These selections have been excerpted from Kurt Beals’s translation of Things That Disappear by Jenny Erpenbeck, to be published by New Directions in fall 2025. Copyright © 2009 by Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch GmbH & Co. English translation copyright © 2025 by Kurt Beals. All rights reserved.
●
BULKY TRASH
As soon as the owner of an old wardrobe/television/bicycle pushes it off the ramp, as soon as it’s “in there,” as they say at the Berlin Sanitation Department’s waste disposal sites, it no longer belongs to him; instead, it becomes the property of the department. The Berlin Sanitation Department takes possession of the item for one sole purpose: to remove it from the city and destroy it appropriately. The moment private owners relinquish their ownership, the items are henceforth referred to only by the material they’re made of. Wood to wood, metal to metal, and so on—these are the names the city uses when it snatches up the old stuff, devours it, along with any function and use value it might still have, along with any surplus value and history it might have had, because only when the old thing has completely disappeared does a resident of this city, a consumer in the marketplace, buy something new.
If that bike over there hadn’t already been labeled “metal,” it would certainly still be rideable. But I tell you, that don’t even cross our minds, there’d be a line all the way from here to Kreuzberg, say the men who lock the containers and cart them away. In the old days, people used to put their old wardrobes out on the street, and they’d always be gone in no more than a night. There were lines due to shortages during the war, and even later in the East, but that’s where they’re supposed to stay: in history books, in black-and-white photos, in eyewitness accounts. In the West, there were always bananas, and that’s how it’s supposed to stay. We’re just tryin’ to do our job, too, the men say. And if we had a bunch of folks crawlin’ around here—trash pickers, I call ’em—there wouldn’t be any room for the folks who just wanna throw stuff away. Not even the men themselves are allowed to pick out anything that’s “in there.” What if, say, you end up with a one-of-a-kind Biedermeier wardrobe? Nope, not even then. So if I were to climb into the dumpster (crawl around in the trash), I’d be able to touch an abandoned piece of furniture like that, but in legal terms, it still would have disappeared completely? Yup. I wouldn’t even be allowed to buy the wardrobe from you? Nope. Well, I mean, on a personal level you might, human error, you know, that’s been known to happen. But it ain’t allowed.
What I don’t ask, but would still like to know, is whether the beauty of a wardrobe like that emerges again after it’s been chopped to pieces and flies up to heaven, as souls are said to do, and whether the wood itself would be a few grams lighter than before.
People from faraway lands often sit in front of the waste disposal sites, waiting to take televisions, fridges, and speakers before they’re thrown away, before they disappear. Unfortunately, I haven’t found out yet whether there’s even a word for Biedermeier in their languages, and if so, what it is. Now my last hope lies in so-called human error.
DISASSEMBLY
We are only guests on earth, we’ve known that for a long time, but even before we vacate the premises altogether, we are guests time and again, as if for a trial run: in other people’s apartments, summer houses, hotels. Before we vacate the premises altogether and all our baggage inevitably falls away, we have the opportunity to transport our earthly belongings to this place or that, as we please. At some point, when the time is up, a woman may come, or a man, or an owner, or a landlord, and tell us to leave. It’s also possible for us to leave before we’re asked to. Or to leave reluctantly, and belatedly. Finally, it’s possible for us to be gone before anyone has even noticed that we were there to begin with, so that our disappearance goes entirely unnoticed. But wherever we stay, for however short or long a time, we always, at a minimum, open a door, go inside, breathe, perhaps sit on a chair, eat from plates, drink from glasses, sleep in beds, we may stock up on essentials, play games, browse through books, move the rug a bit when we go out, turn the key only once when we lock up instead of twice as the owner of the house usually does. We bring some things with us, we handle others, move them just a bit, or our smell clings to them, but in any case, when we disappear, our things are supposed to disappear as well, the mark we’ve made is supposed to be taken back and disappear along with us, then we have to drag all our belongings from the apartments, the houses, the rooms that we leave, the way an octopus drags its tentacles from an undersea cave.
And that’s why this weekend I’m standing on a teetering platform in the branches of an oak tree, pounding on the boards of a tree house with a hammer to pry them loose, that’s why I’m using a pipe wrench to unscrew the hammock hooks from tree trunks full of resin, the pipe wrench breaks and it all blows up in my face, that’s why I’m deflating balls, folding chairs and tables, wrapping plates and glasses in newspaper, that’s why I’m stuffing jackets and sweaters into suitcases, rubber boots and ice skates into a big bag, that’s why I’m even digging up my peony at the very last minute. When you leave a hotel, you often see the doors of the rooms that have already been vacated standing open, revealing rumpled sheets, empty bottles, crumpled paper, cigarette butts, and ashes. Now the rented place where we spent four summers doesn’t look much different than those abandoned hotel rooms. As I’m driving away, I can barely fit into the car because so many things have grown attached to me and have to disappear with me when I leave.
WARSAW GHETTO
In the rear courtyards of the roughly two apartment buildings that remain from the Warsaw ghetto, the Catholic residents have installed glass cases for the Virgin Mary. All around the Virgin, the stench of food, beer, and fabric softener wafts from the open windows, the crumbling corners of the walls reek of cats and piss, and a cool, musty smell drifts out the open cellar doors. The Virgin can’t wipe the dust off the glass that obscures my view of her. A child comes galloping diagonally across the courtyard, then disappears down a well-worn staircase into the darkness of one building that intersects the other at a right angle, a woman totters out of the entryway, a television is on. The roughly two apartment buildings that remain from the Warsaw ghetto are reinforced with iron beams that span the courtyard, there are nets and boards to catch any falling stones, balconies without floors jut out from the facade, and the plaster is long gone. These roughly two apartment buildings with their bare brick walls have been standing like this for over sixty years, but at some point they’re bound to collapse.
On the spot where the smaller part of the ghetto stood over sixty years ago, there is now a nine-story hotel, that’s where I’m staying. Across from my window, three glass elevators go up and down inside a glass tube. On the spot where the Aryans pried the Aryan cobblestones from the street to throw them over the three-meter-high wall at the Jews, the holes have been filled in with asphalt, and all that remains today of the Aryan streetcar that once passed beneath the Jewish bridge are a few last pieces of track. Many of the new houses that were built on the site of the ghetto after the war were constructed on the rubble and foundations of the old houses that the Germans had burned to the ground, which is probably why there’s often a small slope to the right and left of the sidewalk, overgrown with grass and bushes, and the buildings themselves sit a bit higher. At Milastrasse 18, where the last fighters of the ghetto uprising took their own lives, geraniums grow on the balcony, the curtains are bleached bright white, and birds chirp from a quince tree. On the spot where the historian Emanuel Ringelblum climbed out of the sewers to hide on the Aryan side, there’s a beautiful park with large chestnut trees. The only large trees in Warsaw are outside of the area where the ghetto once stood. And in the Jewish cemetery. There, a woman is pushing a baby carriage in front of her, and when I turn to look at the child as I pass by, the carriage holds nothing but a crumpled white woolen blanket.
DRIP CATCHERS
The carpet hangers disappeared from the rear courtyards when wall-to-wall carpeting and vacuum cleaners were introduced—after the Persian carpets had been bombed away, when there was no money to buy new ones, and the men who used to carry the rolled-up carpets down the stairs for cleaning had been killed in the war.
The shop where I used to take my tights to be mended when they had a run in them, back when I was a girl—a shop called Run Express—disappeared when the Wall came down and the West was able to sell its cheap tights in the East.
The drip catchers that graced the spouts of the large coffee pots that used to sit on the table at every German family reunion—those drip catchers disappeared when the children born during the last days of the war finally rebelled against their parents and stopped planning family reunions, preferring instead to travel to Italy and bring back espresso makers from there.
Things disappear when they are deprived of their means of existence, as if they, too, have a hunger that must be satisfied. And even if the reasons for their disappearance are infinitely far removed from the things themselves—as far removed, say, as the crimes of the German Wehrmacht are from German coffee, which is always far too weak, served in those pear-shaped pots it always tried to trickle down until it was held in check by the drip catcher, a little roll of foam rubber on an elastic band decorated with a butterfly, a doll, or a pearl perched atop the lid of the pot, a little thing that protected white tablecloths in Germany from coffee stains until the mid-1970s—even then, no matter how far removed the thing itself might be from the fashion, the invention, or the revolution that leads to its disappearance, that disappearance creates a bond that could not be tighter. For example, the Berlin painter Heinrich Zille once said that you could kill a person with an apartment just as easily as with an ax.
So the little roll of foam rubber and its elastic bridle end up in the trash, which means that now Germans are rich enough to afford vacations in Italy again and to bring back espresso makers in their luggage when they return. Just as each thing, no matter how simple, contains within it all the knowledge of its time, just as everything you can’t touch is contained in a spool of darning thread, for example; in the same way, whenever a thing disappears from everyday life, much more has disappeared than the thing itself—the way of thinking that goes with it has disappeared, and the way of feeling, the sense of what’s appropriate and what’s not, what you can afford and what’s beyond your means. We don’t have darning thread anymore! Really, why? People shouldn’t darn their tights, they should buy new ones!
YEARS
At a certain point in the course of time, there is a sudden bang, and the year that has been called the present for an entire year disappears from the present and turns into the past, from one second to the next. In that second, I think of the second a year ago when the year before that year turned into the past, and I wonder what will happen in another year’s time, when the span of time that has just slipped into the window of the present, the time we refer to by the number 2008, for example, falls out of that window again and into the hole in time that we call New Year’s Eve. He cast his blessing on his time, as we say in German of someone who has died, and with that, he disappeared into the year in which he died, the year carries him off, takes him away; on the other hand, we could just as well say of someone else who has just been born not only that he came into the world in this or that place, but also that he came into time in this or that year, for it is no less true that he was deposited by the year of his birth.
In this second in which one number opens and another closes, I think backward and forward, as if one moment could be seen in relation to another, as long as the distance between them, measured in years, always remains the same. Backward and forward. With each recurrence, I want to believe in the ethereal web, the floating landscape of time, whose paths run between birthdays, weddings, deaths, and other anniversaries, instead of between houses. But as I wait for the moment when a church bell actually strikes twelve, as I hold a bottle of champagne at the ready, as I switch on the radio to hear the official time, as I stand on the balcony, listening like a blind woman for the moment when the noise will finally break out all around me, as I wait for that one second in which I will be connected to all other people by time, I suddenly realize again how little this second really differs from all the other seconds in a year, then the web of time suddenly looks so small, no bigger than a handkerchief, with so much darkness behind it and in front of it and next to it and above it and below it, and all the banging and screaming that flies across the time zones is suddenly nothing more than our own sound with which we seize this man-made moment, as we become aware that we are falling, and as if in a great wave that sweeps across the globe, friends and strangers sink into each other’s arms for a few seconds, while those who have remained alone cry out, individually but all together, yellow, green, red, and silver lights travel around our planet, we drink and dance, and for a second we all hope that eternity might be a place where we can find a home.
●
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jenny Erpenbeck was born in 1967 in East Berlin, the wellspring of many of her works of fiction, including her most recent novel, Kairos, the winner of the 2024 International Booker Prize. The story of an affair set against the background of the declining German Democratic Republic, it makes the tumultuous experience of historical rupture personal: “What is distinctive about Erpenbeck’s novels,” the translator Ross Benjamin wrote in a review of Kairos for The Point in 2023, “is their mixture of claustrophobic intimacy and kaleidoscopic sweep.” The same could be said of her nonfiction collection Things That Disappear, which takes on losses at once mundane and consequential. Most of these autobiographical vignettes—including the ones excerpted here—first appeared in a column of the same name in the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine and are forthcoming in an English translation from New Directions in fall 2025.
●
Art credit: Lyn Liu, Inutilities, 2024. Oil on linen, 60 × 70 in. © Lyn Liu. Courtesy of the artist and Kasmin, New York.
These selections have been excerpted from Kurt Beals’s translation of Things That Disappear by Jenny Erpenbeck, to be published by New Directions in fall 2025. Copyright © 2009 by Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch GmbH & Co. English translation copyright © 2025 by Kurt Beals. All rights reserved.
●
BULKY TRASH
As soon as the owner of an old wardrobe/television/bicycle pushes it off the ramp, as soon as it’s “in there,” as they say at the Berlin Sanitation Department’s waste disposal sites, it no longer belongs to him; instead, it becomes the property of the department. The Berlin Sanitation Department takes possession of the item for one sole purpose: to remove it from the city and destroy it appropriately. The moment private owners relinquish their ownership, the items are henceforth referred to only by the material they’re made of. Wood to wood, metal to metal, and so on—these are the names the city uses when it snatches up the old stuff, devours it, along with any function and use value it might still have, along with any surplus value and history it might have had, because only when the old thing has completely disappeared does a resident of this city, a consumer in the marketplace, buy something new.
If that bike over there hadn’t already been labeled “metal,” it would certainly still be rideable. But I tell you, that don’t even cross our minds, there’d be a line all the way from here to Kreuzberg, say the men who lock the containers and cart them away. In the old days, people used to put their old wardrobes out on the street, and they’d always be gone in no more than a night. There were lines due to shortages during the war, and even later in the East, but that’s where they’re supposed to stay: in history books, in black-and-white photos, in eyewitness accounts. In the West, there were always bananas, and that’s how it’s supposed to stay. We’re just tryin’ to do our job, too, the men say. And if we had a bunch of folks crawlin’ around here—trash pickers, I call ’em—there wouldn’t be any room for the folks who just wanna throw stuff away. Not even the men themselves are allowed to pick out anything that’s “in there.” What if, say, you end up with a one-of-a-kind Biedermeier wardrobe? Nope, not even then. So if I were to climb into the dumpster (crawl around in the trash), I’d be able to touch an abandoned piece of furniture like that, but in legal terms, it still would have disappeared completely? Yup. I wouldn’t even be allowed to buy the wardrobe from you? Nope. Well, I mean, on a personal level you might, human error, you know, that’s been known to happen. But it ain’t allowed.
What I don’t ask, but would still like to know, is whether the beauty of a wardrobe like that emerges again after it’s been chopped to pieces and flies up to heaven, as souls are said to do, and whether the wood itself would be a few grams lighter than before.
People from faraway lands often sit in front of the waste disposal sites, waiting to take televisions, fridges, and speakers before they’re thrown away, before they disappear. Unfortunately, I haven’t found out yet whether there’s even a word for Biedermeier in their languages, and if so, what it is. Now my last hope lies in so-called human error.
DISASSEMBLY
We are only guests on earth, we’ve known that for a long time, but even before we vacate the premises altogether, we are guests time and again, as if for a trial run: in other people’s apartments, summer houses, hotels. Before we vacate the premises altogether and all our baggage inevitably falls away, we have the opportunity to transport our earthly belongings to this place or that, as we please. At some point, when the time is up, a woman may come, or a man, or an owner, or a landlord, and tell us to leave. It’s also possible for us to leave before we’re asked to. Or to leave reluctantly, and belatedly. Finally, it’s possible for us to be gone before anyone has even noticed that we were there to begin with, so that our disappearance goes entirely unnoticed. But wherever we stay, for however short or long a time, we always, at a minimum, open a door, go inside, breathe, perhaps sit on a chair, eat from plates, drink from glasses, sleep in beds, we may stock up on essentials, play games, browse through books, move the rug a bit when we go out, turn the key only once when we lock up instead of twice as the owner of the house usually does. We bring some things with us, we handle others, move them just a bit, or our smell clings to them, but in any case, when we disappear, our things are supposed to disappear as well, the mark we’ve made is supposed to be taken back and disappear along with us, then we have to drag all our belongings from the apartments, the houses, the rooms that we leave, the way an octopus drags its tentacles from an undersea cave.
And that’s why this weekend I’m standing on a teetering platform in the branches of an oak tree, pounding on the boards of a tree house with a hammer to pry them loose, that’s why I’m using a pipe wrench to unscrew the hammock hooks from tree trunks full of resin, the pipe wrench breaks and it all blows up in my face, that’s why I’m deflating balls, folding chairs and tables, wrapping plates and glasses in newspaper, that’s why I’m stuffing jackets and sweaters into suitcases, rubber boots and ice skates into a big bag, that’s why I’m even digging up my peony at the very last minute. When you leave a hotel, you often see the doors of the rooms that have already been vacated standing open, revealing rumpled sheets, empty bottles, crumpled paper, cigarette butts, and ashes. Now the rented place where we spent four summers doesn’t look much different than those abandoned hotel rooms. As I’m driving away, I can barely fit into the car because so many things have grown attached to me and have to disappear with me when I leave.
WARSAW GHETTO
In the rear courtyards of the roughly two apartment buildings that remain from the Warsaw ghetto, the Catholic residents have installed glass cases for the Virgin Mary. All around the Virgin, the stench of food, beer, and fabric softener wafts from the open windows, the crumbling corners of the walls reek of cats and piss, and a cool, musty smell drifts out the open cellar doors. The Virgin can’t wipe the dust off the glass that obscures my view of her. A child comes galloping diagonally across the courtyard, then disappears down a well-worn staircase into the darkness of one building that intersects the other at a right angle, a woman totters out of the entryway, a television is on. The roughly two apartment buildings that remain from the Warsaw ghetto are reinforced with iron beams that span the courtyard, there are nets and boards to catch any falling stones, balconies without floors jut out from the facade, and the plaster is long gone. These roughly two apartment buildings with their bare brick walls have been standing like this for over sixty years, but at some point they’re bound to collapse.
On the spot where the smaller part of the ghetto stood over sixty years ago, there is now a nine-story hotel, that’s where I’m staying. Across from my window, three glass elevators go up and down inside a glass tube. On the spot where the Aryans pried the Aryan cobblestones from the street to throw them over the three-meter-high wall at the Jews, the holes have been filled in with asphalt, and all that remains today of the Aryan streetcar that once passed beneath the Jewish bridge are a few last pieces of track. Many of the new houses that were built on the site of the ghetto after the war were constructed on the rubble and foundations of the old houses that the Germans had burned to the ground, which is probably why there’s often a small slope to the right and left of the sidewalk, overgrown with grass and bushes, and the buildings themselves sit a bit higher. At Milastrasse 18, where the last fighters of the ghetto uprising took their own lives, geraniums grow on the balcony, the curtains are bleached bright white, and birds chirp from a quince tree. On the spot where the historian Emanuel Ringelblum climbed out of the sewers to hide on the Aryan side, there’s a beautiful park with large chestnut trees. The only large trees in Warsaw are outside of the area where the ghetto once stood. And in the Jewish cemetery. There, a woman is pushing a baby carriage in front of her, and when I turn to look at the child as I pass by, the carriage holds nothing but a crumpled white woolen blanket.
DRIP CATCHERS
The carpet hangers disappeared from the rear courtyards when wall-to-wall carpeting and vacuum cleaners were introduced—after the Persian carpets had been bombed away, when there was no money to buy new ones, and the men who used to carry the rolled-up carpets down the stairs for cleaning had been killed in the war.
The shop where I used to take my tights to be mended when they had a run in them, back when I was a girl—a shop called Run Express—disappeared when the Wall came down and the West was able to sell its cheap tights in the East.
The drip catchers that graced the spouts of the large coffee pots that used to sit on the table at every German family reunion—those drip catchers disappeared when the children born during the last days of the war finally rebelled against their parents and stopped planning family reunions, preferring instead to travel to Italy and bring back espresso makers from there.
Things disappear when they are deprived of their means of existence, as if they, too, have a hunger that must be satisfied. And even if the reasons for their disappearance are infinitely far removed from the things themselves—as far removed, say, as the crimes of the German Wehrmacht are from German coffee, which is always far too weak, served in those pear-shaped pots it always tried to trickle down until it was held in check by the drip catcher, a little roll of foam rubber on an elastic band decorated with a butterfly, a doll, or a pearl perched atop the lid of the pot, a little thing that protected white tablecloths in Germany from coffee stains until the mid-1970s—even then, no matter how far removed the thing itself might be from the fashion, the invention, or the revolution that leads to its disappearance, that disappearance creates a bond that could not be tighter. For example, the Berlin painter Heinrich Zille once said that you could kill a person with an apartment just as easily as with an ax.
So the little roll of foam rubber and its elastic bridle end up in the trash, which means that now Germans are rich enough to afford vacations in Italy again and to bring back espresso makers in their luggage when they return. Just as each thing, no matter how simple, contains within it all the knowledge of its time, just as everything you can’t touch is contained in a spool of darning thread, for example; in the same way, whenever a thing disappears from everyday life, much more has disappeared than the thing itself—the way of thinking that goes with it has disappeared, and the way of feeling, the sense of what’s appropriate and what’s not, what you can afford and what’s beyond your means. We don’t have darning thread anymore! Really, why? People shouldn’t darn their tights, they should buy new ones!
YEARS
At a certain point in the course of time, there is a sudden bang, and the year that has been called the present for an entire year disappears from the present and turns into the past, from one second to the next. In that second, I think of the second a year ago when the year before that year turned into the past, and I wonder what will happen in another year’s time, when the span of time that has just slipped into the window of the present, the time we refer to by the number 2008, for example, falls out of that window again and into the hole in time that we call New Year’s Eve. He cast his blessing on his time, as we say in German of someone who has died, and with that, he disappeared into the year in which he died, the year carries him off, takes him away; on the other hand, we could just as well say of someone else who has just been born not only that he came into the world in this or that place, but also that he came into time in this or that year, for it is no less true that he was deposited by the year of his birth.
In this second in which one number opens and another closes, I think backward and forward, as if one moment could be seen in relation to another, as long as the distance between them, measured in years, always remains the same. Backward and forward. With each recurrence, I want to believe in the ethereal web, the floating landscape of time, whose paths run between birthdays, weddings, deaths, and other anniversaries, instead of between houses. But as I wait for the moment when a church bell actually strikes twelve, as I hold a bottle of champagne at the ready, as I switch on the radio to hear the official time, as I stand on the balcony, listening like a blind woman for the moment when the noise will finally break out all around me, as I wait for that one second in which I will be connected to all other people by time, I suddenly realize again how little this second really differs from all the other seconds in a year, then the web of time suddenly looks so small, no bigger than a handkerchief, with so much darkness behind it and in front of it and next to it and above it and below it, and all the banging and screaming that flies across the time zones is suddenly nothing more than our own sound with which we seize this man-made moment, as we become aware that we are falling, and as if in a great wave that sweeps across the globe, friends and strangers sink into each other’s arms for a few seconds, while those who have remained alone cry out, individually but all together, yellow, green, red, and silver lights travel around our planet, we drink and dance, and for a second we all hope that eternity might be a place where we can find a home.
●
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jenny Erpenbeck was born in 1967 in East Berlin, the wellspring of many of her works of fiction, including her most recent novel, Kairos, the winner of the 2024 International Booker Prize. The story of an affair set against the background of the declining German Democratic Republic, it makes the tumultuous experience of historical rupture personal: “What is distinctive about Erpenbeck’s novels,” the translator Ross Benjamin wrote in a review of Kairos for The Point in 2023, “is their mixture of claustrophobic intimacy and kaleidoscopic sweep.” The same could be said of her nonfiction collection Things That Disappear, which takes on losses at once mundane and consequential. Most of these autobiographical vignettes—including the ones excerpted here—first appeared in a column of the same name in the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine and are forthcoming in an English translation from New Directions in fall 2025.
●
Art credit: Lyn Liu, Inutilities, 2024. Oil on linen, 60 × 70 in. © Lyn Liu. Courtesy of the artist and Kasmin, New York.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.