Kairos

Katharina enters a relationship with Hans because she believes that engaging with his sophistication will mark the “beginning of her life” (20). As a young person, she has does not yet have a fully developed sense of identity apart from her first relationships and the affectations of taste. To share the kind of music she likes with Hans is her way of affirming that taste through validation. Katharina learns more about herself through Hans, but she also risks allowing his identity to supplant hers.

The events of the novel challenge Katharina’s dynamic with Hans as the source of her self-knowledge. For instance, Katharina accepts Hans’s ideological influence as a positive effect of their relationship. When she visits her relatives in West Germany, that influence is challenged in a number of ways. Her relatives ask her how it feels to experience “freedom” for the first time, despite the fact that she has always felt free to do as she pleases, as evidenced by her pursuit of a relationship with an older, married man. The culture shock of her trip affects her relationship with Hans, emboldening her to embrace his validation more fully, indulging the start of their sadomasochistic sex games and taking his advice to pursue her craft as an artist. In turn, she feels more independent, a sign of her continuing maturation.

Katharina’s growing independence culminates in her affair with Vadim in Frankfurt. Her guilt exposes the affair to Hans, who exacts brutal forms of retribution in his cross-examination and recorded cassette tapes. Throughout this period of the relationship, Katharina feels extreme doubt toward her identity. She cannot reconcile her love for Hans with her capacity to hurt him. Over time, her doubt extends to Hans’s assessment of her. If he is willing to use everything she says against her, then there is no point trying to convince herself that she—or their relationship—for that matter is redeemable. Instead, the more reasonable alternative is to doubt the language and logic of Hans’s tapes, which continue to litigate her relationship with Vadim even if Katharina has long since broken away from him and her life in Frankfurt. In Part 2, Chapter 16, Katharina’s relationship with Rosa awakens her to the idea that no relationship can fully reveal either partner’s identity. By stressing that unknowable truths are a given in any relationship, Rosa suggests that identity will always exceed language’s capacity to capture it. Katharina thus starts to abandon her reliance on any romantic partner to grant or validate her identity. Since she cannot communicate her identity fully to anyone, no one else can be its arbiter.

The novel ends on Katharina’s conclusion that she and Hans wanted the same thing: to be fully known by the other. The discovery of Hans’s collaboration with the Stasi complicates that desire, however. The impossible wish to be fully known, and to fully know the other, is central to the experience of romantic love. It is also, the novel suggests, the reason for much of the heartbreak and pain that comes with romantic love, as it gives rise to surveillance, power competition, a fear of deception, and an obsession with the rooting out of secrets. In his fear that some part of Katharina remains unknown to him, Hans subjects her to the same tactics of power that the Stasi uses against those deemed enemies of the state. Meanwhile, his own involvement with the Stasi remains unknown to her until after his death. He demands full knowledge of her identity while withholding a central aspect of his own identity from her. In seeking to maintain his power, he denies himself the chance to be fully known. The novel’s conclusion suggests that this refusal of vulnerability is its own punishment.