“Kairos,” by prizewinning German playwright and author Jenny Erpenbeck, tells the story of a love affair set in East Germany right before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The story begins in 1986 when Katharina, a 19-year-old theater design student has an East Berlin version of a meet-cute with Hans, an admired novelist and radio commentator who is both married and more than 30 years her senior. While Katharina is drawn to this handsome writer by his intelligence and nicotine-drenched worldliness, Hans, no newcomer to infidelity, is attracted by her youth and intellectual openness. They dive into an affair that the book describes with precision, capturing the emotional convulsions agonizingly familiar to anyone who’s been caught in a relationship gone sour. At first, Katharina and Hans romp in the realm of magic. They frequent cafes, share inside jokes, and listen to music — lots of Bach and Schubert — as foreplay. They could hardly seem closer, though as they lie together after making love, Erpenbeck coolly delineates their differences. “It will never be like this again, thinks Hans. It will always be this way, thinks Katharina.” She is wrong. Their initial delight begins to fragment into spats and breakups and reconciliations. Beyond having a family, the jealousy-prone Hans has a cruel streak. He begins to punish Katharina for being young and making him love her. Meanwhile, her own awareness keeps growing, and though she still loves Hans, or thinks she does, she starts viewing him and the future in a different way. The gulf between them widens as the East German state starts to collapse, further shifting their power dynamic. Erpenbeck understands that great love stories must be about more than just love. It’s this wider sense of life that Erpenbeck offers in “Kairos,” which, in Michael Hofmann’s crystalline translation, pulses with her memories of East Berlin. The love affair becomes something of a metaphor for East Germany, which began in hopes for a radiant future and ended up in pettiness, accusation, punishment and failure. | 