"A detestable word? A word with a dark history?… I realize that the word has a bad reputation, that it has been abused, so seriously abused that one can hardly use it nowadays … But for that very reason, could we not try to rid the word of its bad connotations? Give it back a sort of purity?"

The word is "homeland," and the speaker is Zygmunt Rogalla, master weaver of rugs and the narrative of Siegfried Lenz's new epic fable ["The Heritage"]. Its original title, literally translated, was "The Homeland Museum," and its theme is the vast gulf between Germany's past and present: a gulf created by the Nazi's unscrupulous use of the idea of homeland, heritage and history to justify and legitimize xenophobia, tyranny and the doctrine of ethnic purity. "The Heritage" is, among many other things, an attempt to rescue the past from its exploiters: a...