Heimsuchung

With this century-spanning novel, Jenny Erpenbeck achieved her international breakthrough. The partly autobiographical stories unfold across generations in a house by a lake in Brandenburg, stretching from 1906 to 2002. From the Weimar Republic through Nazism, the building of East Germany, to reunification - Erpenbeck illuminates and interweaves the fates of individual people: they seek a home on this plot of land in their respective eras.

The characters draw us into the contradictions of their time and their lives. Each story is a single destiny, each person with their own private perspectives on the world, shaped by the social constraints of their era.

There unfolds a profound, literary narrative with very different viewpoints on Germany's ambivalent history.

Jenny Erpenbeck was born in 1967 in East Berlin. She has won, among others, the Hans Fallada Prize (2014), the Thomas Mann Prize (2016), and the Uwe Johnson Prize (2022). In 2024, she became the first German to receive the International Booker Prize. She is a recipient of the Federal Cross of Merit.