisor

Aden Evens

Second Advisor

Yuliya Komska

Abstract

For Germany, the process of reckoning with the past is not a new one. Termed Vergangenheitsbewältigung in the post-war period and envisioned as a project extending beyond the academy into public consciousness, “dealing with the past” was first envisioned in response to the Nazi regime and its horrors. While already a disjointed project in the Nazi context, the question of how reunified Germany reckons with the former German Democratic Republic’s past remains unresolved.

In her 2021 novel Kairos, Jenny Erpenbeck proposes a different model of historical consciousness. Drawing on Theodor Adorno’s post-war theory of working through the past (Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit) and Reinhart Koselleck’s concept of “layers of time” (Zeitschichten), I argue that Kairos rejects the possibility of a coherent historical narrative capable of having been fully “worked through.” Rather than present history as linear progression, Erpenbeck depicts time as stratified, recursive, and simultaneously active within people, objects, and spaces. Historical meaning, therefore, does not emerge from a nation’s psychoanalytic reconciliation or the archive made whole, but rather fluidly exists in temporal layers that continue to structure the present.

To describe this process, I develop the concept of “portals,” or material objects, spaces, and narratives that render the otherwise invisible temporal strata suddenly perceptible at once. These portals expand a linear past, exposing the tradition of chronological historical consciousness. The novel’s protagonists, Hans and Katharina, are thus depicted not as simple allegories of the GDR, but as temporally stratified subjects through whom multiple historical layers (fascism, socialism, reunification, memory, and future reinterpretation) remain active simultaneously.

Further, Erpenbeck transforms literature itself into an affective counter-archive, preserving contradiction without resolving it into a singular national narrative. While Adorno imagines historical reconciliation as dependent upon critical self-reflection capable of identifying and eradicating the social conditions that produce fascism, Erpenbeck troubles this conception of reconciliation by exposing the various layers of unresolved time not just within the nation’s psyche, but within the individual and even within the most discrete material object. In this framework, chronos is the retrospective construction of coherent historical continuity, while “kairotic moments” are the experience of rupture in which that construction temporarily fails and layered historical time becomes perceptible. Kairos, therefore, trains the reader not to “work through” or overcome the past, but to bring awareness to an unstable reality produced when multiple histories converge, both informing the present and being informed by the present.

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