In her debut novel 'Wo der Name wohnt', Ricarda Messner delves into the secrets of her Latvian roots and the loss of the family name Levitanus. The book draws from her own life, including her family's immigration to West Germany in 1971 and the uncovering of dark family secrets. Messner reflects on names, memory, and the voices of the dead.
Ricarda Messner's first novel 'Wo der Name wohnt', published by Suhrkamp in 2025, centers on the maternal family name Levitanus. The first-person narrator mourns this name, which dies out with her grandmother's death, and unsuccessfully applies for a name change from Berlin authorities. 'I mourned the name like a face, so I wanted to take it on', Messner explains in a ZEIT interview.
The story starts in Berlin with two neighboring houses, numbers 36 and 37, where Messner lived with her mother and grandparents. Her family fled Latvia for West Germany in 1971. Instead of a linear narrative, Messner uses an overlaid time structure to make the past tangible in the present. 'I'm interested in where and how the past appears in the now', she says.
A pivotal moment is the discovery at age 15: Documents reveal that most of her grandfather's family was murdered in Riga in 1941 by the German and Latvian SS. Messner incorporates authentic witness statements, notarially certified, and lets the dead act as co-narrators. The novel includes transcriptions and translations to capture the multilingual history.
Trips to Latvia with her family shaped Messner's observation of her mother's body language in Riga. Though Latvian and Russian languages were lost, she follows the stories. The 170-page book costs 23 euros in print and 19.99 euros as an e-book.
