A History We Thought We Knew: An Interview with Tamar Shapiro

Restitution by Tamar Shapiro
Regal House Publishing, 2025. 266 pages. $19.95 paperback.

 If you’re old enough to remember the fall of the Berlin Wall, the upcoming anniversary on November 9th may spark memories of news coverage from the days and weeks following the announcement that the nearly thirty-year-old barrier between East and West Germany had, at last, come down. I remember watching footage of the far-away celebrations from my parent’s midwestern living room: teenagers dancing atop a graffiti-covered wall, East German families reuniting after decades-long separations with relatives from the West, people of all ages swinging pickaxes at a barrier that had come to symbolize every restriction placed on them since the earliest days of Soviet occupation. A joyous time indeed. But as Tamar Shapiro points out in her debut novel Restitution, the reuniting of the two Germanies did not come without its difficulties. In the pages of this beautifully written family story, Shapiro acquaints us with a lesser-known side of reunification—a side that brought economic instability to the East and created a sudden and profound social divide between East and West.

Restitution takes us inside a mending Germany by introducing us to Kate and Martin, two US-raised siblings who, after the Wall topples, decide to accompany their mother on a trip to the East German town she fled as a child. As we travel with them to the “unremarkable house” that holds such troubled memories for their mother, as we sit down with them at a kitchen table and listen to the home’s current owner enumerate the many uncertainties of her now borderless world—so many factories closing, so many neighbors leaving, so much culture swept away overnight—we begin to see reunification in a whole new light, and therein lies Shapiro’s art as a storyteller. She believes in acquainting her readers closely with her characters and their setting, in engaging our senses through her vivid descriptions of their internal and external worlds. As a reader, I came to care deeply about these characters, actually taking sides when Kate and Martin came to blows over whether to try to reclaim the house their grandparents fled in the 1950s, sharing their shock when they uncovered long held family secrets.

In a recent interview, I talked with Tamar Shapiro about her character-driven writing style, about how families can resemble countries, and about what we, as citizens of a politically divided America, stand to learn by taking a deeper, more intimate look at a history we thought we knew. – Carrie Muehle



TriQuarterly: While Restitution is not an autobiographical work, you did find inspiration in your personal connection to Germany. Like its narrator Kate, you grew up in two worlds (Germany and the United States), speaking two languages, and processing two histories… and yet Kate’s story is entirely her own. How did your real-life connection to Germany help inform the novel’s characters and plot?

Shapiro: Germany is like a second home to me. My mother is German (from what was then West Germany), and she made sure I was strongly connected to the language, the culture, and to our extended family in Germany. I’ve lived there repeatedly both as a child and as an adult. In 1990, my parents moved from Illinois, where I had mostly grown up, to Leipzig in former East Germany. I was already out of college at that point and no longer living with them, but I visited frequently. Over the course of these many visits, I fell in love with Leipzig. Then, in 2017, I finally moved to Leipzig myself with my husband and two kids, albeit only for two years. My interest in the story that I tell in Restitution grew out of my love for Leipzig, and I wrote the early drafts while living there.

Not surprisingly, this connection to Germany shaped almost everything about the characters and the plot of Restitution. Although Kate’s story is not my story (and I don’t think I am very much like Kate), we do share both the joy and the confusion that comes from having two homes. Questions about where I belong have always been a part of my life, and they are threaded throughout the lives of my characters as well. More specifically, the plot of the novel grew out of conversations I had with my parents’ friends and colleagues in the early years after reunification, as well as subsequent conversations with my own friends in Berlin and Leipzig who had lived through reunification. I am so grateful for their openness and for the spark they provided that ended up becoming this book.

TQ: Early in the book, Kate and her husband Darren watch breaking news of the fall of the Berlin Wall from their living room in Illinois. Your descriptions of the US coverage took me back to November 9, 1989, to all the singing and dancing and hugging I saw on TV. But as Restitution points out, it wasn’t all celebration. Reunification came with a good deal of confusion and uncertainty that I don’t recall hearing much about in the US.  Why do you think that part of the story was overlooked here and why was it important to you to bring it to light?

S: In the U.S., the fall of the Berlin Wall is generally portrayed as a triumphant moment – a victory over the Soviet Union. This portrayal aligns neatly with the American narrative about its own role in the Cold War. But the actual reunification process that followed was much more complex and nuanced. Above all, it was very rushed. The Wall came down in November 1989. By July 1990, the Deutschmark had been adopted in the East, and all border controls had been removed. By early October 1990, there was one country. It is no surprise that a process that hasty was also flawed.  Many of the decisions made then continue to divide the country more than three decades later. I wanted to bring this fascinating and troubling history to an audience that might not be familiar with it, and I am convinced there are lessons in the continuing divisions within German society that are relevant to our own divided society in the U.S. today.

TQ: A story of reunification does seem well timed for a U.S. audience, given our current political and cultural divide. What do you hope American readers will take from the novel?

S: The division between the two Germanies didn’t magically disappear after reunification. In fact, the process of reunification, which was more takeover than merger, reinforced certain societal divisions. For all intents and purposes, the East was subsumed into the West, and its history, as well as the personal histories and achievements of its citizens, was largely dismissed. This, in turn, bred great resentment. I want to be clear that the East German regime was a corrupt, violent, repressive regime, and I have little patience for “Ostalgie” (a frequently used riff on the word nostalgia referring to the sentiment that everything was better back in the East). Yet, the many ways in which East Germans were made to feel “lesser” during and after reunification created dangerous rifts in society. These rifts arguably laid the groundwork for the particularly strong rise in extreme far-right support we are seeing now in the former East German states—a rise that mirrors the sharp rightward shift among portions of the population in the U.S., as well as in other countries. Although Restitution is primarily a family story, I do hope it provides insight into certain root causes of social and political disaffection because I believe this knowledge will be critical to our ability to fight back against the rising tide of authoritarianism here and abroad.

TQ: Let’s talk about The Wall as metaphor. While we witness its fall in Chapter One, it manages to cast its shadow over the characters’ lives throughout the entire story. Figurative walls go up between family members, particularly Kate and Martin, and around family secrets. What made you want to explore this idea of figurative walls

S: I was definitely intrigued by the parallels between countries and families—the way they can fall apart and come back together. I wanted to use these parallels to make the political trauma of Germany’s division and reunification more personal and relatable for readers.  For example, I hoped that by showing how hard it can be for siblings to reconcile after an estrangement, I might also help readers understand in a more visceral way why reunification wasn’t simply the triumphant end of the Cold War, but the start of something precarious. Still, I didn’t want to be too cute about it. Stories similar to this one took place many times after the fall of the Wall, and I imagine the families involved were not thinking about analogies! They were too busy dealing with the political decisions that deeply impacted their families’ wellbeing.

There is a scene in Restitution where young Martin is playing with Legos. In the first draft, I had him building a wall out of multi-colored Lego pieces. One of my early readers commented that it felt a little too on the nose. A Lego wall and the Berlin Wall. The funny thing is that I had not even made the connection. For one thing, the Berlin Wall hadn’t been built yet in the 1950s, which is when most of the East German action in my novel takes place, so the literal wall doesn’t play much of a role in Restitution. For another, I was trying to achieve an altogether different purpose in that Lego-building scene—shedding light on family dynamics amid loss. In the end, I changed the Lego wall to a Lego fence to avoid the possibility that readers would interpret the Legos as an overly pointed analogy. I hope that the parallels I draw between countries and families illuminate the context in which this story takes place, but without drawing attention away from the underlying human drama that is the core of the story.

TQ: Place figures prominently in the book and you describe the landscapes and structures in the Bodensee, Grimma and Leipzig with incredible precision. Does this level of detail reflect a writerly impulse, or does it relate more to how Kate as a character sees the world?

S: Kate and I are dissimilar in many ways, but I do think we both connect strongly with place. This book was inspired by my love of the places I describe—Central Illinois, the Bodensee, Leipzig and its surroundings. It gave me great pleasure to paint them for the reader. At the same time, I felt this approach also fit with who Kate is. She’s a very observant narrator—not always correct in her observations, but always looking, interpreting, and analyzing.

In addition, my writing takes inspiration from many different literary sources, including German literature which, on the whole, tends to be more character-driven than action-driven—though there are many exceptions, of course. Character development is also central to my writing, and like real people, characters too are shaped by the places they know. I believe these places come alive when they are imbued with specificity.

TQ: Questions of belonging come through strongly in the work, as do questions of how individuals and families cope with loss, secrecy, and abandonment. Did you find it difficult to weave all these themes together within the space of one family’s story?

S: On the contrary, I found that working within the confines of a single family allowed me to focus more strongly on the central themes of the book because I had the time and space to dig more deeply into each character. Restitution is not so much about what happens, but why and how. The reader finds out right up front in the prologue that the siblings are estranged, after which the novel jumps back in time to explore why and how they got there. To answer these trickier questions, I had to get to know my characters and unearth their most closely held emotions. Because I focused largely on one small family, I had the luxury of lingering with these characters and finding the seeds of the book’s bigger themes within each of them. That was the real joy of writing Restitution.

TQ: There’s a fair amount of grief in this book, a fair amount of trauma. But you’ve also infused it with moments of laughter and brightness, and end on a note of hope. How difficult was it to strike the right balance of darkness and light? 

S: Two things were very important to me: First, I wanted Kate and Martin’s relationship to have warmth, love and mutual understanding, not just tension. Not only does this feel more believable, but their warmth also makes their estrangement more poignant. They know each other so well even in those moments when they are farthest apart. Second, I knew I wanted to end on a hopeful note. I’m not sure the state of our world justifies a hopeful ending to a book that is, in part, about political decisions that caused great harm to people. But at least within the family story, I wanted to end on a cautiously optimistic note. I spent a lot of time with these characters over the past eight years. I felt I owed them at least that much.

TQ: This is your debut novel. How long did it take you to complete it, and how did the story evolve over the course of the writing?

S: I began writing in 2017, and I signed my contract for publication in late 2023. The first draft was completed in just over a year, but the rest of the time was spent on revision. I’ve discovered that I am the kind of writer who does most of my actual writing during the revision process. That’s when I really understand what it is I want to say and who my characters are. For this reason, it’s also the part of the process that is the most fun for me. It’s like figuring out a puzzle. You’ve got all the pieces scattered around, and revision is when they come together to form one coherent picture. To take the analogy a step further, I put together the edges of the puzzle very early on. In other words, I knew where I wanted the story to begin and to end almost from the start. I drafted versions of both the prologue and the closing chapter in the very first month I began to write. Of course, some of the details changed over time, but the core ideas of the beginning and the ending remained the same. The rest of the book remained in flux much longer. I often had breakthroughs on runs or on long walks with my daughter, who was brilliant at thinking through plot or character challenges. What a feeling when it finally all came together! By that point, I no longer had any idea which draft I was on. I had long ago lost count.

TQ: How different is the final version of RESTITUTION from the draft you started back in 2017? 

S: If someone were to compare the final version with the first draft, it would be clear that they are the same book. Much of the plot remains the same, the characters largely did not change, and many of the chapters that were in the first draft are still present in the final draft. However, I made very significant differences both in content and in structure. Each of these changes, in turn, required an entire waterfall of additional changes throughout the book. It took me several drafts and endless checklists simply to catch all the places where one change necessitated many more.

Revision can be a tricky part of the writing process, because it also tends to be when writers get the most feedback. Connecting with other writers and learning from them was an incredibly important and productive part of my writing process, and I have been very lucky to have wonderful writing groups that have provided literary and emotional support! But it can also be easy to be shaken by feedback from others, especially with a debut novel. I learned to differentiate feedback that would help me make the book into a better version of the book I wanted to write from feedback that would make it into a different book altogether. For example, in early drafts, there were far more time jumps than in the current version. I reworked the structure of Restitution many times based on feedback that these jumps were confusing. But no matter how often I got that feedback, I was unwilling to make the book fully chronological. From the very beginning, I’d known that I wanted to capture the fluid way our memories jump around in time. It took many drafts to get the “right” balance between clarity and fluidity, and it took almost as long to recognize that I was the only one who could define “right” for myself.

TQ: You speak fluent German and probably could have written this story for a German audience if you’d wanted. Did you ever consider it and how might that have changed the story?

S: I learned both English and German when I was young. I’ve also lived in Germany both as a child and as an adult, and I consider myself fluent in German. Having said that, there’s no question I have spent much more of my life in the U.S. and am more comfortable in English, especially when writing.  I think it takes a very particular kind of fluency to be able to write a novel in any language. While it would be a challenge for me to write a book in German, it is a challenge I would love to take on some day. For one thing, I think differently in the two languages, so writing in German would allow me access a different side of my personality. For another, I just love constructing German sentences—each one is like an intricate puzzle or a perfectly layered cake! I get immense pleasure out of reading German sentences. I imagine it would be a thrill to write them.

As for Restitution, I never considered writing it in German. In fact, I specifically set out to write this for an English-speaking audience. While there is a great deal of English-language literature about World War II, there is comparatively little English-language literature about the division of Germany into East and West and almost none about the subsequent reunification of the two Germanies. There are wonderful German novels on these topics that have been translated into English, but these books are often aimed at a German audience with a very different knowledge base.  Having said that, my German friends have pointed out that younger generations in Germany are also less familiar with this history. So perhaps Restitution will find a German audience too.

TQ: This idea of thinking differently in the two languages is fascinating. Can you talk a bit more about that? 

S: German is a far more emotional language for me, because it is connected so strongly to my warmest childhood memories—of summer and of extended family. I have an entire world of smells and sounds and sights that I connect with these memories and that only the German language can bring to life. I am not sure if this emotional resonance is visible to others when I speak German, but I feel it very strongly.

TQ: Do you consider Restitution a work of historical fiction?

S: I’m not a big fan of the clear lines that are sometimes drawn between genres of fiction. Yes, Restitution deals with history, but I never considered it historical fiction. To me, it is simply a story about people who—like all people—live in a historical context and whose experience within that historical context has some bearing on our lives today. The characters drive the story, not the history. I feel similarly about books I read. I am drawn to books that are primarily human dramas but also teach me something new about the world—whether it’s about a historical period, a contemporary issue, or an unfamiliar geography. As long as these stories have some bearing on contemporary life, they are all contemporary novels to me!

Tamar Shapiro’s debut novel, Restitution, was published in September 2025 and named one of the 49 Must-Read Books of Fall 2025 by Town and Country Magazine. Her writing has also appeared in Poets and Writers, Electric Literature, Literary Hub, and the Washington Independent Review of Books. A former housing attorney and non-profit leader, Shapiro grew up in both the U.S. and Germany and now lives in Washington, DC.