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Home , Jenny Erpenbeck, Ruth Berghaus

Working Against Gravity The Many Lives of

Di Brandt

enny Erpenbeck has emerged as one of the most important writers of united , in league with such literary giants as Günter Grass and Christa JWolff. Like these famous predecessors and colleagues, she has managed to span cultural differences and contradictions in the contemporary cosmopolitan German and European scene and its intense, fraught history, with grace and ease, capturing a growing international audience with her darkly ironic humor, stylish prose, and sharp narrative turns to, at times, chilling affect.

Erpenbeck was born in East in 1967. She grew up in the experimental artistic milieu of postwar Berlin where she studied theatre at Humboldt University, and later, music theatre directing at the Hanns Eisler Music Conservatory, with theatre and director , one of the leading European theatre artists in the postwar era and artistic director of the 1971–1977. Another of her exceptional teachers was the East German playwright and director Heiner Müller, now considered Brecht’s successor. Later she had the good luck to apprentice art directing on set with the renowned filmmaker Werner Herzog. While the marked influence of these artists on her own work is evident, certainly in its expressionist and surrealist aspects, the radical ways she adapted their techniques and vision for her own purposes is equally recognizable.

Cats Have Nine Lives, Erpenbeck’s first play, premiered in 1997 in , , under her direction, the same year she also staged Schoënberg’s and Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle at Oper Graz. Her play opened at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin in 2003, becoming a runaway success and remaining in the repertoire for three years. Erpenbeck continued to write for the theatre and also wrote a libretto for the opera entitled Lot, by Italian composer Giorgio Battistelli, which debuted at the Staatsoper Hannover in 2016. The opera addresses the question of how people (Lot, his wife and his two daughters) manage to become refugees after being forced to leave their home, the city of Sodom.

92  PAJ 121 (2019), pp. 92–94. © 2019 Di Brandt doi:10.1162/PAJJ_a_00455

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj_a_00455 by guest on 25 September 2021 In the late 1990s, Erpenbeck began writing novellas and novels, which brought her great acclaim and a transatlantic audience, while also carrying on with a successful career directing opera. Her fiction is preoccupied with questions of identity in contexts of dislocation or the aftermath of devastation, as much of Europe experienced through the first half of the twentieth century. Over a period of the last dozen years, her novels have been appearing in English, including The Old Child and Other Stories (2005); The Book of Words (2007); Visitation (2010); and The End of Days (2014). The Guardian reviewer of the latter novel referred to her as “one of the most significant voices writing in Europe today.” The End of Days is reminiscent of Cats Have Nine Lives in that the main character lives and loves and fails and dies again and again, experiencing resurrection and another chance in each of its five chapters.

Jenny Erpenbeck has received numerous awards for her fiction, including the Prize, the Hans Fallada Prize, the Prize, the Italian Premio Strega, and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. She was given the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2017. Several of her novels have been translated into English by , the prize-winning translator of , Herman Hesse, and , and published by New Directions. The novels are now available in more than two-dozen languages. In 2017, Erpenbeck read her work at the 92nd Street Y in New York City.

Cats Have Nine Lives shows Erpenbeck’s strong interest in women’s lives and stories. This early play explores the power dynamics in women’s relationships with remarkable clarity. She shows originality and depth in her ability to locate these dynamics within a wide-angle intergenerational context. Listening for both deeply embedded historical vectors and the negative pull they exert on people’s interactions, desire what they may, the transformative possibilities of the new are always present, nonetheless. This long view opens the play to spiritual and cosmological dimensions that transcend the individual characters and their engagements, allowing for a slow transformational development over time that exhibits grace and greater understanding far beyond what is possible in the often disappointing and tragic outcomes of single lifetimes.

The author’s most recent novel is Go, Went, Gone (2017), in which a retired Ger- man classics professor finds his life intertwined in the daily struggles of refugees in contemporary Berlin. Reviewing the novel (a bestseller in Germany) in the New York Times, Claire Messud praised Erpenbeck’s “rigor, her crystalline human insight, her exhilaratingly synthetic imagination.” The question of how one can cope with becoming a stranger after having been forced to leave home is the core of Go, Went, Gone, a powerful critique of the European treatment of refugees. Here,

BRANDT / Working Against Gravity  93

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj_a_00455 by guest on 25 September 2021 Erpenbeck questions the notion of personal and ethnic identifications, and how one can survive deep cuts and losses in one’s identity without losing one’s soul.

DI BRANDT is a Canadian poet, author, and translator whose best-known poetry titles include questions i asked my mother; Agnes in the sky; Now You Care; Walking to Moácar, with French and Spanish translations by Charles Leblanc and Ari Belathar; and, most recently, Glitter & fall: Laozi’s Dao De Jing, Transinhalations. Her critical work includes the prize-winning anthology Wider Boundaries of Daring: The Modernist Impulse in Canadian Women’s Poetry, co-edited with Barbara Godard.

94  PAJ 121

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj_a_00455 by guest on 25 September 2021