This week I read Visitation by Jenny Erpenbeck. Erpenbeck was born in 1967 in East Berlin, Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall. East Berlin was the Soviet sector of Berlin and was formed in 1945 (the city was separated physically from West Berlin by the Berlin Wall from 1961-1989) and didn’t dissolve until the fall of the wall and the unification of Berlin in 1990. Germany is a country located in Central Europe and is bordered by nine different countries: Denmark, Poland, Czech Republic, Austria, Switzerland, France, Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands.
Visitation is a haunting portrayal of Germany’s history spanning over a hundred years beginning in the 1800s and ending with the fall of the Berlin Wall and reunification in 1990. The protagonist of the story is not a human being, but a house. It is located on Bradenburg lake outside of Berlin and once belonged to Erpenbeck’s grandparents.
We follow the house through its 12 residents: The Gardener, The Wealthy Farmer and his Four Daughters, The Architect, The Cloth Manufacturer, The Architect’s Wife, The Girl, The Red Army Officer, The Writer, The Visitor, The Subtenants, The Childhood Friend, and The Illegitimate Owner. The only constant is the aging Gardener who sees the house through its trials and tribulations as well as through its joy.
The Gardener “himself own[s] no land, not even a patch of forest, he lives alone in an abandoned hunting lodge at the edge of the woods, he's always lived there, everyone in the village knows him, and yet he is only ever referred to by both young and old as The Gardener, as though he had no other name”. The Gardener provides a familiar face and is a character that is comforting in his monotony. He sows the seeds, mows the grass, and waters the plants without complaint. As the house changes hands, sometimes violently, reading a mention of the one familiar face is an Easter egg for the reader to grab onto.
In one scene we see The Architect and his wife planning to flee to West Berlin after he got a tip that his name is on a list of people who are going to be arrested. His crime? Buying screws made in the West Berlin to use on a building project in the East. He would have a sentence of at least five years in prison. He grapples with not only the loss of the house that him and his wife designed and put their heart and soul into, but also the loss of his sense of purpose. He "finds that he no longer knows something he once used to know: what counts as valuable and what does not”. He contemplates the meaning of value as he buries dinner china and other “valuables” underneath the garden.
Erpenbeck focuses not only on Germany’s turbulent history, but also the country’s identity and what it means to be German. As The Writer inhabits the house she works on her historical fiction novel. She takes inspiration from the diary of a German mayor during WWII who disagreed with Hitler and Nazism, but in the end did not rebel and let them take over his town. In his diary he writes, “‘Germany had been irrevocably transformed into something disembodied, a lost spirit that neither knew nor was forced to imagine all these horrific things’”. She is particularly taken with his constant refrain that all he wants is to go home, despite never having left.
In the epilogue, after decades and decades of use, the house is torn down. That is only “until the time comes when a different house will be built on this same spot, [and] the landscape, if ever so briefly, resembles itself once more”.
With the possibility of the reconstruction, Erpenbeck also leaves us with the hope that Germany and its people can also put themselves back together again. She writes about her “hope for mankind's salvation from greed and envy”, though there is no erasing history. “The errors of mortals were mortal, but their work was immortal”.
This book is not for the faint of heart. Erpenbeck does not shy away from violence or truth and the descriptions of the atrocities committed by the Nazis and The Red Army, especially against young children, are gut-wrenching. Through the build-up and lifespan of a house, Erpenbeck gives a nuanced and truthful history of Germany. While she does not disguise the tragedy, she still leaves readers with hope in humanity as well as the hope that we are not doomed to repeat history.
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