History consists of stories. Individual experiences condense into collective memory, leave their mark, are overlaid, blurred, interwoven, and add up to the sum of the past, together forming history – that of a place, a country, a nation or a region.

Jenny Erpenbeck tells the story of fifteen destinies in Heimsuchung (Visitation), linked over a period of more than a hundred years by their relationship to a very specific piece of land and house on a lake in the Mark Brandenburg. She tells of the longing for security in a place that may become home. And of the violence of losing it. Heimsuchung is a novel, but it is based on researched life stories and ultimately the biography of the author herself – her own life is connected to a house on Lake Scharmützel. What kind of place is this?

Looking closely

Anyone stepping off the train in Bad Saarow in autumn may find it hard to believe for a moment that they are stepping onto a Brandenburg
platform. A white colonnade, the trimmed grass of the forecourt, the tourist information office: a historic spa town that could also be called Wiesbaden or Bad Kissingen, perhaps a little smaller. But only for a moment. If you look closely, you will recognise the crusty rolls in the baker's display and read ‘Karl-Marx-Damm’ on the street sign, so you know that this cannot be Hesse or Bavaria. On Lake Scharmützel, a good hour's train ride from Berlin, there is not only a well-known thermal spa, but also a very special piece of land. It is this land that Jenny Erpenbeck uses to tell the story of two wars and four political systems.

If you cycle around the lake in autumn, you enter a kind of liminal period. It's too late for swimming, but too early for the thermal season. A few rental boats bob at the jetty, but the rental office is already closed. Perhaps a good moment for a visit – when time seems intangible, the more precisely one can search for the signs of its passing.

Traces of the past

A clockwise loop means walking along Karl-Marx-Damm, where new buildings called ‘Karl von Saarow’ are being constructed next to the prefabricated buildings, and where, according to the estate agency, it feels like a holiday resort by the water. Along Karl-Marx-Damm, where prefabricated buildings stand because here, too, a pogrom against Jewish residents took place in 1938 and houses were burned. A stumbling block reminds us of those who were not allowed to stay here. Along Karl-Marx-Damm, past a playground under fir trees with a carved Sandman figure and a ceramic Pittiplatsch, next door an advertisement for another investment project hangs limply from a construction fence,
an unfortunate project, the house long since without windows and with an even longer overgrown front garden.

The story of a house

Through a forest, continuing along the eastern side of the lake, and then there it stands, next to floor-to-ceiling glass, rectangular architectural villas, a house with a thatched roof. One that is unlike any other, with grey plastered walls and colourful glass small windows. Built in 1936 by a Berlin architect, it was the home of Hedda Zinner, Jenny Erpenbeck's grandmother, a Jewish communist and writer who had lived in exile in Moscow since 1935 and returned to Berlin after the end of the Second World War. As a child, Jenny Erpenbeck spent many summer months here. After the end of the GDR, her family learned of the property claims of the descendants of those who had lived in the West until then and who had owned the house before the GDR was founded. They, in turn, had taken it over in 1939 from a Jewish family who had to sell it to finance their escape. An escape that failed and ended in the Kulmhof extermination camp. After the property became part of the Federal Republic of Germany, it was transferred back to the heirs in a process that was exemplary for the experience of many GDR citizens and after a long legal battle. The house then stood empty for over a decade. It is a real place that Erpenbeck is talking about.

From yesterday to today

Now cycle from the east side to the west side: here, however, the shore path is not called a path, but a road, and you can still sense something of the spirit of optimism with which the avant-garde, tired of the big city, once settled the land around the lake. Where a moor bath was built in 1914, a healing spring was discovered in 1927 and the eleven-kilometre-long lake was found to be ideal for sailing, extravagant buildings such as the Villa Parolo in the shape of a barrel were constructed on the shore. Here, too, the Jewish family fled from the Nazis in 1938. A few steps through the adjacent Fontane Park with 16 bon mots on metal steles and covered with orange leaves to the ice cream parlour next door – but here the season is already over. Not closed, but a bookcase by the side of the path, in which one could not find a more fitting place: a self-published theatre text about Karl Marx in heaven and a copy of Stefan Heym's Ahasver. Heym's novel about eternal resistance against oppression and the Jewish fate. Given away here – as if the responsibility of coming to terms with one's own history should also better change hands.

The Markish Sea, where the days are longer

The hungry village gathers at the snack bar in the EDEKA car park. A doctor talks about her stay at a clinic in Boston, about the courteous manner of her colleagues and how they still take the time to treat patients there. But it's also nice to come back. To the Markish Sea, where the days are longer, as the village motto proclaims – in Diensdorf am Scharmützelsee. But it's also nice to be back. Back to the Markish Sea, where the days are longer, as the village motto evokes – in Diensdorf on Lake Scharmützel.