Kairos Time: Fortune, History, & the Legacy of the German Democratic Republic.
Part II of II. Contains Spoilers and Sexual Content.
Katharina is sitting in her country digs watching television with her country landlady and two other country biddies. […] Upstairs in her room, Katharina opens her little book and writes: You gave me the loveliest goodbye kiss today, on a little side path in the wood, with the wind blowing.
Later, she kills the three women in a basement. It’s all the fault of the little silvery wood louse who lives down there. Which is also to blame for the fact that she eats raw meat. Investigations ensue. Someone brings along her bag, which contains two towels and copy paper, on which some writing can be deciphered. She wrote about blood and about murder. Proof enough of her guilt. The trial, shadowy affair, unclear memories of the white cadavers in the basement. And no one knows that she still hasn’t managed to get rid of the little beast (236-237).
“Bloody Murderer” by Cursive
Has Katharina committed mass murder? What is happening?
Psychical Fracturing & Reintegration: Katharina’s Death & Rebirth.
In Part I, I tried to call attention to the rich mythopoetics of Kairos. In Part II, I want to continue the mythopoetical and Jungian analysis and add a political analysis as well.
Kairos portrays a doomed, failed romance. At the beginning of the novel, the young Katharina is doing perfectly fine; in the course of her relationship with Hans, she completely unravels and loses herself. A short recap: Han is married and much older, and Katharina embarks on an intense and serious affair with him, in which he intimates that he wants to have a baby and a future with her while simultaneously doing nothing to end his marriage and commit to her fully. Katharina leaves East Berlin for Frankfurt an der Oder for a theatre set design internship, where she ends up sleeping with her co-worker Vadim. Hans becomes increasingly paranoid and consumed by jealousy even before she cheats on him, and when he learns of her infidelity, he opens a Stasi-style investigation where he demands that she submit a detailed record of her daily activities to him, relinquish her diaries, consent to a thorough inspection of her belongings, and listen to lengthy, psychologically abusive audio tapes that he records daily in which Hans relentlessly harangues her, insults her, and catalogues her many deficiencies (he calls her “soulless” at one point). He also alternates between giving and withholding affection, and he intensifies her beatings during BDSM sex (177).
So, while Part I of Kairos opens with the meet-cute of Hans and Katharina, Part II opens with Katharina in another underworld (See my first essay on the underworlds of Kairos for more on this theme): a cemetery housing some of the GDR’s deceased great Communist artists and thinkers who had “survived the concentration camps, the Stalinist purges, the detention camps, the War, and exile” (167). She goes to this “underworld” (168) because she wants to die and join them, but is not granted access to the world of the dead. As Hans turns the screws on her, Katharina calls herself a monster and expresses a wish for suicide (172). When Hans leaves her at the train station at Frankfurt an der Oder, she cries in the bathroom and imagines Hans with her (138), holding his imaginary face while conversing with him (138). Then she takes “invisible Hans” to the film Valentin and Valentina, where invisible Hans holds her hand (139-140). After listening to one of Hans’s tapes, Katharina destroys her room and mutilates herself (185-186).
By the time Katharina joins the “old biddies” on the collective rural farm during her art program, Katharina has become fractured and disturbed. To me, this murder scene is completely imaginary and represents the psychological (not literal) return of the repressed – all of Katharina’s shadow (repressed because of Hans) and inner torment psychologically overwhelming her. Katharina goes to Rome and cheats on Hans again. His suspicions confirmed, they break up upon her arrival (first parting). If we stay with the repressed Mother Goddess theme, we should expect that for Katharina to break the cycle with Hans, she needs to move through a different cycle: the infinite spiral / cycle / ouroboros of the divine feminine in birth, death, and rebirth. She prepares her body for this cyclic transformation before her psyche: “She doesn’t want anyone to touch her. Ever again. No one ever. […] She closes her eyes, her body shuts down. She is virginal again” (277). She undergoes a period of celibacy (probably a good idea anyway), and then she ovulates and experiences a primal lust. She has sex with another friend, Robert (279), and gets pregnant. Katharina gets back together with Hans and tells him that the baby is his (281). Then she miscarries, and Hans accuses her of not wanting the baby (281) and of becoming the infanticidal mother of his shadow fear: “She has in her hand an article that he gave her for their second farewell: Mother buries baby alive” (283).
As I wrote in my first essay, Hans unconsciously fears the divine feminine because of its bloodthirsty, murderous forms or emanations (think: Lilith the baby-killer and succubus / night-demoness), and he is projecting onto Katharina. Birth and death have come cyclically for her. Finally, Katharina travels to Egypt and incubates – has a visionary dream in a sacred space for curative or prophetic purposes – “between the paws of the sphinx” (283-286). Through this incubation episode, she cures her soul-sickness called Hans, parts from him for the third time, and transforms into a self-possessed individual. She has finally escaped the labyrinth, the minotaur’s prison, the cave as matrix. Through this healing modality, she resumes the path of individuation. Three is a magical number. Why three partings? (I have theories, but I’d love to hear others).
This is no heroine’s journey, however. Katharina is weak and dependent on Hans throughout the novel. Instead of initiating him into her sacred mysteries and realizing her archetypal potential as Ariadne, she allows him to initiate her into his order, with him as godhead and supreme dictator. Katharina never withdraws her consent to his domination or refuses him, becoming the proverbial boiling frog of nightmares anticipating the next wave of totalitarianism. One of the functions of the text, then, is as a cautionary tale against this kind of subservient submission to authority. Carl Jung believed that the individuation process produces individuals who are less vulnerable to totalitarian takeover.
“Introduction to Carl Jung: Individuation, the Persona, the Shadow, and the Self” by Academy of Ideas
Academy of Ideas states,
The individuation process, which culminates in an identification with the Self is, according to Jung, crucial for the development of a healthy, functioning personality, as well as the expression of the unique potential that exists within each of us. But along with these personal benefits, Jung thought the process of individuation was essential for the well-being of society. Jung believed that conformist societies, composed mainly of people who over-identify with their persona, are easy prey for the rise of oppressive governments. Therefore, it is essential for any lasting positive societal change that increasing numbers of people, assisted by the individuation process, come to the realization that there is more to their being than the social role dictated by their persona. A society increasingly composed of individuated individuals would not, according to Jung, succumb as easily to the rise of oppressive governments.
“Clockwork” by Subtronics
Hans: Janus-Faced Minotaur, Tortured Dictator.
I want to return to Hans and his significance for the novel. He’s a monster and a symbol of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), and while his cruelty towards Katharina is inexcusable, it is nonetheless explainable. Understanding it requires excavating his past.
Hans tells Katharina that he was in the Hitler Jugend (89). The Nazis used the Hitlerjugend as child soldiers. From the “Military use of children in World War II” Wikipedia page:
Hitler Youth (Hitlerjugend) was established as an organization in Nazi Germany that physically trained youth and indoctrinated them with Nazi ideology to the point of fanaticism. […] Huge numbers of underage males were removed from school in early 1945, and sent on what were essentially suicide missions.[3] Hitler Youth activities often included learning to throw grenades and dig trenches, bayonet drills and escaping under barbed wire under pistol fire; the boys were encouraged to find these activities exhilarating and exciting.[4] The Hitler Youth was essentially an army of fit, young Germans that Hitler had created, trained to fight for their country. They had the "choice" either to follow Nazi party orders or to face trial with the possibility of execution.[4]
Hans alludes to the fact that he was lucky to avoid the fate of a child soldier: “If Hans had been two years older, he would have been used in ack-ack defense” (95). When he’s eighteen, politically conscious and “rebellious” (147), Hans rejects what he perceives as the amnesia and avoidance of responsibility in West Germany and, in remembrance of the war victims, moves to East Berlin (147), a place whose ethos is built on Communist anti-Fascism: “Later, as a pale youth, Hans had decided in favor of that part of Germany that had Anti-Fascism written on its read banners. The dead meant something to him. It was their price that had driven his hopes upwards, into the incalculable” (149). The text also abounds with references to the anti-Fascists in the Spanish Civil War because the East Germans identify and feel a great affinity with the Spanish Resistance. Interestingly, this article argues that while East Germany sincerely denazified after the war, West Germany failed in its obligation to do so.
Anti-fascism forms the core of Hans’s identity, and after the trauma of seeing corpses piled up (90), his singular goal, his primary motivation – and justification – for working for the East German secret police called the Stasi is to militate against the resurgence of fascism and Nazism. The novel shows that the resurrection of Nazism is a legitimate fear:
Katharina was so beside herself following the punk concert in the Zion Church. Neo-Nazis had stormed the church, armed with iron bars and bicycle chains. Jews out. Sieg Heil. Katharina’s friend Sibylle hid under the altar, Katharina herself slipped out through a vestry door. […] The police stood around outside but didn’t get involved, Katharina said. Let them smash each other’s heads in. Continuity leads to destruction (149).
Continuity leads to destruction. I’m not sure what this phrase means in this passage (what do you think?), but I read it as Hans interjecting his own beliefs that if Germany does nothing and continues on the same post-war path that it took pre-war, the same problems of war and fascism will recur. East Germany was forged for legitimate reasons. Liberal democracies in Europe decimated themselves in two apocalyptic world wars, leaving ruin, waste, and unthinkable mass death in their wake. They fell to fascism and Nazism. Capitalism produces its attendant horrors as well – slavery, suffering, alienation, dispossession, endless war, poverty, indignity, punishment of the poor. Creating a new path invulnerable to fascism means envisioning and executing a different world, an elsewhere and otherwise. Hans dreamed and longed for a different social reality and wanted to create a utopian state in East Germany.
By the time he dates Katharina, that dream has already turned into a nightmare, effecting his disillusionment. He wrestles with the question of the GDR’s failure to live up to its hopes and possibilities, tortured by it:
What if what he’d been given by way of an answer for forty years was no answer and would never be an answer, then would the sacrifices have proved to be in vain after forty years? And whose job is it to go down in to the underworld and tell the dead that they died for nothing? Can you bury what once was? No (149).
Finally he realizes that the GDR has become another abusive state, its promises of social justice, equality, and universal dignity hollow and deceitful, and he comes to terms with his role in its abuses:
To be arrested or to carry out arrests and believe in the cause, to be beaten or to beat and believe in the cause, to be betrayed or to betray and believe in the cause. What cause would ever again be great enough to unite victims and murderers in one heartbeat? That it would make victims out of murderers and murderers out of victims, until no one could tell anymore which he was? Arrest and be arrested, beat and be beaten, betray and be betrayed, till hope, selflessness, sorrow, shame, guilt, and fear all make one indissoluble whole (204).
In light of all this, the scene where Hans and Katharina notice the minotaur’s acquiescence to death (and possible suicide) in the Picasso drawing takes on new significance. Pablo Picasso had a decades-long fascination and identification with the minotaur, regarding him as a symbol of the unconscious, irrationality, and repressed impulses, especially unbridled lust and violence. Picasso also conjured the minotaur as a symbol of Spanish anti-Fascist resistance. Like Picasso, Hans is an artist and womanizer. Because Hans is ruled by his passions, and because he also places anti-fascism at the core of his identity, Kairos identifies him with the minotaur (51-53). The minotaur’s character here resembles the character of the golem, a legendary clay warrior created by the Jews as their champion, to defend them from violence, but whose programming makes him attack not only his foes but also his own people; thus, the golem is ungovernable, incapable of the self-control necessary to know when to cease fighting. When Hans and Katharina observe that the minotaur in Picasso’s drawing has acquiesced to death (52), his surrender foreshadows Hans’s disillusionment with the GDR, as well as the GDR’s imminent collapse. If the minotaur represents Hans, who represents the GDR, the minotaur’s tragic suicide signifies self-sacrifice: since he cannot control his passions to fight valiantly for the cause of anti-Fascism and may indeed turn his violent impulses against his own people, bringing them harm rather than safety, he removes the danger.
According to the government file on Hans, his official collaboration ended on “May 13, 1988” (293); the Berlin Wall fell on November 9, 1989, and German reunification occurred on October 3, 1990. Surrender also suggests the minotaur’s disillusionment with the political cause of anti-Fascist Communism because of its own political terrors. Unlike the minotaur in the drawing, who obtains self-knowledge and commits self-sacrifice, Hans never confronts his own shadow. Hans never ends his enslavement to his evil shadow traits.
“Tear Me Down” – Hedwig and the Angry Inch
(sorry, I couldn’t find a better-quality video)
(better audio quality, but no video)
A (Complicated) Tale of Two Berlins.
When Katharina and Hans go to the Pergamon Altar (91-93, which I analyze in Part I), the language of that series of passages is remarkably similar to the passage when Katharina descends into the “underworld” (80) of the sex shop in West Berlin, which is a visual barrage of dismembered sex organs in various sexual acts. The effect is incredibly repulsive and difficult to read. The juxtaposition is deliberate, to prompt the reader to notice the difference between West Berlin and East Berlin values. Moreover, when Katharina visits in West Berlin, she is shocked to witness begging for the first time, and Uncle Manfred calls the beggars “lazy” addicts (74). Uncle Manfred asks Katharina how she enjoys her freedom in West Germany: the freedoms of shopping, speech, and museum visits (78), and Katharina responds that the cathedral is beautiful (78), indicating that she finds her relatives’ West Berlin lifestyle superficial and commodity-oriented. At one point in the novel, she expresses anxiety and horror over the idea of being transformed into a consumer in accordance with Western German values.
The novel seems to be making an intervention into Western discourses about East Germany, that it was monolithically and reductively oppressive for everyone who lived there. On the contrary, experiences are varied and nuanced, and the narratives have become grossly oversimplified. This brings us to the title of the book: kairos. In ancient Greece, Caerus or Kairos was the god of opportunity, who personified the sense of things happening at the right time. In the ancient Greek conception, there were two ways of categorizing time, quantitative time called chronos and qualitative time called kairos. Kairos is a way of evaluating the quality of the time. What this a good time or a bad time? An auspicious time or an inauspicious time? On the one hand, Katharina seems not to regret meeting Hans, and the text refers to their “good fortune” frequently. Katharina would not be who she is without being born in the place and time she was and without meeting Hans. Maybe the text is asking us to think more broadly about the time of the GDR and evaluate its quality. What is its legacy? What does it have to teach us? I have the sense that the novel is trying to concretize major philosophical and political themes from the book so that we don’t lose the GDR to the mists of time as simply another failed communist experiment; it was much more than that. There’s also a line in the text where Katharina recalls learning a communist slogan or principle about the transformation of quantity into quality (196), which sounds alchemical. It turns out to be a principle of dialectical materialism elucidated by Marx and Engels. The concept surfaces a few times, especially to espouse the notion that complete social transformation can only happen after a few generations (like the Israelites between Egypt and Canaan, wandering in the desert for forty years – the enslaved generation had to die out), so there’s this sense that the communist nations are waiting for the “good times” to come, but those times never quite arrive. I think that’s why the book is named Kairos, ultimately, to signify the awaited good times that failed to materialize.
Glossary of Jungian Psychology Terms.
psyche: both mind and soul, has three components: consciousness, personal unconscious, and collective unconscious
consciousness: our field of awareness
unconscious: bipartite/dual; the part of the psyche that is subconscious – subliminal, or below the threshold of conscious perception, and includes everything we repress, disregard, and banish from consciousness; comprised of the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious
personal unconscious: all of our repressed experiences, desires, and perceptions; the things we banish from consciousness in our own personal lives
collective unconscious: a deeper level of the unconscious that contains repressed universal or cultural traits and instincts, expressed in dreams, myths, and visionary art; cannot be perceived directly; can only be apprehended indirectly through archetypes
archetypes are expressions of the collective unconscious – evolved cognitive that provide a mental map or schema of the unconscious traits that we are repressing. Archetypes are culturally or universally shared, as we are products of millennia of biological, psychological, and collective/social evolution. Archetypes manifest through symbols, images, and other phenomena. They are symbolic tropes that unconsciously influence our thoughts, feelings, and behavior. Myths are one symbolic language for expressing archetypal truths.
For Jung, the goal was. Jung called the process of self-development and maturation individuation: self-actualization or self-realization through maturation – the individual reaching his highest potential and developing towards ever-greater heights of psychical health, wholeness, and fulfillment; achieved through self-knowledge, meaning that in order for the individual to mature, he must confront the shadow and bring it to light
shadow: the hidden (unconscious, repressed) parts of the individual’s psyche, stored in the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious; comprised of dark shadow and golden shadow
dark shadow: everything inside us that’s dangerous, evil, and destructive which needs to be transformed, sublimated, or healed through confrontation
golden shadow: untapped potentials and creative energies; all the good and generative parts of ourselves that we haven’t discovered yet, that remain to be actualized and integrated
shadow work: bringing the shadow to light; an integral part of the process of individuation in which individual must bring his unconscious desires and predispositions into the conscious realm in order to appropriately assimilate, channel, and sublimate them; the shadow can be accessed in a variety of ways, and the parts of the shadow emanating from the collective unconscious can only be apprehended indirectly through symbolic systems – myths, dreams, spiritual and mystical practices, awareness of syncronicities, the arts, and divination
persona: the social mask that a person wears in conformity with social expectations and situations; is not problematic unless the person conflates the mask with the Self and allows it to stifle growth, change, authenticity, and soulfulness
projection: the act of attributing negative traits onto others and scapegoating them resulting from the individual’s failure to confront his own shadow and integrate it safely, healthily, and morally into his personality
Self: the totality of one’s psyche when one is on the path to self-realization through individuation
Some Sources for Basic Jungian Theory
“Introduction to Carl Jung: The Psyche, Archetypes, and the Collective Unconscious” by Academy of Ideas
“Carl Jung, the Shadow, and the Dangers of Psychological Projection” by Academy of Ideas
“Dreams and the Hidden Realm of the Soul with James Hillman and Carl Jung” by Third Eye Drops
On one level, the central relationship in Kairos is a political allegory for what it's like to live under a political regime that becomes increasingly paranoid and oppressive but retains a promise of utopian idealism.
On another level, it's about tainted love. Our objet d'amour may be art made by a controversial artist, a place ruined by violence, or a person who has both loved and harmed us. What is the balance of chiaroscuro, the interplay of light and dark? When does the scale tip into redemption for this object of our affection, and when into denunciation and rejection? When do we stay, and when leave?
Did anyone else have this personal kind of response to Kairos -- one that allows us to do a moral and aesthetic accounting of our more shameful and problematic loves, and how we assess them or think about them in all their complexity? We may find things beautiful that others call ugly, and vice versa.
I'm thinking about a conversation I had with another Booker Club member about Berlin in regards to Wagner's Ring Cycle, which took me to the film Wagner and Me by Stephen Fry. And I was thinking about how I need Fry to frame Wagner for me, because he understands how fraught his cultural legacy is for some -- that Fry's profound enthusiasm / ecstatic love for Wagner is stained by history, and that it's part of the human experience to love tarnished things richly and to live in the fallen place where purity is no longer possible.
I wanted to preserve this extended quote from The Labyrinth by Amanda Lohrey:
"One night, lying in bed, I am woken by the loud bang of a bird flying against my window, and a word enters my sight, as if retrieved from a bricked-up wall in my tunnel of memory. Kairos. A word from my small portion of undergraduate Greek, a word I had stored away: meaning not time, but timeliness. By this the Greeks meant the right or opportune moment for doing, a moment that cannot be scheduled, as it is poised unpredictably between beginnings and ends. It does not submit to chronos, which is mere arithmetic: a minute, an hour, a day, a decade, the work of timekeepers. Kairos exists as a potential, a mode of improvisation, of responding to a sudden opening in the fabric of time. No theory can enable or plan for it. Abandon the fixed plan, wait for the moment to arrive, and then act. At nineteen I had been struck by this, had decided that this was how I would live my life. It seemed then to be purely a matter of resolve; instead, it requires an inhuman patience. And faith.
"So this moment may never arrive, and if it arrives it may never achieve completion. Still, the potential is always there, but first you must find the place. In this place the past will be dead and the future a mirage. And when the opening appears it must be passed through without hesitation. The Greeks compared it to the moment in weaving when the shuttle can be passed through the threads on the loom, the instant when a gap opens in the warp of the cloth and the weaver must draw the yarn through to make the pattern. But does this space ever exist other than in our dreams?"