The prize-winning writer on her new memoir Not a Novel, growing up near the Berlin Wall and her support for refugees
The writing of Jenny Erpenbeck has a tendency to sneak up on you rather than trumpet its arrival. The first page of her new book Not a Novel starts with an understated polemic. “There is nothing better for a child than to grow up at the ends of the earth,” she writes in a short piece of memoir about her childhood living on the 13th floor of a high-rise on Berlin’s Leipziger Strasse, a stone’s throw east from the iron curtain.
Three decades after its fall, the Berlin Wall is still the world’s ultimate symbol of cold war repression; for thousands of East Berliners, it was for nearly 30 years a cruel instrument to separate them from their families and curtail their freedoms. But for a child living just metres from its concrete ramparts, Erpenbeck insists, it had some undeniable advantages: when an ideological system reaches a dead end at the bottom of your road, there’s no passing traffic and “the asphalt is free for roller-skating”.
