Kairos - Jenny Erpenbeck illustration John Galsworthy

John Galsworthy

From city laneways to public parks and suburban shopping strips to abandoned car lots

and Scarlett Smulkowskip

wandering the streets of the city

She is currently a professor of global governance at the London School of Economics and Political Science

Kairos - Jenny Erpenbeck illustration John GalsworthyA love affair unfolds in East Berlin during the final years of the GDR, where time itself feels unstable, like a clock slipping its gears. Katharina, a young woman, becomes entangled with Hans, an older, married writer, and what begins as a charged, intellectual romance slowly tightens into something more possessive and unsettling. Their relationship mirrors the state around them, built on control, contradiction, and the quiet pressure of a system