Moving often involves a head-on confrontation with all the possessions one has acquired over the years, and choosing what to keep and what to cast off can be a difficult and laborious undertaking. Decisions are influenced by items' economic or sentimental value — the latter indicating their mnemonic worth and meaning. In these choices, far more is at stake than the fate of objects, since sorting through things in preparation for moving also entails, according to Jean-Sébastien Marcoux, “the sorting out of relations and memories. … As such, sorting mediates the relationship between people and things, and in turn that between people and places.” From this anthropological point of view, the seemingly simple act of sorting — that is to say ranking, keeping, and discarding belongings — can be interpreted as “a way of rewriting one's autobiography, inscribed in things.” House inheritance (particularly when unexpected) entails, it seems to me, a similar though considerably more complex autobiographical sorting act. In taking apart the contents of ancestral homes, one faces not only familial biographies as expressed in the family's belongings but also confronts one's own relationship with this past. Two recent “Familienromane” (family novels), Arno Geiger's Es geht uns gut (2005, translated as We Are Doing Fine, 2011) and Katharina Hagena's Der Geschmack von Apfelkernen (2008, The taste of appleseeds), depict the sudden confrontation with the past triggered by house inheritance, and these texts explore how individual biography and family ancestry are mediated through a house.