Idle Things

Jenny Erpenbeck was born in East Berlin, and grew up among post-war ruins that gradually disappeared from the landscape following the reunification of Germany. Those ruins, writes Robert Rubsam, “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?” For The Baffler, Rubsam considers our varied relationships with ruins, exploring ways in which they vivify the histories we inherit.

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.”