In September 1990, Victoria Donnelly accompanies her mother, Anneliese, to Regensburg to sell the apartment building in which Anneliese grew up. The three-story house on Lonerstrasse appears merely old and neglected, but its wooden staircase conceals evidence of a history the Felsing family has spent decades avoiding.

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Before the war, the building belonged to Samuel and Rachel Rosenfeld, who lived on the ground floor with their three daughters. Bruno Felsing, Anneliese’s ambitious father, rented the apartment above them and taught their eldest daughter, Miriam. As Nazi persecution intensified, Bruno used his political position to acquire the Rosenfeld property for one Reichsmark. The Rosenfelds remained in their former home as his tenants until their deportation.

 

More than fifty years later, Victoria discovers photographs, a black ledger, Miriam’s red belt, and a hidden manuscript written by Daniel, the young writer who lived in the Mansarde and loved her. Together, the objects reveal not only Bruno’s crimes but also the silence of Gerda, his wife, who preserved the house without ever openly confessing what she knew.

 

While Victoria forms an unexpected bond with Elias Rahman, a Palestinian architect interested in the property, she and Anneliese must determine who can rightfully claim a stolen home and what responsibility belongs to those who inherit it.

 

Moving between 1930s Germany and 1990, The Staircase is a literary historical novel about memory, complicity, dispossession, and the possibility of moral restitution.