Kairos

Hans’s friend announces that he will return ahead of schedule, requiring Hans and Katharina to vacate the apartment immediately. Because he has nowhere else to go, Hans asks Ingrid if he can return home. For practicality’s sake, he does not tell her of the plans he has for his relationship with Katharina

Katharina waits for Hans to return from a Communist Party meeting before visiting her father in Leipzig. The meeting goes on longer than anticipated because the Party is concerned about the state of the Soviet Union, which has transitioned to new leadership. By the time Hans returns, Katharina is gone, and Hans is left to pack up by himself. He realizes how much he has tried to impress his interests upon Katharina and wonders whether she accepted his influence willingly.

Katharina worries that moving out will undo the progress of the relationship. She is also concerned that things will never be as good as they were in the apartment again, especially with her impending internship in Frankfurt. Hans assures her that he will divorce Ingrid and that he and Katharina will start a family afterward. Upon her return to Berlin, Katharina helps Hans finish packing. Hans stuffs all the belongings he wants her to take into two heavy bags. It staggers Katharina to bring them home by herself. After he moves back into his old apartment, Hans revisits Katharina at hers.

Katharina resigns from her job at the state publishing firm now that she has been qualified as a worker. A few days later, she and Hans celebrate their first anniversary revisiting the sites of their first meeting.

Hans plans to work on his novel during the year of Katharina’s stage design internship, as a way of allowing her to regain the lost time with him while she is away. In his novel, he hopes to impart the new thinking that will embolden her and her generation to live according to his ideals for the socialist state. He remembers how his childhood had emboldened him toward those same ideals, uprooting him from his first home to live in Nazi-occupied Poland. His father had hoped that Germany would heal by returning to its old values. This resonated with the 1943 Posen speeches delivered by high-ranking Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler, meant to embolden his men toward their actions in the Holocaust. Hans concludes that it is difficult to divorce his emotions from the historical events in which he grew up.

Katharina moves into her own apartment, which she will occupy in preparation for her move to Frankfurt. The move inspires her to wonder what kind of person she will be in the future. Katharina enjoys her first days of independence, though she regularly hosts Hans. This causes her to settle into a mode of domestic anticipation. She prepares meals for Hans, but he is often delayed in coming home, primarily because of matters involving his family. This disappoints Katharina.

Katharina moves to Frankfurt for her internship. Traveling between cities, she surprises Hans while he is on vacation again with his family. This time, Hans is nervous about being seen with her because Ingrid now knows what she looks like. Katharina registers his reluctance. He nevertheless sees her off at the bus stop the next day.

Later, Katharina shows Hans around the theater where she works. Hans wishes she would be more excited by the programs they are putting on than by the observational gossip she shares about her co-workers. He worries that she might meet someone new, recalling the time she had been expecting to meet a woman she had a crush on instead of Hans. Katharina had given Hans a key to her Berlin apartment, but after Katharina told him about her crush, he returned the key.

Hans believes it is for the better that he has returned to his family, feeling that his presence would have embarrassed Katharina in front of her colleagues if he followed her. Katharina is nevertheless proud to have shown him her work, even though he pretended to be her father out of remorse.

The day before Hans is due to visit Frankfurt, Katharina calls him later than they agreed because she had gone swimming with one of the assistant designers, Vadim. She ensures that she is on time to meet him at the train platform when he arrives. However, Hans announces that he will go back to Berlin at once because he needs to stop thinking of Katharina. He tries to end their relationship, which confuses Katharina. Hans commits to his plan before he can explain his reasons.

Katharina weeps in the women’s toilet, trying not to mind the presence of the other people around her. Instead, she tries to recall happy memories with Hans. She retreats to Vadim’s apartment and sleeps on his guest bed.

During a work break, Katharina calls Hans. They agree to meet at a Berlin bistro as though nothing has happened. Hans tells Katharina that leaving her revived him, which causes her to drop her teacup. They dismiss it as their polterabend, a tradition related to German weddings.

Katharina surprises Hans by staging a wedding for them, assembling a makeshift dress from various pieces at home. For a wedding gift, Katharina gives him the key to her apartment so that he can no longer refuse it. They reconcile, despite the fact that they do not address what happened during Hans’s last visit. That evening, they return to their respective homes.

Following a successful performance, Katharina’s theater group celebrates with drinks at the canteen. Katharina spends the night in Vadim’s apartment for the second time, though only because she has misplaced her key. They do not have sex.

A month after their wedding, Hans gifts Katharina a series of erotic BDSM photos. He means to inspire her to engage in similarly “obscene” acts.

Katharina grows fonder of Vadim, and while she remains happy with Hans, she spends several more nights with him, which she does not write about in her diary. Though they do not have sex, Katharina feels a physical attraction to him. She tries to relieve her feelings by spending more time in Berlin after she finishes work.

Hans does not regret leaving Katharina behind on the train platform in Frankfurt. He believes that it catalyzed the current state of their relationship, which demanded that she sacrifice her innocence. Their marriage has thrust them into an uncertain future, which obstructs Hans’s ability to finish his novel.

Hans tries to navigate his relationship with Katharina against the historical underpinnings that gave rise to his novel idea.

Hans’s father had been a professor at the Reich University of Posen, teaching German thinking according to fascist values. Part of the culture at the time involved normalizing domestic life during World War II. Hans’s parents avoided reading newspapers that reported the eastward expansion of German occupation and the atrocities committed against the people they displaced. After the war ended, Hans’s father was appointed to a professorship in West Germany. As a teen, Hans moved to East Germany to rebel against his father and his values. Hans immediately resonated with the socialists who were reconstructing the eastern side of Berlin. He became a playwright in the presence of the new country’s intellectuals.

In spite of his efforts, Hans is aware of the presence of neo-Nazis, who pursue their ideology because they believe it gives them meaning.

Katharina continues to behave affectionately toward Vadim as she and Hans fall into comfortable patterns of visitation between Frankfurt and Berlin. They make plans to visit Moscow in the summer. Hans keeps the evidence of his relationship in his rental studio. Katharina’s letters are found by one of his ex-lovers. Hans sends the ex-lover away as she curses him.

Vadim engages Katharina in sexual acts, though Katharina prevents him from kissing her on the mouth. Katharina is conflicted about how she might tell Hans about her and Vadim’s mutual attraction to each other. Meanwhile, Hans’s concerns as a political writer become increasingly divorced from Katharina’s life as a stage designer. For practicality’s sake, he discourages her from traveling to Berlin whenever she has work the following day.

Katharina prepares a portfolio to apply for art school, part of which includes nude sketches of Hans. Uncertain about their future, Katharina takes a riding crop from the theater props room back to Berlin because it resembles the one that appeared in the erotic photos Hans had gifted her. She believes that this gift will free her from her guilt.

Late one night in January 1988, Katharina and Vadim stay behind after the night porter has closed up the building. They have sex. Back in Berlin, Hans writes an erotic love letter to Katharina.

Katharina stops writing in her diary, worried that Hans will deduce what has happened between her and Vadim. Through Hans’s diary entries, Katharina is shown to have become despondent. Hans has an amicable discussion with Ingrid, then makes considerable progress on his novel.

Hans’s friend, the dramatist Heiner Müller, stages a revival of his debut play, Scab, which is based on the life of Hans Garbe, a worker who inadvertently lowered his coworkers’ wages by risking his life to rebuild a factory ring. Garbe goes on to strike against the norms of production upheld by the Soviets. The play exposes the unrealistic expectations of the Soviet system, which expects heroic self-sacrifice from its people, generation after generation, while the purported rewards are always deferred. Throughout the 1950s, the Eastern Bloc witnessed a series of upheavals, resulting in the denouncement of Joseph Stalin by Nikita Khrushchev.

Katharina writes down the feeling of being kissed by Vadim on her breasts. She absentmindedly leaves this piece of writing in plain view, and several weeks later, Hans finds it.

Katharina finishes going through the contents of the first box she received from Hans. She has also been revisiting Hans’s work and has recently made an information request with the government. As she revisits her own writing from this time, she feels simultaneously like she is unearthing a corpse and like she is a corpse herself.