Jenny Erpenbeck, born in 1967 in East Berlin, and granddaughter of East German writers Hedda Zimmer and Fritz Erpenbeck, began her writing career in the 1990s after studying theater and directing. Author of prose, plays, essays, and radio plays, Erpenbeck won immediate critical acclaim with her first publication, Geschichte vom alten Kind (1999, translated as The Old Child and Other Stories, 2006). Born the same year in Frankfurt am Main, Hacker, who studied philosophy, history, and Jewish Studies, also began her freelance career in the late 1990s, and she has published both prose and poems. Her work, beginning with her first text, Tel Aviv: Eine Stadterzählung (Tel Aviv, a city narrative, 1997), explored the legacy of the Holocaust. While Erpenbeck and Hacker have produced writings that respond to major developments of postwar and postwall German literature and culture, especially with regard to German-Jewish history, each author has created stylistically distinctive and innovative new oeuvres. Heimsuchung (translated as Visitation, 2010), Jenny Erpenbeck's prize-winning novel of 2008, and Der Bademeister (translated as The Lifeguard, 2002), published by Katharina Hacker in 2000, both explore how characters form attachments, how they establish a sense of belonging, and how they cope when they lose such anchoring. Each novel also focuses on one specific edifice — a family home in Heimsuchung and a public swimming pool in Bademeister — in order to explore the relationships between bodies, biographies, and buildings.