A village can be small enough for everyone to know one another – and large enough to hide its history. In Shida Bazyar’s novel ‘Die Lücken’ (The Gaps), that place is called Heimesbach. Across several generations, it becomes the setting for persecution, flight and the attempt to construct an innocent past after the fact.
Heimesbach is invented, but not without roots in reality: Bazyar modelled it on Hermeskeil in the Hunsrück, where she was born in 1988. The novel does not equate the two simply because they are close. That very distance is part of its literary method – and of the responsibility that arises when an author translates historical violence into fictional lives.
A place is not a neutral backdrop
Bazyar’s debut, ‘Nachts ist es leise in Teheran’ (At Night It Is Quiet in Tehran, 2016), told a family story spanning the Iranian Revolution, flight and everyday life in Germany. ‘Drei Kameradinnen’ (Sisters in Arms, 2021) focused on friendship and racism in the present. In ‘Die Lücken’, the author brings these concerns together in one place: home emerges not as a settled feeling, but as a web of belonging, exclusion and memory.
The publisher describes Heimesbach as a community that conceals its past while offering refuge to people fleeing war. This is the novel’s central tension: a place can offer protection and still rest on a history that has not been confronted. Jewish families disappear from social life; perpetrators and those who benefited can later remember themselves as mere followers. Decades later, people from Iran arrive in the village, unaware of its earlier ruptures.
Rather than telling the story of a single family, Bazyar places different lives and periods alongside one another. The shifting perspectives and the overarching voice of a deceased female narrator allow the novel to leap across decades and into the thoughts of different characters. This is not a historical overview in the guise of a novel. It is a narrative form that reveals how memory is distributed: who can speak, who is passed over, and who declares themselves uninvolved?
Inventing without appropriating history
In a conversation with her publisher, Bazyar explicitly addressed the question of mediation: the narrator should be identifiable, she said, because everyone in this place is entangled in its history in their own way. The interweaving of fact and fiction also demands clarity. The name Heimesbach marks out a fictional setting; its recognisable proximity to Hermeskeil points to its starting point without equating the two.
This boundary is particularly important when historical victims and perpetrators appear in the novel. Fiction cannot fill gaps at will or treat historical experience as material freely available for use. But it can give narrative form to connections, everyday life and consequences that might easily remain abstract in a simple chronicle. Bazyar’s approach draws its power from this friction: the village is not documentary evidence, but neither is it a stage detached from history.
The title refers to more than missing information. Gaps emerge when people are expelled or murdered; they also emerge when those left behind fail to include that disappearance in their account. The village’s memory thus becomes a site of conflict in its own right. The question is not only what happened, but who is later allowed to determine what counts as a shared past.
The occasion: another literary prize
On 7 November 2026, Bazyar will be awarded the Wilhelm Raabe Literature Prize at the Kleines Haus of the Staatstheater Braunschweig. The city of Braunschweig and Deutschlandfunk are awarding the prize, worth 30,000 euros, for ‘Die Lücken’. The novel had already received the German Book Prize on 5 October. This further award draws attention to a book that does not tell history on a grand scale from above, but examines it in a place small enough to grasp and through its consequences for the people who live there.
Bazyar’s village is neither simply a home nor simply an indictment. It is a model of how the past continues to shape streets, houses and families – even when no one explicitly speaks of it. The novel does not claim to be able to recover the missing voices in full. Instead, it makes the gap itself legible: as a consequence of violence, a result of silence and a task for the present.
Original reviewed by the editors · 28 October 2026
