Why International Booker Prize winner Jenny Erpenbeck never planned on becoming a writer
The German writer spoke with Eleanor Wachtel, who chaired the International Booker Prize jury, in 2015
As Writers & Company wraps up after a remarkable 33-year run, we're revisiting episodes selected from the show's archive.
Jenny Erpenbeck is an award-winning German writer fresh off her latest win: the 2024 International Booker Prize for fiction.
She was recognized for her book Kairos, translated by Michael Hofmann, which is the story of a tangled love affair during the final years of East Germany's existence, a setting that has parallels with her own life. The novel was selected from 149 books by a jury chaired by Eleanor Wachtel — and follows in Erpenbeck's signature style of balancing the personal, political and historical.
Her earlier novel, The End of Days, won the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Netherlands' European Literature Award. Imagining multiple versions of the life and death of an unnamed protagonist, it spans the 20th century, set against historical forces, buffeted by politics and war. In honour of Erpenbeck's big win, Writers & Company is revisiting this 2015 conversation.
Writing about death
"The cut which is made by death always puts a new meaning on a life. When someone dies, you say 'he or she is a person like that' but if she or he dies a bit later or a bit earlier, he or she would be a completely different person. So this interested me that's there's not just a line of life, there's a more complex body of stories that could have happened. Death allows us to make a summary, to have a last look at all that happened. The interesting thing about looking at this absolute moment is that the same material makes different stories because of the way it shifts over the course of a life.
Death allows us to make a summary, to have a last look at all that happened.- Jenny Erpenbeck
"When we experience death, when we lose someone, we try to put a meaning to the death and to somehow find a structure that helps us to get some comfort, to understand what had happened. What we really like to have is a good reason to have lost someone. It helps us to stay in life. I think it's hard to survive a death of someone you love."
On why you can't ignore history in fiction
"The beginning of being interested in the connection of the private and historic life is with our own family history. There were so many persons fleeing or emigrating or just wandering around. When I write, I look at the private stories, but in the same moment, I am always looking at the other great historic changes in Germany and in Europe. If you look at the last hundred years, you have to face all of these changes. They didn't change just the political order, it was really moving people around, it was really like losing places, the cities have been bombed, the Communists had to emigrate, millions of people were killed. It's not possible not to look at it."
Becoming a writer
"Writing was a way to deal with a change and to compare the closed and the open system as I did it in the very first book. And to deal with a question of identity. So if the GDR would have stayed like this, probably I would just be the director of some Wagner opera now.
"Actually, I didn't want to become a writer. I always had been writing in a diary, but never ever short stories or something like that. There are so many writers in my family and I thought it's much nicer to become, for instance, an opera director because my father, my mother was a literary translator, my grandmother and grandfather were writers, so everybody was sitting at the desk and I thought, 'Oh, it must be a boring place.'
Actually, I didn't want to become a writer.- Jenny Erpenbeck
"I loved writing, but not fiction or novels, not at all. Just a diary for my own and very private expression. And it was more a way of thinking than of presenting myself to the world. It was like my very private thing and I never showed it to anyone. Then when my opera directing studies were finished and I got a diploma, but no job, I thought, 'Okay, working in a bakery is not a job for an opera director.' And so there was something had to be done. I was used to work. So I started to write the first book. And I put it in a drawer for three years.
"Then I started to be be an assistant director in Austria and three years passed and then I wrote another story because of being in love with someone. And I was a director by then myself, but it was like sharing the time. And from a certain moment on it was not really possible to share the time anymore because the writing took more and more time and needed time which was not interrupted by directing."
Jenny Erpenbeck's comments have been edited and condensed.
