Kairos

The history of East Germany plays a crucial role in driving the political ideas that underlie Hans and Katharina’s romance in Kairos. One of the results of World War II was the abolition of Nazi Germany, the occupation of whose territory was divided among four countries through the Potsdam Agreement—the Soviet Union, the United States, France, and the United Kingdom. From 1946 to 1949, the occupied zones reorganized according to their allegiances in the ensuing Cold War. The British, American, and French zones merged to establish the state of West Germany in May 1949. Five months later, the Soviet-occupied zone was reorganized into the German Democratic Republic, informally known as East Germany.

Inspired by the Soviet Union’s socialist ideals, East Germany effectively functioned as a communist state with a centrally planned economy. To meet the obligations of paying war reparations and reconstructing its devastated cities, the East German government focused on aggressively developing its industrial and agricultural assets with the intention of reaching high production targets and standardizing the prices of goods. While this enabled East German citizens to enjoy a higher standard of living compared to those in other Soviet nations, the economy struggled to compete against higher-quality imported goods from its Western counterpart. By comparison, West Germany was riding on the impact of its miraculous economic upturn, causing it to become one of the world’s largest economies at the time, while East Germany entered a period of economic stagnation. This led to widespread protests among the East German workforces, which the government had exerted considerable effort to prevent.

Throughout its lifespan, the East German government conducted several campaigns of suppression to minimize popular resistance. From 1950 to 1971, the state security force, the Stasi, arrested and tortured subjects to minimize dissent. This had an adverse effect on the government’s international image, especially as it became public knowledge that the Stasi utilized an extensive surveillance network to spy on and detain citizens. With the appointment of Erich Honecker as head-of-state in 1971, the Stasi shifted its methods, using personalized psychological abuse to operate in more subtle ways. This operational procedure, known as Zersetzung (German for “decomposition”), saw both Stasi officers and informal collaborators preemptively attacking the mental health of citizens whom they suspected had the potential for dissent. Hence, many of the Stasi’s targets during this time were members of the cultural sectors, including artists, musicians, and writers. The goal of this procedure was to undermine the citizens’ capability to criticize or oppose the East German government in an undetectable manner. The psychological bent of this method enabled the Stasi to disavow their actions.

The economic and political instability of East Germany, whose effects had fully crystalized at the end of the 1980s, made it increasingly difficult for socialism to compete with the allure of capitalism. This culminated in the 1989 collapse of the Berlin Wall, which is commonly cited as one of the key events that led to the end of the Cold War. East Germans fled en masse into West Germany. The country held its final general election in 1990, with the resulting government moving to reunify the two German states by the end of the same year.

In Kairos, the character of Hans represents the idealism with which East Germany was founded, resisting the fascist values of Nazi Germany in favor of the collectivist ideals of socialism. The end of the novel reveals that Hans is a Stasi collaborator, emphasizing the fraught pursuit of those ideals at the expense of the very people the new state intended to serve. He thus spends a significant portion of the novel reflecting on the East German endeavor, wondering whether the war against fascism ever ended or whether it continued in East Germany in other forms. The novel thus contains many references to the historical suppression of East Germany’s cultural sector. Ultimately, the novel builds toward the dissolution of East Germany, depicting events such as the westward exodus and the 1990 elections.