Restitution

As children in Central Illinois, Kate and Martin were never told much about their mother’ s childhood in East Germany. And they rarely asked questions. They were too busy grappling with the heartache left behind by an absent father and the tough love of a mother forced to raise them alone in a country not her own. Decades later, when the Berlin Wall falls, Kate and Martin are faced with a difficult decision: Should they try to reclaim the house in East Germany from which their grandparents fled in the 1950s? They travel to their grandparents’ hometown and meet the couple now living in the house. But a house is never just a house, and the family secrets they discover reopen old wounds, driving the siblings apart just as divided Germany is coming together. Against the backdrop of German reunification, Restitution asks urgent questions that resonate today. What remains when people leave entire lives behind? What happens when personal histories are erased? And what— if anything— can heal these wounds?