67 pages • 2 hours read
Jenny Erpenbeck, Transl. Michael HofmannKairos
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 2, Chapters 1-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “Box 2”
Part 2, Chapter 1 Summary
Afraid that Hans will leave her, Katharina weeps over the grave of Ernst Busch before remembering that her father is supposed to visit. She searches for a phone to call her father and passes the old houses of communist artists who tried to define the culture of Socialist Germany but have now long since passed. She finds one house that is still occupied by a living artist, Theo Balden. She calls her father to cancel their meeting.
On her way to meet with Hans, Katharina has her hair cut off at a hairdresser. At a café bar, Hans scolds Katharina for putting their relationship at risk. He stresses the need to find out who she really is in order to save their relationship, which means that he will scrutinize every aspect of her life in Frankfurt. Katharina guiltily agrees to submit everything she has written down in Frankfurt for his investigation. That night, he lies awake next to Ingrid and realizes that Katharina’s infidelity was inevitable.
Part 2, Chapter 2 Summary
No longer able to trust anything Katharina tells him, Hans suspects that Katharina has been intimate with Vadim more than once. Katharina ends her internship and moves back to Berlin. When Hans accuses her of bourgeois hypocrisy, Katharina is unsure what else she is capable of and what that says about who she truly is.
Hans reads through Katharina’s letters from Frankfurt. He can’t interpret any expression of her love as anything other than a lie. He instructs Katharina to write a letter to Vadim to insult him and definitively end their sexual relationship. He forbids Katharina from writing any future letters by hand because he doesn’t want to look at her handwriting again. Katharina’s desire for Hans increases, but so do her fears that he will leave her. She desperately tries to regain his affection but fails to elicit the desired reaction.
Hans weeps when he learns that Katharina listened to some of their favorite music together with Vadim. He intended to pair some of the musical themes with sentences they had written to each other as a birthday gift. He thus forbids her from listening to them with him again. Hans recognizes, however, Katharina’s resolve to rescue their relationship. During his cross-examination, Hans learns that Katharina slept in Vadim’s apartment one other time in the past.
Hans decides to forego their correspondence altogether, abandoning it in favor of cassette tapes, which he will record for her and expect her to answer.
Part 2, Chapter 3 Summary
Katharina receives the first of Hans’s tapes in March. The tape consists of Hans speaking for one hour about her infidelity. He condemns her and declares their relationship over. He now considers her in opposition to him and indicates that he must be indifferent to her. Katharina takes occasional pauses to cry. Afterward, she types out her response.
Part 2, Chapter 4 Summary
Katharina and her father visit Dresden to attend an exhibition. Katharina’s father tries to reassure her that what happened with Vadim isn’t so bad, but Katharina insists on her devotion to Hans.
The next time Katharina meets Hans, Hans is in a better mood, which she suspects may be a performance. She is forbidden from telling him that she loves him. Katharina returns to her apartment and is terrified by its emptiness. She retreats from her apartment.
Hans’s ex-lover tells him of a dream predicting Hans’s imminent death. When Hans tells Katharina about the dream, he laughs at it. Katharina, on the other hand, wonders if having a child with Hans will tie them to one another.
Katharina applies for a job as a switchboard operator at the opera house, the Staatsoper. Hoping to regain Hans’s trust, she surrenders her desk key to Hans.
Erika tells Katharina about an abusive boyfriend she had shortly after her separation from Katharina’s father. Katharina doesn’t realize that she was present during this relationship, as she hadn’t noticed that anything was wrong with Erika. Erika explains that she isn’t happy with the way Katharina is being treated. Katharina disagrees, believing that Hans’s cross-examination will only strengthen the renewal of their relationship.
Part 2, Chapter 5 Summary
Katharina ensures that her reply to the first cassette is comprehensive, answering every part of Hans’s critique of her character.
Hans soon gives her the second cassette, in which he says that he must be careful about whom he trusts because he only has one life to live. He retorts against her reply that his continued relationship with Ingrid, as well as the act of abandoning her on the train platform, contributed to her actions. He accuses her of turning him into a person who doubts and a person who believes her. He does not think half a love can sustain their relationship. This sends her into a rage.
Part 2, Chapter 6 Summary
Katharina gets the job at the Staatsoper. Although she no longer gets to attend rehearsals as she did in her internship, she feels validated by her contribution to the theater scene.
Ingrid and Ludwig beg Hans to stay with their family. Katharina feels that Hans is the only person who truly knows her, even as she spends time apart from him with her friends and family. She submits her response to the second cassette. Hans feels a lump on his neck.
Katharina is accepted into art school. She shares the acceptance letter with Hans, who believes that her departure will repeat the conditions that led to her infidelity. Katharina is crestfallen with his response.
Toward the end of April, Hans and Ingrid agree to talk. Katharina goes to work and waits for Hans to return, but then she spots him and Ingrid at a bar. When Hans and Ingrid leave the bar, Katharina trails behind them and watches them return to their apartment. When it becomes clear that Hans won’t come down for her, Katharina leaves in tears.
Part 2, Chapter 7 Summary
In the third cassette, Hans criticizes Katharina’s indulgences, which he feels have ruined his sense of certainty. He asserts that their wedding was a sham to her, whereas for him it was completely sincere. Although he claims that their vision of a shared future has been destroyed, he also maintains that he wanted a child with her so that he wouldn’t be alone.
Once the tape has finished, Katharina writes a will indicating that she wants her corpse to be buried, not dismembered. She realizes, however, that dying would be the easy way to let herself off the hook with Hans. She decides to endure her guilt.
Part 2, Chapter 8 Summary
Whenever they walk around the city, Hans and Katharina avoid the routes that would lead them back to the sites of their first meeting. Given this and all the other affections that Hans has forbidden, Hans has ensured that all the memories of their early romance remain intact, albeit as specters of the past.
Hans and Katharina watch a film about the sculptor Werner Stötzer, who is a contemporary of Hans. They laugh over Hans’s anecdotes about him in the bar afterward. The evening is a joyful reprieve from the past few weeks. They discuss the need for truth and beauty to be intertwined in order for art to truly serve the working class without moving them to espouse bourgeois values. Hans considers taking her to see Stötzer’s reliefs, but this would mean going back to where they first met. This thought turns him serious again.
Hans is ambivalent about their impending trip to Moscow, which would have served as a honeymoon. He does not feel he has any control or agency over the present as he did before. He expresses this in a letter to Katharina.
Part 2, Chapter 9 Summary
Hans tries to cancel the planned trip to Moscow. In response to Hans’s recent tape, Katharina tried to defend herself by claiming she needed to live by something familiar in Frankfurt, an unfamiliar city. Hans retorts by claiming that Katharina is the one who has punished him, rather than the other way around.
Katharina helps Hans to pack for their trip anyway. Hans relents and writes down the list of clothes and toiletries that Katharina tells him to pack. On the second anniversary of their relationship, Katharina and Hans do not celebrate, but go to the money changer to acquire rubles. Despite his claim that he cannot commit to the trip, Hans meets Katharina at the bus stop that will take them to the airport.
Part 2, Chapters 1-9 Analysis
The second part of the novel deals with the repercussions of Katharina’s independence—and by extension, her infidelity—on her relationship with Hans. Although Hans has reacted to Katharina’s infidelity in a way that seems hypocritical given his own repeated infidelity toward Ingrid, it becomes clear that Hans is expressing a transgressive form of possessiveness that underlines his fear of losing power in his relationship with Katharina. This is partly why Katharina chooses to accept Hans’s behavior and see it as a tool for renewal and empowerment, as she thinks when speaking to her mother in Part 2, Chapter 4: “Doesn’t her mother understand that the greatest gift Hans can give isn’t forgiveness but the thorough inspection of the wreckage? That’s the only way anything new and lasting can begin, hopes Katharina” (184). She understands that just as much as he is responding to her guilt in the situation, he is also trying to navigate his own failures as a lover to assert the strength of the relationship in the aftermath.
Hans’s tactics with Katharina echo the novel’s meditations on the history of East Germany and the struggle to inculcate socialist values into the culture of the state. Just as Hans abandoned his father’s family and his nuclear family to pursue a relationship that values his role in it, the state breaks away from its old values, enlisting a sector of idealistic cultural workers like Hans to redefine its identity. Simultaneous to Hans’s cross-examination of Katharina’s infidelity is his reflection on the way the state has treated cultural workers like Wolf Biermann and Ernst Busch, with many of them being arrested, executed, or expatriated by the state. In Part 2, Chapter 1, Katharina wanders through a district of houses that were previously occupied by communist artists. All but one of them have died—some in prison or executed by the state—which helps explain the loss of strong socialist values by the time of Katharina’s generation. By tying together the personal and the political, Jenny Erpenbeck explores The Generational Divide Against the Backdrop of History. Katharina is growing up in a world in which capitalism is ascendant. Though she does not have to face the violent repression faced by artists of Hans’s generation, she will also never know the ideological fervor and urgency that members of that generation felt in their work.
In the same chapter, Hans expresses his need to understand who Katharina really is. This reflects Katharina’s self-doubt in the quest to determine her identity as an adult. Realizing the impact of her actions on Hans, she is shocked by herself, wondering whether she has always been capable of hurting someone she loved in that way. Her responses to the cassette tapes, which are implied by Hans’s reactions to them, are ways of testing the identity she thinks she has. Her responses can be characterized as defensive, trying to speak up to Hans’s own failings, while also stressing the circumstances that led Katharina to desire Vadim. Hans’s critiques of her replies are a direct manifestation of Identity and Power in the Context of Romantic Love as a theme. He dictates the letter she should write to Vadim, usurping her voice and forcing her to say things that she would never say. He asks whether she listened to music with him, and what music, and then says “So you really listened to our music with someone else. Defiled it. […] My music” (175). Because he has shared this music with her, he believes that it belongs to him and that she has no right to share it with anyone else. His ongoing interrogation of her is predicated on possession and control.
The cross-examination also stresses the importance of the archive in examining the past, itself a comment on the narrative frame presented in the Prologue and the intermezzo of the novel. Just as Hans is reviewing the letters and writings that will constitute the contents of the first box Katharina receives, Katharina is also reviewing the relics of the second box to make sense of who she and Hans were with the distanced perspective that time has given her. This pushes forward the materialist idea that the past is essential to understanding the present. Hans cannot have something to look forward to unless he doubts all his assumptions about Katharina and forces himself to understand her. The same can be said for Katharina after Hans has died.
