A plot of land on Lake Scharmützel in Brandenburg, a summer house on it, and within it the history of the 20th century. This is how one could summarize the novel by Berlin author Jenny Erpenbeck, published in 2007, a text in which the main role is played by the house, or rather the property itself. Originally owned by a large farmer, it is divided up after his death and becomes the stage for eleven life stories, representing the hope and suffering, happiness and tragedy of the last hundred years.

In eleven chapters, Erpenbeck recounts the events and history of three generations that have befallen this piece of land, including a successful architect during the Nazi era who builds a house according to his wife's ideas, and a Jewish cloth manufacturer who sells the property for less than its value and is deported and murdered along with his family. She tells of the occupation of the house by a company of young Red Army soldiers after the Second World War, of the architect's wife hidden in a closet, of a writer returning from exile in the Soviet Union, and finally of the architect's heirs, who claim the house after the end of the GDR. Throughout all this time, a gardener watches over the property, trimming hedges, tending shrubs, cultivating nature, which repeatedly spreads through the cracks of fate. Heimsuchung is, in a sense, a history book, but one that complicates clear distinctions between right and wrong, good and evil, perpetrators and victims, thus making the complexity of history palpable. Interwoven with this is the story of the author, whose grandmother Hedda Zinner owned a house on Lake Scharmützel after returning from Soviet exile to the GDR in 1945, and extensive research into the life of Doris Kaplan, a Jewish girl murdered by the Nazis, whose life is recounted in one of the chapters.

In 2024, Jenny Erpenbeck won the International Booker Prize for her novel Kairos and became known to an international audience, with the New York Times voting Heimsuchung into its list of the “100 Best Books of the 21st Century.” Director Alexander Eisenach, born in East Berlin in 1984, is adapting the novel for the stage.