In the following, the question of the seminal figure as an aesthetic model, literary, moral or even human role model will be examined beyond major literary figures and names, as a special form of literary reference and dialogue that connects two writers from two generations of the same family: Jenny Erpenbeck, born in East Berlin in 1967 and now one of the most important authors in contemporary literature, and her grandmother Hedda Zinner, born in 1904 in Lviv, Galicia, and who died in Berlin in 1994, author of an extensive oeuvre in the GDR that has largely been forgotten today