Memory and the Past

The author introduces her thematic interest in exploring memory and the past by way of Hans’s death and the appearance of his boxes at Katharina’s home. Shortly after Katharina learns that her former lover Hans has passed away, she returns to Berlin to discover “two large cardboard boxes” filled with “letters and carbons of letters, scribbled notes, shopping lists, desk diaries, photo prints and negatives, postcards, collages, a few newspaper clippings” (6). Katharina delays opening the boxes because she knows what they contain. Indeed, the narrator says that she has “a suitcase of her own, full of letters, carbons, and souvenirs” from her affair with Hans, too (7). The boxes and the suitcase, therefore, are symbolic representations of the characters’ memories and pasts. For a time, the narrator remarks, these mementos “were speaking to each other. Now they’re both speaking to time...