Heimsuchung (Visitation)
by Jenny Erpenbeck DIRECTED BY Alexander Eisenach
premiere on 23.01.2026
synopsis
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 the novel by Berlin author Jenny Erpenbeck, published in 2007, could be summarized. It is a text in which the main role is played by the house, or rather the plot of land 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 with his family. She tells of the occupation of the house by a company of young Red Army majors 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 the nature that keeps spreading in 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, and instead makes 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 she came to the GDR from Soviet exile in 1945.
In 2024, Jenny Erpenbeck received the International Booker Prize for her novel Kairos, becoming known to an international audience, and the New York Times voted Heimsuchung (Haunting) one of the “100 Best Books of the 21st Century.”
premiere
23.01.2026
cast and creative
- directed by Alexander Eisenach
- Bühne Daniel Wollenzin
- Kostüm Claudia Irro
- Live-Musik Sven Michelson, Niklas Kraft
- Video Oliver Rossol
- Dramaturgie Johann Otten
- Licht Robert Grauel
Termine → Heimsuchung (Visitation)
-
Sun, 29. March 2026
by Jenny Erpenbeck DIRECTED BY Alexander Eisenach
DT Bühne
29.03.2026
18:00 → 20:45 Uhr
only a few tickets left