Conclusion

Summary

“So, which one did you like best?” the real estate agent asks the prospective home buyer at the end of a house tour. In answering this question, the client might address price, location, and design, or perhaps discuss needs and wants that could also include those of family members. At heart, these considerations all point to the hope for the good life. “Houses are fictions of how life ought to be,” Philippa Tristam has stated (265), and the plots that unfold in houses are, as I hope I have shown in the preceding interpretations, built on influential but conflicted bourgeois house imaginaries whose hold is not easily escaped. Many of the houses visited reference the dream of belonging, of shelter and beauty, of a house free of haunting and fear; but the texts discussed also reveal this dream's exclusions and limitations. What Rosemary Marangoly George called “the seductive pleasure of belonging in homes and communities and in nations,” needs to be balanced, if not reconciled, with the “exclusions and inclusions” (200), on which such pleasures rest. Summarizing how the group of writers presented in this study, many of them leading figures of contemporary German literature, used the house reveals the tensions between conflicting needs and desires.

In the novels Heimsuchung by Jenny Erpenbeck and Der Bademeister by Katharina Hacker, the house on the lake and the swimming pool in the former East Berlin designate both personal and German national history, and they were intended to ensure permanence and constancy, the enduring strength of Heimat as a deep attachment to locality.