Die Familie Spiro is the title of a ten-page, typewritten document that spent years sitting in the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet in my grandfather’s apartment outside Washington, DC. Last summer, I asked him about our family history, hoping to learn more about the Jewish diaspora and our place in it, perhaps tracing great-grandparents and aunts and uncles. He disappeared to another room and returned with several folders containing photographs, a metre-long family tree, and Die Familie Spiro. Written in German and dated 1963, it tracks the Spiro family’s movements from the Rhenish-Palatinate city of Speyer 1,000 years ago to northern Germany, western Poland, and east Jerusalem over the centuries. The typeset is bleary, umlauts are missing, and some words collapse together; my grandfather had been unable to understand it, and my own elementary-level German strained to predict what came next in sentences of jumbled characters. I took photographs of each page, returned home, and began the laborious process of translation. Amidst the foreign names and far-away dates, it was the mentions of things—spaces, buildings, belongings—that brought my ancestors close as I read and translated these records. The Schocken & Co. department store in Bremerhaven; the Memorbuch, a memorial text kept by a Melamed (Jewish teacher); the King David hotel in Jerusalem—each thing let me feel the ephemeral textures of a distant world.
I think of this while reading Things That Disappear, Jenny Erpenbeck’s recently translated collection of short autobiographical essays. Throughout, meaning latches itself onto objects and places, from lost pairs of socks and bread rolls to cemeteries, nurseries, and schoolyards. Each piece in the collection focuses on a particular object, place, or person that has vanished in some way. ‘Thing’ is a broad, elusive category for Erpenbeck: a thing may be a kitchen table or a thing may be more abstract, the ‘Middle of Nowhere’ or ‘The Simple Life’. In these essays, things are always and never specific, always cyclical and changing, always returning in new forms.
Born in East Berlin in 1967, Erpenbeck grew up a few streets over from the Berlin Wall, and the Wall looms over the collection. In these pieces, West Germany becomes something material that can be ‘stuffed into pockets’ and smuggled back East, whether in the form of a box of sulphur-headed matches from her uncle or a teddy bear sewn by her grandmother. Just as the protagonist of Erpenbeck’s novel Kairos pictures the West as ‘detergent, gummi bears, and coffee’, these essays render difference material and thingly. In one essay, Erpenbeck writes mournfully of Splitterbrötchen, a type of East Berlin bread roll that she remembers ‘without raisins, neither round nor square, but as if the baker has jumbled it up.’ They can now only be found in two bakeries in Berlin-Mitte; other bakers take a more ‘creative’ approach to the recipe. The seemingly trifling matter of bread assumes the gravity of lost history. The country in which Erpenbeck grew up no longer exists and nor does its Splitterbrötchen; a specific taste, and a specific part of her childhood, will always belong in the past.
The essay ‘Stolen Goods’ is a sardonic indictment of the West’s condescension to the East. Erpenbeck describes the moment the Wall falls, when ‘the border opens, and people from the West bend down from the tailgates of their trucks and give presents to their poor sisters and brothers from the East’. These ‘poor sisters’ bear little understanding of material belongings, with many goods previously available to them only on black markets or at state-run Intershops, where items like coffee and cigarettes had been coveted. They shove cheese and champagne callously into their bags; they ‘don’t know what gratitude is’, Erpenbeck writes mockingly, they ‘rob the West blind’. The vicissitudes of a people, to paraphrase Borges, are registered in their shifting relationships with possessions, totems of social change.
The book moves from one topic to the next in rapid succession. Within a few pages, our introduction to a subject is followed by its rapid dissolution—‘Friend’ gives way to ‘Stoves and Coal’, ‘Empty Spaces’ to ‘Splitterbrötchen.’ Once Erpenbeck turns her attention to a new thing, she is brief, for each must disappear to give way to the next.
If her essays are short, her sentences often linger, decelerate, before suddenly propelling:
The sky above Berlin was always very wide, precisely because it had its counterpart on the earth below: the vast, open spaces left by bombs in Berlin.
We begin by imagining a vast, sprawling Berlin sky, mirrored by the land beneath, before stopping at the colon, holding our breath only to discover there are bombs on the other side, bombs that disappeared large swathes of the city. The experience of reading Erpenbeck is akin to climbing a hill to a great height, pausing, and speeding down a valley, before beginning the next ascent anew. She often interrupts long, delectable sentences with abrupt brutalities, favouring a tense, unsteady syntax. In the piece ‘Words,’ she tells the story of a ‘fair maiden’ who, after donning ‘her finest robe’ and gathering her ‘diamond jewelry,’ meets a ‘bold knight’. Parentheticals inject concrete referents and break up the game of seduction:
The rider pulls at the reins of his horse, he stammers, he falters, his blood is boiling, the most beauteous of maidens chastely lowers her eyes to her bodice, he springs from his horse, leads the noble animal aside by the reins (bicycles may not be parked in the foyer), then approaches his lady.
Material reality takes hold and bruises the fantasy of the tale while it’s being told. This is not a tale with a happy ending; the ‘knight’ grows ‘contemptuous’, soon calling the ‘maiden’ a ‘whore,’ before the latter ultimately casts ‘the whole wicked man… her chastity, her robe, and a few other things she no longer remembers into the trash.’ Erpenbeck thus ends the piece with the un-remembered and discarded, calling into question the interplay between those memories and belongings we hold dear and those we let go.
The collection pays close attention to what it means when we get rid of things, when things become waste. Erpenbeck recalls a time when East Berliners desperately collected and held onto things and questions the perceived uselessness of rubbish. In ‘Bulky Trash’, she describes how once an unwanted object, such as an old wardrobe or a rusted bicycle, is placed at a disposal site, the Berlin Sanitation Department takes possession and ‘devours it’. As soon as objects have been relinquished they ‘are henceforth referred to only by the material they’re made of.’ The wardrobe is now no longer a wardrobe but wood, the bicycle no longer a bicycle but metal. Possession or non-possession changes a thing’s category, its meaning. But the wardrobe, Erpenbeck points out, doesn’t suddenly cease to exist; in our minds, our old wardrobe is still our old wardrobe. Our memories function as almost holy containers: if it’s true that the wardrobe is removed and shredded up by the Sanitation Department, perhaps it’s also true that it ‘flies up to heaven, as souls are said to do.’
In these essays, disappearance often makes way for a new kind of presence. The pieces dwell on silences, whether the long wordless periods shared with friends far apart or the silences in families, like those that punctuate the seemingly random returns of absentee fathers in ‘Men’. Lives are shaped by absences, by vanishings. ‘Disappearance is surely no less powerful than love,’ Erpenbeck writes; ‘but it remains astonishing that thin air can sometimes have just as much weight as something that is really there’. Nothing can truly disappear if it is remembered, she suggests, but emptiness is an active force, demanding to be fed with memories:
Things disappear when they are deprived of their means of existence, as if they, too, have a hunger that must be satisfied.
In the empty space left behind, things can also come back, changed. When Erpenbeck writes of visiting Warsaw, she stays in a ‘nine-storey hotel’ built where the Warsaw Ghetto once stood; the indelible historical memory of this site, where over 400,000 Jews were imprisoned and starved, pervades the reconstructed building.
Change demands our attention, and every time Erpenbeck travels or moves from one apartment to the next, she loses something. In ‘Things’, she remarks that, despite the ‘sacrifice’ she seems to make each time she leaves a place, her total accumulation of possessions only grows in sum over time. When she befriends and invites over a Russian woman who has come to Germany with her four children, Erpenbeck is stunned by the woman’s excitement at the buildup of objects around her apartment. The Russian woman strides around Erpenbeck’s space, declaring, ‘How lovely!’, overcome with joy; how lovely to have books, to have a piano. When the woman and her family fled Russia, many possessions had to be left behind. Rather than leaving their things to sit and rot, the family ‘made a big bonfire’ and ‘burned it all.’ In remembering the burning, the woman revisits the history of each object, and the act of disappearing their things becomes a moment of pain and togetherness, of collective reminiscence over endings and beginnings.
Translating Die Familie Spiro, my own family record, transformed it into a new thing, no longer disappeared. The memories and objects it brought forth gave me a window into the lives of relatives I’d never known existed, from an ancestor in Poznań, Poland in the eighteenth century to great-great-grandparents, aunts and uncles who fled Nazi Germany to England, Colombia, New Zealand, and Israel. The signoff, though, returned me to a state of mystery: there is only a date, November 1963, and an illegible signature or perhaps a pair of initials. The author—maybe a distant cousin, my grandfather suggested—has seemingly vanished from record and recollection.
Erpenbeck’s final essay protests a more conceptual vanishing—or death—of the author. It consists of a single partial sentence, cut off by ellipses: ‘Surely you’ve also heard the theory that the author is disap…’. This ironic gesture, the disappearance of the word ‘disappear’, points us back to the author’s presence, to the relationship we’ve shared with Erpenbeck through her stories of things and their vanishings, even of her own vanishing. Writers disappear, allowing you to read, for a time, unaware that they have painstakingly selected each and every word for your eyes. But they may suddenly reappear, as if out of the blue, with declarations of their own fading away. Erpenbeck ends this extraordinary collection by calling attention to herself, the writer of this thing we are reading, always there—even if only in memo…