Kairos - Jenny Erpenbeck illustration Thirty-Eight

Thirty-Eight

and Scarlett Smulkowskip

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

"Four Twenty Five

Kairos - Jenny Erpenbeck illustration Thirty-EightA 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