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Lauren Oyler on the German author Jenny Erpenbeck and her private collection of ephemera from the German Democratic Republic.

“What interests me is the process of differentiation,” she says. “My own experience of what East Germany was like is changed by every book I read. To me, it’s always interesting to look at what is happening on the periphery.” Erpenbeck’s latest is neither a novel nor a memoir in the conventional sense, but made up of essays and speeches from 1999 to 2018, some of which have been previously published, others only delivered to small rooms at awards ceremonies. But through the bricolage of pieces covering literature, music and current affairs runs a thread: the beli...