Idle Things

Things That Disappear by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated from the German by Kurt Beals. New Directions, 96 pages. 2025.

There is a story in one of Hebel’s almanacs about a man lost in a mine collapse. The man went to work in the bloom of his youth—and fifty years later, when a group of miners come upon his body in the pit, they find him much the same. His body, soaked in ferrous sulfate, is so miraculously preserved that the man still looks “as if he had died only an hour before,” as if he were only sleeping. In the meantime, Lisbon drowned, Poland disappeared, the Ottomans advanced, and the long waltz of revolution and reaction continued apace. The sleeper remains, yet the world of his youth has come and gone, with his unblemished body the only remnant. Even the woman to whom he was once betrothed has grown old. Still in the bloom of youth, he must return to the earth.

Thus is the ruin: time’s product and time’s survivor. Perilous and imperiled, inconvenient and incomplete, the ruin stands apart, stands among, stands, quite frequently, in the way. It recalls to us our ignorance, our infirmity—and our impotence, our inability to staunch the passage of time, the depredations of wind and rain, the dervish whirlwind of human history. Definitionally, we arrive too late before the ruin to glimpse its splendor, too soon to be rid of it once and for all. They transform us into spectators, speculating as to the landscape of our own lives. “We may witness ruination,” says Susan Stewart, “but we come upon a ruin.”

They are distant, dangerous, scoured and scrapped, yet they speak to us all the same. Anglo-Saxon settlers wandered the ruins of the Roman empire and recorded it in their poems. Gazing on the wreckage of Aquae Sulis, in modern-day Bath, an eighth-century poet wondered at what seemed the work of giants and bemoaned the cruel fate that brought their world to an end. “Death fetched off the flower of the people; / where they stood to fight, waste places / and on the acropolis, ruins.” For poem and poet, there is but one path: toward the embrace of “gravesgrasp” and the effacement of all records, all names, all trace of what was, or that it was at all.

Jenny Erpenbeck knows well what it is like to come of age in the wreckage of an empire. Born and raised in East Berlin, she recalls how “ruins were an everyday sight in my childhood,” the shattered buildings and emptied spaces of a city battered and partitioned. In a 2013 essay, she writes of climbing into the husks on the Museumsinsel, of staring up through the burned-out hollow of a house, of playacting with friends in vacant lots and meeting with boyfriends in the shell of the Deutscher Dom. “It didn’t cost anything for the ruins to stand there back then. Time wasn’t running, time was standing still.”

She is describing a childhood idyll, a city that, in its devastation, has become like a village at the ends of the earth. Born into a nation resurrected from the ruins, a society where private ownership had been abolished and the legal name for real estate translated to “immovable property” and children were exhorted to turn their faces toward the future, there was no reason to reflect on this wreckage, those remnants of the approximately 80 percent of Berlin destroyed during World War II. These ruins spoke of cataclysm, collapse and rebirth; they spoke of history. But they also contoured the landscape of her youth, like those Roman herders who for a millennium grazed their cattle over the Forum. The ruins lingered, and in lingering, they taught her the virtue of unproductive places and idle things, of empty spaces, left open for her to wander them and to ask: How did I get here, and how did all of this?

The Nazi architect Albert Speer certainly thought ahead. His plans for the Nuremberg parade grounds and the Berlin Volkshalle took into account how each structure would look once it had fallen into disrepair—to become ruins on the level of Greece and Rome, long after the thousand-year Reich had run its course. Ruins, for Speer, were fundamentally aesthetic objects, works of picturesque destruction which acquire through their wear and tear a unique form of “ruin value.” The grandeur of the Nazi regime would only come into view once cracked and scoured by wind and rain, ravaged by the passage of time.

He shared such an outlook with Hitler and with the aristocratic humanists of the eighteenth century. In their gardens pocked with the artificial ruins we call follies, their galleries with paintings of depopulated arcades, their folios filled with prints of ravaged monuments, their travels to Rome and Athens, Palmyra and Jerusalem, they gazed with melancholy upon a kind of memento mori, a reminder of the inexorable passage of time with its cycles of construction and devastation, returning all the works of man to the earth. For such enthusiasts, observes the historian Peter Fritzsche, particular sites became “more or less interchangeable. They summoned up general feelings of the transience of all things”—but rarely actual curiosity about the people who had once occupied these places or of the circumstances that had brought about their destruction. Detached from history, and thus from the realm of human action, the ruin became as much an expression of natural processes as a mountain or a canyon, an illustration that, as Judith Schalansky writes in An Inventory of Losses, “every item is already waste, every building already a ruin, and all creation nothing but destruction.”

“Only later did I understand,” Erpenbeck reflects, “that what seemed so familiar to my childhood eyes was actually another era, a destroyed era that sticks in the throat of the new one until it can finally be spit out.” Only later did she understand, once her own familiar childhood era caught in the throat of the next. In her essay collection Things That Disappear, recently translated by Kurt Beals, she remembers visiting the Palace of the Republic in the days after its construction. She remembers the utensils and the light fixtures produced in the factory where her aunt worked, the pain of pinching her finger in the bowling alley, the weight of the wrought-iron stools in the wine bar where she went on her first dates.

The Palace of the Republic no longer exists. In 1990, less than a month after the Volkskammer voted to approve reunification, the East German government ordered it closed. “The palace,” Erpenbeck explains, “was gradually losing its republic.” The structure, built over the demolished ruins of the old Berlin City Palace, had now become politically redundant and spiritually toxic, and, like all other reminders of the DDR, it had to go. Like the state it had been erected to celebrate, the Palace was razed and replaced. In this case, by a brand-new Berlin Palace, reconstructed in the grand old style. The past has returned in the garb of the future and consigned what was once the given present to a distant and inaccessible time. Reading Erpenbeck, you see how we must live through history to see the ruin anew. Or rather: by living through history, we see that every ruin has a ruiner.

Among the Europeans, at least, it was the Romantic refugees of the Napoleonic Wars who first began to perceive a human, rather than natural, force behind the production of ruins. Caspar David Friedrich painted the dolmens of Northern Germany. Sulpiz Boisserée compared medieval ruins along the Rhine with the monasteries torched by the French Army. Visiting the excavations at Pompeii, Germaine de Staël saw the disasters of her own century embodied in the calcified residue of so many annihilated lives.

“The power of ruins in the nineteenth century,” Fritzsche writes, “was to depict the violence of historical movement without imputing necessity to its direction. They challenged the absoluteness of the present with the counterfactuals of the past.” This awareness made any given ruin into a particular site of particular disaster, transforming the landscape of Europe into a new topography of action and subjectivity. It humanized destruction, removing the rise and fall of nations and cities from the inexorable circularity of nature and rejecting the conviction that the future might only offer more of the same.

When a world dies, much dies alongside it. Ways of thinking, ways of building, ways of living so mundane no one noticed their presence or their passing. “Whenever a thing disappears from everyday life,” Erpenbeck writes, “much more has disappeared than the thing itself.” The evaporation of the DDR shifted border lines, political formations, rights of free trade and free passage. It allowed former East Germans to replace damaged tights, to fill their apartments with brand-new furniture, to bring back espresso machines from their trips to Italy, just as it allowed them to get rid of their darning thread, to junk old wooden furnishings, to get rid of those coffee pots that Erpenbeck remembers on the table of her family reunions, always pear-shaped and full of weak coffee and always with a foam rubber roll around the lid to catch stray droplets.

Overnight, East Berlin became Berlin, and East Germans became Germans, though the landmarks around them remained the same. Erpenbeck’s Berlin was still pockmarked with ruin, with the open spaces left by the bombs of the last war. Her Berlin was a city of vast sunsets and bare fire walls, of “barren sites, often on street corners, where nothing grew, not even a kiosk”—of places which, because they had become abandoned, were repurposed by citizens just like herself, a public-private project that remade the city in the image of its most adventurous residents.

A common ruin is definitionally idle. You cannot live in it, cannot make it turn a profit; and it produces nothing but further ruination. Urban real estate is only physically immovable; its abstract value now extends to meet the sky. With the reunification, all that space became property, and its function had changed, because the governing logic of reality had changed. Waste ground could not remain waste; the reminders of the last war must do something more than simply remind. So the Deutscher Dom was rebuilt; the Museumsinsel restored; the empty spaces were cleared by bulldozers, and new buildings in a faux-classical style filled them. Things That Disappear provides us with a record of such alterations. The shared spaces between apartment buildings are dissected and fenced off, until they become unusable/impassable. Erpenbeck’s son’s nursery school in historic Mitte is sold off and demolished, more valuable for its property than whatever educational purpose it might have served. Even the Splitterbrötchen pastries she grew up eating are now scarce. It is her own world which has become the relic, the curio, the tumbledown ruin. Or perhaps a skeleton, “individual bones with a great deal of soil in between.”

A ruin is a structure which has lost its originating context, yet survived into our own. They are subject to natural wear and tear, to human forces, to politics and forgetting. Architects in postwar Yugoslavia were tasked with imagining a new style of memorial architecture, a physical language that was legible to the people of the Balkans, yet at the same time transcended limited (and loaded) symbols of ethnic difference. Their spomeniks would honor the partisans who had fought the Germans and their local allies, would pay tribute to the million massacred in reprisals or rounded up into camps, and they would do so abstractly, in forms that recalled the ruins of the ancient world while stretching toward the sleek shapes of the approaching space age. Shorn of local signifiers and chauvinistic forms, their abstract universalism would model the nation in miniature: a new, united people, a utopia grounded in the past with its face turned towards the future.

Today many spomeniks are graffitied and overgrown. Most were destroyed by ethnic nationalists during the wars of the 1990s. The abstraction that aspired to universality has left them fundamentally illegible to outsiders. You have likely scrolled past a carousel of their images and not known that they memorialize the slaughter of innocents, that they were erected as the hope of a new nation. Cleaved from their purpose, abstracted so many times over, they have lost their context, and become pure form, mere material. If, per Schalanksy, “the ruins are a utopian place in which past and future become one,” they are also a space where both can be zeroed out.

“Things disappear,” says Erpenbeck, “when they are deprived of their means of existence.” Visiting Berlin today, you cannot find Erpenbeck’s jagged ruins and cleared spaces. East German structures have transformed into nightclubs and art galleries, and prewar wrecks have all been rehabilitated, memorialized, or demolished. Their long horizons and weedy gaps have been replaced with faux-classical Stimmannian structures, whose low eves and sandstone facades elide the architectural movements of the twentieth century. Rather than the active, mutable space of the vacant lot, the derelict building, the ruin, you have the strictly policed sites of “memory culture,” which run a border wall between what can be respectably mourned and what must be forgotten.

In one of the essays in the collection, Erpenbeck remarks that “the word disappear has something active at its core,” that language itself contains the mechanisms for dematerialization and forgetting. Yet her own words are themselves a kind of bulwark, a catalog of the minor details and inconsequential impressions that make up the course of a private life. When she recalls the plastic animals once produced at the factory in Zschopau, the sunset view from across a cleared lot, the weight of a metal stool in her hand, she is recalling an entire network of social existence which is slowly being ground into dust. They are her fragments, shored up against forgetting. And in reading, they become ours too.

No more than a memorial arch or a pair of legs ruined in the desert, these words cause us to pause and to reflect. That things have once been otherwise and might be otherwise again. That structures raised today will fall tomorrow. That in the end, as Schalansky writes, “all that remains is simply whatever is left.”