It’s not every day that a potential Nobel Prize winner comes to our school auditorium to read excerpts from one of her works. So Jenny Erpenbeck’s visit on March 16, 2026, was something truly special, as she rarely visits schools to read from her novel Heimsuchung - which was on this year’s high school graduation reading list - and to talk about the novel’s creation. Students from the thirteenth grade moderated the reading and facilitated discussions. In addition to students from the twelfth and thirteenth grades of the Nelson Mandela School, the audience also included graduating seniors from the Schiller Gymnasium.
Heimsuchung tells the story of a house on Lake Scharmützel. Over the course of the twentieth century, the house changed hands frequently, and its residents lived through the Weimar Republic, World War I and World War II, the Nazi era, and the GDR. In the novel, Jenny Erpenbeck also explores her own childhood memories of the house and its loss due to the restitution laws enacted after 1990. Prominent themes in the novel are flight and expulsion, as well as time and space. Jenny Erpenbeck read excerpts from the chapters “The Cloth Manufacturer” and “The Girl.” She spoke about the autobiographical details of the house, her experience while writing, and how she often dreamed of the house after losing it. One aspect discussed at length was the reason she dedicated the novel to Doris Kaplan. Kaplan was a young Jewish girl about whom she had read extensively during her research. In the novel, she represents the actual, displaced owners of the house. Thus, the house is not only an idyllic retreat but also a place with a dark past. For after Kaplan was deported with her mother to the Warsaw Ghetto, all traces of her were lost. The novel therefore has real-life starting points in many respects, which were then fleshed out by Jenny Erpenbeck.
Finally, it was a really great for everyone present that Jenny Erpenbeck signed the students’ novels and posed for photos with them.
We would like to thank the “Friends” of our school, which generously funded this memorable event for us.