This is a very postwar-German sentiment, and Erpenbeck is a very postwar-German writer. In her professed “love of dirt,” she follows W. G. Sebald and Günter Grass. For these authors, history is not compressed strata; layers of the past surround them, a constant atmosphere, felt and seen anytime they look around. Hans, the middle-aged East German author who is one of the main characters in Erpenbeck’s new novel, Kairos, describes the East Berlin of the 1980s very much in his author’s terms: Inhabiting a place where the past is visible everywhere, exposed and rotting, he concludes that “this devastation was the truth.”