Kairos: a time when conditions are right for the accomplishment of a crucial action : the opportune and decisive moment. – Merriam-Webster Dictionary

A video has been making the rounds in Germany for the last few days, depicting a group of wealthy young people at one of the country’s most exclusive bars engaged in laughing, singing and shouting racist, nationalistic and even fascist paroles, one of the revelers seemingly giving the Nazi Salute, filming themselves with glee and later posting the recordings. (I refuse to share, giving them more exposure…)

Most commentators remark on this as something that is not novel for the sentiment depicted. What is new is the pride accompanying a brazen openness about one’s ideology that was previously subterraneous in a country blanketed with shame over past sins. There is also a shift regarding who comes forward with explicit racism – once a province of beerhalls and most often associated with lower-education populations mainly in the East, it now seems to be fashionable among the elite. Think a five star drinking hole in the Hamptons, visited by Nepo-babies and their entourage. For Germans who were happy to assign Nazism to poor yokels, this is an unwelcome occasion to have to admit extremist sentiments in all sectors of society across the nation.

Of course, we see an inclination towards unapologetic flaunting of ideologies previously kept close to the chest and only revealed in like-minded company here in the U.S. as well. Just think of Justice Alito’s various flag demonstrations. Or that of evangelical House Speaker Johnson, who displays the Christian nationalist flag in front of his office, signaling his theocratic agenda. The Appeal to Heaven flag is part of the symbolism of the far-right New Apostolic Reformation, a movement fighting for a hegemonically Christian America.

Apparently it is a crucial moment in time, propitious for the public flaunting of racist and nationalistic agendas we thought banned for good. Or at least hoped. It signals a qualitative shift, in my opinion, fostered by increasing desire for and acceptance of authoritarianism colored by religious fervor, whether Christianity or Hinduism as just two example, internationally.

Crucial moment in time is also the title – Kairos – of Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel, translated by Michael Hofmann, that won this year’s international Booker Prize. You can read ubiquitous reviews here, here and here. Be warned, though. It is an incredibly sad, cruel, and bitter tale that is unfolding, both in descriptions of a May/December love affair, and a reckoning with German history set at the time of approaching reunification of East and West in the 1980s.

I was grateful to read the original language, having always thought the author has an incredible skill with words to both lure you and distance you at the same time to and from her preoccupation with time. Much of her work is concerned with how time takes things -as well as bodies – apart. Now she shifts to the concept of time as that moment that changes everything, and it dawns on you, slowly, eventually, that we willingly overlook the signs that point to that moment of change, until, basically, it will be too late. True for relationships as much as politics of nations.

By all reports, the English translation is formidable. I, on the other hand, have been struggling to find the right word for an adjective I associate with the author, who was by the way, trained as a director of opera: unerbittlich. In English it is translated as unrelenting, but the German word has more of sense of “without mercy” attached. Not just not giving in to pleas, but exhibiting a punitive streak. She mercilessly holds the mirror to German society preoccupied with “Vergangenheitsbewältigung,” a reckoning with the past, showing how often we still look away, or keep things at a surface, too fearful to look deeper. Exactly the situation that the reactions to the video alluded to above seem to reflect. The same pattern emerges for acknowledging signs of domestic violence and abuse. We ignore the creeping signals around us as long as we can, since it can’t be true what we don’t want to be true.

This might not be the moment in time to focus on entropy, Erpenbeck’s continual concern. Do we really want to burden ourselves with yet another downer, a hair-raising, deeply sad tale, when we are so emotionally vulnerable from all the trauma around us?

But if not now, when? Disentangling the lessons of history from wishful thinking will always be hard. Her writing is as brilliant a guide as any. Maybe this novel rises to prominence with the Booker Prize at exactly a propitious moment, before it is too late.

Kairos.

Music by John Dowland today.