Flail and Thrash
/The End of Days
Has she been in the world all these many years just so two sentences—to give just one example—can confront each other within her, and the good one defeat the bad? Might everything that’s ever been said and that will be said in the world constitute a living whole, growing sometimes in one direction, sometimes in another, always balancing out in the end? So was this the end?
If there is a balance in Erpenbeck’s fiction, it isn’t immediate and doesn’t play out in a direct, eye-for-eye way. An unjust death remains unavenged, and certainly Erpenbeck’s characters have a way of dying swiftly, without warning. The balance encountered in Erpenbeck’s work resembles more an overall leveling of a grander scale.In Visitation, this idea of the whole is addressed through the history of a piece of land and, specifically, the house built upon this land in Schäferberg, on the sea. The narrative traces lives of those who live in and pass through the house and tracks the ways the property shifts hands. The inheritance of a mad daughter is taken back by her father, split, then sold. One part is sold to a coffee/tea importer, another to a Jewish family who later attempts to flee the Nazis. The third is sold to a German architect going through a divorce. Later, a writer and her husband lease the property after it’s been taken over by the state. The novel is bookended by a prologue that pans out to document the history of the landscape in geological time—the nature of the glaciers expanding and contracting, melting into rivers and refreezing, carving deep channels into the land—and by an epilogue documenting the dismantling of the house, so that in the end “the landscape, if ever so briefly, resembles itself once more.”In The End of Days, considering the truth of the whole means accounting for the course of one woman’s life, from infancy through old age. The woman, Frau Hoffman, is based to some extent on Erpenbeck’s grandmother, who became a writer of esteem later in life in the German Democratic Republic. This character’s life is extraordinary for the ninety-year epoch it spans—from her birth in Galicia in 1902, to Vienna in her youth, to the Soviet Union in the 1930s and ‘40s, and then returning to the GDR, specifically Berlin, living through fall of the Wall. Her life is extraordinary, too, for the violent, war-filled century she’s born into, for the upheaval in the cities and nations she moves between and for their shifting boundaries, later for the accolades she receives for her writing, and because within the course of the novel, she dies five times.After each death—except for the last—Erpenbeck resurrects her.This conjuring isn’t merely a cheap trick. Quite the opposite. The book is divided into five distinct books—each book depicts a portion of the arc of Frau Hoffman’s life (each segment ending in her death), as well as the circumstances leading to and following from this death each time: first as an infant, next a lovelorn teenager, then in a labor camp nearing her fortieth birthday, later as a mother and writer of distinction; ultimately, she dies in a nursing home on the day following her ninetieth birthday. The structure allows for the reader to examine this woman’s life in stages, life as a function of time measured like an
But if her grandmother had left for the Vienna Woods just an hour later to gather firewood; or if the young woman who was so eager to cast her life aside had not, after leaving her grandmother’s locked door to wander the city, taken a right turn from Babenberger Strasse onto Opernring, where she coincidentally encountered her own death in the form of a shabby young man; or if the fiancée of this shabby young man had not broken off their engagement until the next day; or if the shabby young man’s father hadn’t left his Mauser pistol in the unlocked drawer of his desk…
The list goes on for two pages. When the seemingly arbitrary circumstances surrounding a death are questioned in retrospect, it seems that one small adjustment could make all the difference. With one wish granted, Frau Hoffman’s life begins again.Time continues and a life continues or it doesn’t, but what’s obvious in this book is that time will not stop its forward momentum. The reader is reminded again and again that, “A day on which a life has come to an end is still far from being the end of days.” It’s an incantation. It’s a consolation: life is larger than any one person.The teenage Frau Hoffman considers “how many people walk past each other in a big city like this without even dreaming they might actually be related to one another.” Connections are lost with movement, with distance, with time, and especially and irretrievably, with death. Roles shift with age, as do the lines that distinguish them. At the book’s beginning, a daughter gives birth to a daughter, making her a mother and her own mother a grandmother. The father thinks of this daughter, who had come into the world “equipped with her own insides when she slipped out of her mother, emerging from her mother’s concavity with concavities of her own,” but at the point he considers this the daughter lies dead in the ground. The mother, too, in grieving is unable to grasp this slippage of life from herself, into death, into dirt: “thinking about the fact that a part of her is now lying in the ground and beginning to rot.” It’s incomprehensible when she is surrounded by air, alive. What is this line that divides us from one another? That divides life from death? Erpenbeck reveals that the boundaries are less clear than we believe them to be.In one version of this story, the family is torn asunder after the infant’s death. Both parents start over: the father leaves and travels to America and the mother moves back in with her mother and is pressured into prostitution. In this version she learns that her father was killed in a violent attack. The version where the infant lives plays out differently, we learn, when she’s a teenager. The family stays together, and the reason for the grandfather’s disappearance forever remains a dark secret.Blame the ruptures on the nature of a trauma and its sprawling effects: effects travel like aftershocks, leading outward in all directions. The teenage Frau Hoffman’s father is obsessed with a book on the great earthquake of 1897 in Styria, and with how the aftershocks traveled, where they could be felt, the damage incurred:
His wife doesn’t just ask why he brought Notes on Earthquakes in Styria home with him, why he spends evening after evening reading this book and copying out the most important passages; the thing is, it describes in meticulous detail exactly the sorts of processes he is now able to see with different eyes: How one and the same cause can have a thousand different effects on different regions and locations. It feels to him as if a top later is crumbling away all at once from everything he sees and encounters, a layer that once prevented him from comprehending, and finally he is able to recognize what lies below. Minds= landscape.
The last time it wasn’t yet a last time, that’s why he didn’t take note of it. Only yesterday did it become the last time. As if time, even when you grip it firmly in your hands, can still flail and thrash about and twist which way it will.
This depiction of time’s force and power of which we are all subjects evokes the Time Passes section in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Time Passes breaks from the human narrative to depict the passage of time in fast-forward: in a matter of pages, night passes to night, winter turns to summer and back, and again, and the Ramsays’ summer house falls into disrepair, “left like a shell on a sandhill to fill with dry salt grains now that life had left it.” In The End of Days there is the question of artifacts, of what remains after a death: a tissue in the pocket, a journal of one’s days, the coat buttons, the complete Goethe, with a knick in no. 9, gouged by a stone hurled during the attack that left the grandfather dead. Like the Ramsays’ house on the hill, or the landscape in Visitation, the complete Goethe outlasts them all, it even outlasts the family memory of owning the set, tucked away on a consignment shop shelf.In The End of Days, as in Visitation, Erpenbeck never loses awareness of how immensity of time overshadows the brevity of a human life. When Frau Hoffman dies in a Soviet labor camp, the passage describing her resting place imagines the possibility of renewal in a distant future. The living are bound to their corporality but in this instance death’s liberation brings hope:
Perhaps someday flowers will bloom even here, in the middle of the wasteland, perhaps even tulips, perhaps someday the presence of innumerable butterflies of any sort today, at minus sixty-three degrees Celsius. Now, like all the rest of the dead, she has all the time in the world to wait for the arrival of different times. For the living—to be sure—who have no other time at their disposal than the one in which they happen to possess a body—the only bit of color they’re able to behold right here at night, together with the dead, are these flames.
Forces of nature ravage and bring renewal, lives fall by the wayside while others are born and the cycle of human life continues. In Time Passes, Prue’s and Andrew’s untimely deaths are peppered in as mere parenthetical asides. But in The End of Days, time passes with attention to the human interval. Erpenbeck fathoms the human duration and how the effects of a death extend out within the entangled human web.And so, within this novel that investigates the nature of life by staging a series of deaths, a contradiction is embraced. In lesser hands, such repetition and focus on loss and mourning could become sentimental or overbearing. The constant encounter with death is harsh. It’s devastating. But it’s not untrue. By the third time the character died, I thought, Again?! And then a moment later it dawned on me, Of course she does, we all do in the end.
The brief American interlude at the beginning of The End of Days seems to reflect this opinion of American thinking. The freedom, individuality, and renewal that the husband seeks in America contradict the fundamental truths in the novel: that lives remain in some way inextricable from their origins and their surroundings. The father sets off on the ship Speranza—the name itself reflecting his desperate stab escaping sadness by starting over. Once he’s arrived at Ellis Island, he gathers: “Shame, then, is the price one pays for this life of freedom, or is this itself the freedom: that the shame no longer matters? Then America must really be Paradise.” It’s hard to read “paradise” here without derision—this man left his grieving wife, his homeland, desperate to cut ties, unable to look death in the face he seeks a new beginning.And what is it about darkness seems more trenchant than, say, the story of an American upstart? A group of friends were recently a discussing Russian author Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s Memories of the Future, whose stories were written in Moscow largely during the 1920s, in a landscape of poverty, oppression, and censorship. One raised the question of whether the contemporary American cultural landscape could foster such writing today. In other words: do we with our art school MFAs have anything important to say? I think the question reflects an anxiety that writers are often attempting to assuage—how to write something significant that speaks to our age. Gertrude Stein addressed the very matter of time’s influence in her “Composition as Explanation”:
The only thing that is different from one time to another is what is seen and what is seen depends upon how everybody is doing everything. This makes the thing we are looking at very different and this makes what those who describe it make of it, it makes a composition, it confuses, it shows, it is, it looks, it likes it as it is, and this makes what is seen as it is seen. Nothing changes from generation to generation except the thing seen and that makes a composition.
It’s not like Americans lack for social injustices to anchor their works—racism, debt, disparity of wealth, living with constant surveillance—but commercial fiction in the U.S. is less engaged with these on the whole, and more engaged with individual strength and silver linings, tales of overcoming and redemption.Whereas what binds the fiction by three great Eastern European female writers—Erpenbeck, Jelinek, and Muller—are their dark, dark centers. Taking into account where they are writing from, how could they not write without darkness? Jelinek’s fiction is more severe and misanthropic than Erpenbeck’s and Muller’s is more nightmarish. But the three write inextricably, and significantly, from their recent pasts—of fascism, of revolution, of the Holocaust, of oppression. It’s a reminder that the past isn’t as distant as it sometimes seems. And the present is labile, often shifting. Shifting away from the past, perhaps, but still connected to it.The boundaries that define thought, territories, ways of being and thinking, life and death obsess Erpenbeck, in part because she has lived through such significant change in her lifetime. In an essay recently published in The Paris Review, Erpenbeck writes of her great loss when the Berlin Wall fell. The Berlin she knew and loved as a child disappeared, as did the customs and ways of being that she had taken for granted as being permanent:
something, some wholeness, that I failed to learn as a child still eludes me now. Someone like my neighbor, who always bought his breakfast rolls across the street before the war—in a place that suddenly became the inaccessible West—no doubt had a very different experience. For him the Wall can only have been a subtraction.
Even though the borders of her landscape have shifted, they remain set in her mind. Erpenbeck is still crossing borders that no longer exist; they are the same borders she’s attempting to reconcile in her fiction, knowing the ways the present and hope for the future is taken for granted.____Anne K. Yoder’s fiction, essays, and criticism have been published in Fence, Bomb, and Tin House, among other publications. She is a staff writer for The Millions, co-editrix of Projecttile, a journal of nontraditional writing with a feminist bent, and a member of Meekling Press. She lives in Chicago, where she’s at work on a novel.
