Jenny Erpenbeck's ​Things That Disappear

Reviewed by Hannah Gardiner

(New Directions, 2024)

They almost didn’t find it on the wooden shelf, tucked in between the other pre-ordered books, white slips along their spines marking the names of those to come for them. When the booksellers returned to the register, my thin gray volume in hand, one looked at me and said, “It is no wonder it disappears.”

At just seventy-one pages, the newest of Jenny Erpenbeck’s work in English, Things That Disappear, is easy to overlook, but shouldn’t be. Translated from the original German by Kurt Beals, the collection of thirty-one thematically linked short essays is a subtle meditation on disappearance in its various forms. The essays chart bodies overtaken by illnesses; objects lost when traveling; fathers who suddenly vanish from the lives of their children. In one, Erpenbeck even gives a nod to “the drip catchers that graced the spouts of the large coffee pots that used to sit on every table at every German family reunion.”

The essays in the collection evoke grief and joy and nostalgia and longing. Their strong emotional resonance is surely in part due to the fact that the theme of disappearance has a deep personal meaning for the author. Born in East Berlin in 1967, Erpenbeck has said that her impetus to write came at the collapse of the GDR, taking with it the world she grew up in. Erpenbeck certainly grounds the collection in this loss. It begins with an essay about the opening and eventual demolition of the Palace of the Republic, where the seat of the East German Parliament was housed (along with, we learn, a painting gallery, a wine bar, a café, a theatre, a bowling alley and more…). Foreseeing the end that would come, Erpenbeck writes: “When it became clear, years later, that the palace was gradually losing its republic, I slipped one of the spoons […] into my pocket for safekeeping.”

The marvel of this book lies in moments and moves like this, when Erpenbeck observes expansive histories and universal experiences through interactions with small things. Although there is certainly variable strength to the short essays included in the collection, each one experiments in its own way with what it means to really look at these small things and see how they exist within their own poetic ecologies. I found myself especially drawn to the essays that develop and trace material histories, but readers of different sensibilities can all find something in Erpenbeck’s compelling writing and wide-ranging meditations to hold onto.

When writing about the Splitterbrötchen pastry she loves, the one that she can only find made as it once was in two bakeries in Berlin-Mitte, Erpenbeck reflects on the subject of disappearance explicitly: “For the first time, it strikes me that the word disappear has something active at its core, that there is a perpetrator in the word who makes things that I know and cherish disappear: Dismantle, discard, disband, disparage, discredit, disembowel, disuse.” But disappearance is just one part of the act. In writing about all these things, Erpenbeck proves her literary concern instead in recording, in remembrance, and in reappearance. Like the empty frame on the cover of the book, Things That Disappear asks a reader not to dwell on what is now gone, but to reimagine what was once there: a former country, a now-demolished nursery school, the Warsaw Ghetto, friends, mothers, misplaced cheese…
​
Anyone looking for a kind of renewed poetic attention to things will find in Erpenbeck’s new book a worthy companion, for in her loving and unvarnished essays, it is not just Erpenbeck’s disappearing things that a reader begins to see, but their own. 

---

​Hannah Gardiner is a writer and cultural organizer from Kitchener, Ontario. She has a master’s degree in literary studies from the University of Waterloo, where she was thrice awarded the Beltz Essay Prize. Her writing and translation projects have been supported by Canada Council for the Arts, the Region of Waterloo Arts Fund, the Brubacher House Museum, and the Mennonite Historical Society of Ontario. Find her online: ​www.hannahgardiner.ca/