visitation

Venue: DT Bühne - A plot of land on Scharmützelsee in Brandenburg, on it a summer house, including the story of the 20th century. This is how the novel by Berlin author Jenny Erpenbeck, published in 2007, could be summarized. A text in which the house, actually even the plot, has the main role. Originally owned by a large farmer, it is divided up after his death and becomes a stage for eleven life stories, representing hope and suffering, happiness and tragedy of the last one hundred years.

In eleven chapters, Erpenbeck chronicles the time and history of three generations that happened to this patch of earth, of an architect who was successful during the Nazi era who built a house according to his wife's ideas, of a Jewish cloth manufacturer who sells the property below value and is deported and murdered with his family. About the occupation of the house by the company of a young major of the Red Army after the Second World War, from the architect's wife hidden in the closet, from a writer returning from Soviet exile and finally from the architect's heirs, who redeem their claims to the house after the end of the GDR. During all this time, a gardener watches over the property, cuts hedges, cultivates shrubs, cultivates nature, which continues to spread out in the cracks of fate. Visitation is, in a sense, a history book, which, however, complicates clear associations between right and wrong, good and evil, perpetrators and victims, which rather makes the complexity of history tangible. Interwoven into it the story of the author whose grandmother Hedda Zinner herself owned a house on Scharmützelsee after she came to the GDR from Soviet exile in 1945.

In 2024, Jenny Erpenbeck received the International Booker Prize for her novel Kairos and became known to an international audience; the New York Times voted Visitation in the list of the “100 Best Books of the 21st Century.”