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WORK TITLE: This House Is Mine
WORK NOTES: trans by Anne Stokes
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1964
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: German
http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/international/international-book-news/article/67961-behind-the-german-bestseller-old-country.html * https://www.goethe.de/en/kul/lit/20681665.html * https://historicalnovelsociety.org/reviews/this-house-is-mine/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1964; married; children: one.
EDUCATION:Attended the Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel and the University of Hamburg.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Worked at North German Broadcasting Corporation (NDR).
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Dörte Hansen is a German author. Her first book, the novel This House Is Mine, became an instant hit. The book spans seventy years and follows the story of Vera, who at the beginning of the book is a five-year-old who has come to the rural Altland area of northern Germany from East Prussia in 1945 with her haughty mother, Hildegard. War refugees, Hilda and Vera are grudgingly allowed to stay in the servant’s room of a farmhouse owned by Ida Eckoff. Ida’s son, Karl, is a prisoner of war. When Karl eventually makes it back home, he has an injured leg and is dealing with the psychological effects of war. Much to Ida’s dismay, Karl and Hildegard begin a relationship and eventually marry. Karl is especially attached to the young Vera.
Vera never feels comfortable in the farmhouse or in the community, but she ends up staying. When Hildegard leaves Karl and Vera and runs to Hamburg to marry another man, Vera spends the next few decades in the emotionally cold house taking care of Karl. When Vera’s niece and four-year-old son escape an abusive relationship in Hamburg and come to live with Vera, they bring with them change to the house and to Vera.
Reviewers highly praised the novel. Historical Novel Society reviewer Cynthia Slocum wrote: “Eloquent imagery and symbolism enrich the perceptive central story, related through various characters’ points of view, and subplots portray cultural tensions between Altland’s entrenched heritage and the contemporary attitudes of city dwellers who flock there as tourists.” Regina Marler, writing online in the New York Times Book Review, commented: “Not much escapes Hansen, a former journalist, and one can only wish for a little more of Vera, perhaps, before she passes on her house to its next steward.”
Other reviewers were equally impressed. Library Journal contributor Lisa Rohrbaugh wrote: “Hansen carefully examines family relationships while providing amusing contrasts between city and country life. A wonderful, thought-provoking first novel.” A Publishers Weekly reviewer was impressed by Hansen’s descriptive powers, writing: “Hansen’s passages about the house and its village are fully realized and vivid, allowing for the setting to enhance the characters. … Hansen makes this story about the process of healing affecting, real, and memorable.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Library Journal, November 1, 2016, Lisa Rohrbaugh, review of This House Is Mine, p. 74.
Publishers Weekly, September 19, 2016, review of This House Is Mine, p. 42.
ONLINE
Historical Novel Society Website, https://historicalnovelsociety.org (November 1, 2016), Cynthia Slocum, review of This House Is Mine.
New York Times Book Review, https://www.nytimes.com (December 2, 2016), Regina Marler, review of This House Is Mine.
Dörte Hansen A Sense of Home – On Escape and Coming Home
Best-seller author Dörte Hansen;
Best-seller author Dörte Hansen; | © Sven Jaax
Dörte Hansen’s “Altes Land” (i.e. The Old Country) was the surprise hit of 2015. Without bogus romanticism, the debut novel tells about life in the country.
There is a widespread prejudice that best-sellers are now made by the marketing departments of publishing groups – and not by readers. While it cannot be denied that publishing houses have the corresponding budgets for arousing the desire to buy and read, the largest investments are put into those books that have already enjoyed a great success abroad, whose authors have already written several sales successes or are well-known in film or television. Dörte Hansen had none of this to offer. And yet she has written a best-seller. Born in 1964 and reared in a North Frisian village near Husum, the writer went to university in Hamburg, worked at the North German Broadcasting Corporation (NDR) and moved from the city one day, with her husband and daughter, to the countryside – to that rustic, apple and cherry tree paradise south of the Elbe which gave her debut novel its title: Altes Land, The Old Country. It took Hansen some years of complete silence before she could make a book out of her observations and experiences and, above all, her feelings for the landscape and its inhabitants.
Middle-class life, described with a malicious eye
Altes Land takes place in a farmhouse south of Hamburg. There, after the Second World War and flight from the East, arrives the East Prussian countess Hildegard von Kamcke together with her daughter. “Polack child” is what Vera, five years old in 1945 and the central female character of the novel, is called in her strange new home. All her life she feels strange in the big, cold farmhouse and yet remains bound to it, at least after she inherits it from her mother. Then a few years later her niece Anne, also a kind of refugee, joins her. She can no longer bear the middle-class hell, described with a malicious eye and satirical pointedness, of Hamburg-Ottensen. Thus a central theme of the novel may be seen as the necessity to flee, but also running away out of one’s own free will. Unmissable in the background is the question what then ensues: will the old country become a new home, can it become a place of rest, a truly sheltering home?
A home from which you can be expelled last of all is language. And so it is no accident that the Frisian Hansen speaks Low German with her husband, her daughter, her grandparents. Thus the little-spoken language becomes a home; you take it with you wherever you live. “We’re no longer born somewhere and stay there, as our parents or grandparents”, Hansen has said in an interview. “We have this immense freedom: Go wherever you like. Where that is isn’t always easy to say.” For from freedom under certain circumstances comes insecurity, a lack of shelter. Not knowing where you belong can often give you a feeling of painful loss. Many may see the remedy for this in a backward-looking nostalgia for the apparently intact life of the country.
No sentimental glorification of country life
The reviews therefore sometimes took Hansen to task for having based her great success on such magazine market publications as Landlust (i.e. Desire for the Countryside) or Mein schönes Land (i.e. My Beautiful Countryside). But in the pages of Altes Land the reader will find no pastel-coloured, sentimental glorification of country life. The characters are rough, all damaged, yes, perhaps here and there a little too conspicuously gnarled. For example, the taciturn farmer Dirk zum Felde, who mulls over whether he should convert his farm into a guesthouse. Or the perpetually ill-tempered neighbour Heinrich Lührs with his angular face. Their counter-image is the somewhat caricature-like portrayed journalist Burkhard Weißwerth, who significantly wants to found a magazine entitled Land&Lecker (i.e. Country & Delicious), a dig by the journalist Hansen against her own guild and the nature hype rampant amongst urbanites.
Shortly after the publication of Altes Land in March 2015 the novel made it to one of the top places on the Spiegel best-seller list, reaping almost without exception good reviews. The TV critic Dennis Scheck called Hansen “a psychologically savvy author”, whose novel strikes “somnambulistically the right balance between family novel and satire”. Die Zeit praised its “refreshing entertainment”, and the NDR chose Altes Land shortly after its publication as the March Book of the Month: “This novel is refreshingly different. No romanticism. Cliché free. [...] A story that leaves a deep impression on the mind, like the groaning and creaking of the big, dark farmhouse“. Finally, at the end of 2015, the association of owner-operated bookshops selected the novel as Favourite Book of the Year.
Contradictions remain
Paradoxically, however, the novel, which over the summer climbed to the top of the best-seller lists and stayed there for months, may owe its success to exactly that romantic glorification of the countryside practiced by the urban readership and so aptly caricatured in Hansen’s journalist character. This contradiction remains; it is broached in the novel itself, but then left as it is. Dörte Hansen has doubtless written a Heimat novel that makes use of the corresponding longings. But the old house is never glorified; it affords the opportunity of feeling at home only temporarily. “Dit Huus is mien und doch nich mien, de no mi kummt, nennt’ t ook noch sien“ stands fittingly in Low German over its door: “This house is mine and yet not mine; those who come after me will also call it theirs”.
Hansen, Dorte. This House Is Mine
Lisa Rohrbaugh
141.18 (Nov. 1, 2016): p74.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Hansen, Dorte. This House Is Mine. St. Martin's. Nov. 2016.336p. tr. from German by Anne Stokes. ISBN 9781250100856. $26.99; ebk. ISBN 9781250106469. F
The "house" of the title is an old, thatched-roof farmhouse in rural Altland, Germany, with an inscription on its front facade that reads, "This house is mine and not mine, he who comes after me will call it his." Alternating a bit roughly between the present and 1945, this story weaves the lives of two strong, independent, sometimes eccentric women who do, indeed, become a family. Anne is a carpenter by trade and a single mother with a young son, and her Aunt Vera, an unmarried dentist, lives in the dilapidated old homestead. As the renovations on the house progress, so does their relationship. Vera and Anne learn to respect, trust, and care for each other as well as young Leon. Stokes's translation is rocky in the beginning but smooths out to make for an enjoyable read.
VERDICT In this remarkable debut novel about life and love among mothers, sons, stepfathers, lovers, friends, and neighbors, Hansen carefully examines family relationships while providing amusing contrasts between city and country life. A wonderful, thought-provoking first novel that will work well for book groups.--Lisa Rohrbaugh, Leetonia Community P.L., OH
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Rohrbaugh, Lisa. "Hansen, Dorte. This House Is Mine." Library Journal, 1 Nov. 2016, p. 74+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA467830337&it=r&asid=0ed8e1b6edd5c624ff613b06b295123a. Accessed 29 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A467830337
This House is Mine
263.38 (Sept. 19, 2016): p42.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
This House is Mine
Dorte Hansen, trans. from the German by Anne Stokes. St. Martin's, $26.99 (336p) ISBN 978-1-250-10085-6
Hansen's haunting debut novel spans 70 years, from 1945 to the present, presenting a progression of women who carry their histories with them. Vera is a Polish refugee. In the depths of winter, she and her mother, Hildegard, journey across the barren expanse of post-WWII Europe looking for a new home. Their destination is the farm of Ida Eckhoff, where Ida lives with her son, Karl, who was injured in the war. The book switches between Vera adjusting to life in northern Germany, and modern-day Hamburg, where we follow Vera's niece, the recently single Anne Hove, and Anne's son, Leon. In alternating chapters, Hansen slowly reveals the threads that connect these two women. Anne is a single mother and recently jobless, and she decides to retreat with Leon to the family farm, where a much older Vera still lives. That house, and the haunting memories of generations of family, keeps Vera awake at night as it decays around her. Vera never felt at home there but never left; Anne has never lived there but insists on making it home, and she begins to fix the decrepit building. Hansen's passages about the house and its village are fully realized and vivid, allowing for the setting to enhance the characters. Though the narrative is perhaps a bit familiar, Hansen makes this story about the process of healing affecting, real, and memorable. (Nov.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"This House is Mine." Publishers Weekly, 19 Sept. 2016, p. 42. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA464352691&it=r&asid=7311f24ea0ce2dcb5be2a229c7211119. Accessed 29 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A464352691
This House Is Mine
By Dörte Hansen
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This literary novel takes place in the rural Altland area of northern Germany, where Vera arrives from East Prussia as a five-year-old war refugee in 1945. Ida Eckhoff, a farmer’s widow, grudgingly allows Vera and her haughty mother Hildegard to stay in the servant’s room. Ida’s son, a prisoner of war, returns with an injured leg and permanently disabled by psychological trauma. A bond forms between Karl Eckhoff and the young Vera. When Hildegard marries Karl, much to Ida’s displeasure, Vera lives in the crossfire of a domestic battle of wills. Vera’s mother later abandons her and Karl to marry a wealthy man in Hamburg.
The ravages of World War II, however, never leave. For decades an emotionally numb Vera tends to Karl, whose sleep is haunted nightly by invading Russians. She clings to the cold house, never really at home in it or in the surrounding community, and grapples with her own experiences of the war’s devastation. The centuries-old farmhouse speaks to Vera via noises in its roof and walls and the inscription carved on the beam of its gable: this house is mine but not mine, it also belongs to the one who comes after me.
Vera’s niece flees Hamburg when the relationship with her child’s father implodes and she moves into the farmhouse with a four-year-old son in tow. This pair of present-day refugees brings change to the house that begins to thaw Vera’s frozen core.
Eloquent imagery and symbolism enrich the perceptive central story, related through various characters’ points of view, and subplots portray cultural tensions between Altland’s entrenched heritage and the contemporary attitudes of city dwellers who flock there as tourists.
Review
Appeared in
HNR Issue 78 (November 2016)
Reviewed by
Cynthia Slocum
A House Connects Refugees in This Novel
By REGINA MARLERDEC. 2, 2016
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Dörte Hansen Credit Sven Jaax
THIS HOUSE IS MINE
By Dörte Hansen
Translated by Anne Stokes
325 pp. St. Martin’s Press. $26.99.
A northern German farmhouse groans in the wind, its old, bare timbers “like gray bones.” “That’s what witches sound like when they’re burning,” thinks 5-year-old Vera, the refugee at the center of Dörte Hansen’s shrewd, timely, completely absorbing debut novel. Readers captivated by the gothic opening of “This House Is Mine” may be surprised to watch this dark bud blossom into a quirky family saga and social satire. Manderley this is not.
Vera’s mother, Hildegard von Kamcke, fled East Prussia with her at the end of World War II. They find a bed — but not a home — on Ida Eckhoff’s ramshackle farm in the Altland. For months, Hildegard disappears nightly to steal milk directly from Ida’s cow and to pocket a few apples from her orchard. Eventually Ida makes grudging accommodation for Hildegard (who completes her takeover by marrying Ida’s war-damaged son, Karl) and begins to look after Vera. She teaches Vera to read the Low German inscription carved on the house’s gable: “This hoose is mine ain and yet no mine ain, he that follows will caw it his.”
Gruff Ida performs admirably in loco grandparentis. Later, when Hildegard abandons Vera and Karl for a wealthy man and his villa in suburban Hamburg, Karl does equally well for his adoptive child. And she becomes his caretaker, nursing him through his night terrors. Because he can’t be left alone for long, Vera moves away only to earn a dental surgery diploma, then returns to care for Karl. “There wasn’t a word for what Karl had been,” Vera reflects after his death, “not a father, nor a brother, nor a child. Her comrade perhaps. Her fellow man.” Vera inherits the sagging, distinguished house that is hers but not hers. She survives among her insular country neighbors by being slightly terrifying — keeping ferocious dogs, for example — but also by not asking or expecting to belong.
We recognize the modern, make-do, lateral construction of Vera’s family: a reluctant host who gradually assumes a grandmother’s role; a stepfather who becomes the sole parent. In the city, having brushed off the dirt of Altland, Hildegard gives birth to another daughter. Raised apart, Vera and her half sister barely know each other. Yet one day, Anne, the half sister’s daughter, drives up to the farm with her own child and his pet rabbit in a cage. “Vera Eckhoff didn’t know much about her niece,” Hansen writes, “but she knew a refugee when she saw one.”
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Hansen’s themes — family, home, belonging, alienation — are reiterated in this Vera/Anne doubling, and feel especially poignant given the current refugee crisis in Europe and the backlash against migrants. (This novel was a best seller in Germany.) But even a welcoming hand can’t erase a refugee’s losses. Hildegard describes her fellow refugees as “drift ice”: “homesick wanderers for the rest of their lives. They had marched off as Prussians and arrived as riffraff.”
The brief, powerful glimpse Hansen allows us into the horrors of Hildegard’s flight occurs relatively late in “This House Is Mine.” By then, readers will have fallen for the novel’s odd charm: not as odd as “The Tin Drum,” the ur-text of postwar German exile, but with some arresting tonal shifts. Chapters set in the present day playfully puncture Gen-X mores with jokes about “the organic mob in Hamburg,” with their overprotected children and underprotected marriages, who can’t tell factory jam from homemade, but who besiege the Altland farmers to grow warty, authentic heirloom fruits and stop spraying their crops.
Not much escapes Hansen, a former journalist, and one can only wish for a little more of Vera, perhaps, before she passes on her house to its next steward.
Regina Marler, the editor of “Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell,” is writing a book about Virginia Woolf.