Heimsuchung

With this century-spanning novel, Jenny Erpenbeck achieved her international breakthrough. Partly autobiographical stories unfold in a house by a Brandenburg lake across generations, 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 property 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 entirely private perspectives on the world, shaped by the social constraints of their era.

Thus unfolds a profound, literary narrative with widely varying perspectives on Germany's ambivalent history.

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