Writer of the Hare With Amber Eyes tells why a new Austrian law is behind the first gathering at his ancestral Jewish home since 1938

The celebrated writer and ceramicist Edmund de Waal has said it is a “huge deal” for his family, whose Jewish ancestors were driven out of Vienna in 1938, that the Austrian government is to allow descendants of Nazi victims to reclaim their citizenship.

De Waal, author of the 2010 bestselling family memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes, said he and his relatives would be returning to Vienna in November for their first reunion in more than eight decades. It would “mean the world” to his 90-year-old father, Victor de Waal, a former dean of Canterbury cathedral, who came to Britain as a refugee at the age of 10, to reclaim the citizenship that was stolen from his family, he said.

“My father will be coming with us to Vienna, and would like to be able to finally have the citizenship that was stripped from his parents,” De Waal said, before the opening this weekend in Berlin of his second solo exhibition there. “The only reason I and my family exist at all is because my father was allowed to come to Britain as a refugee and become a British citizen,” he said.

The artist said it was both poignant and timely that Austria’s parliament had passed the law earlier this month after decades of heated discussion. Until now, only Holocaust survivors were able to reclaim their citizenship. The decision of Austria’s legislature follows a huge rise in inquiries from descendants with British nationality seeking to secure citizenship of an EU country as Brexit looms.

Libraries are incredibly beautiful, powerful places of solace and resistance. They are under threat, not just in war zones but also in the UK Edmund de Waal

“Now, if and when my father is able to reclaim his, the rest of the family would be able to have it too, and that means a huge deal for us, particularly at a time of crisis in Europe when more and more terrible kinds of definitions of who belongs and who doesn’t are emerging, at a painful moment when the feeling of vulnerability around identity is very palpable,” said De Waal.

“I am European. I refuse to feel exiled from England, but, like many, I am feeling an acute sense of rootlessness. Now, somewhat ironically, we’re going back to the Vienna which banished my family in order to reinforce that Europeanness. It’s a restitution of sorts.”

It has been a stellar year for De Waal, who also has a show of his ceramic sculptures at the Frick Collection in New York. In November, he will bring his acclaimed “library of exile” from Venice’s Ateneo Veneto to Dresden’s baroque Japanisches Palais. The work, a porcelain pavilion built as a library with books by writers forced to leave home, has drawn more than 20,000 visitors since it opened in May. It is engraved with the names of lost libraries, including De Waal’s great-grandfather’s, Viktor von Ephrussi, and those of Sarajevo, Aleppo and Mosul. After travelling to theBritish Museum in London next March, the library will continue to Mosul in Iraq.

“It is a reminder of how incredibly beautiful, powerful places of solace and resistance libraries are, and just how under threat they are, not just in war zones but also when politicians decide we don’t need them any more, as they have in the UK,” De Waal said.

In Dresden, he said, he expected it to resonate anew. “This is the place where the first Nazi book burnings took place in 1933. It’s also where porcelain was first made in Europe 300 years ago, a story that features prominently in De Waal’s 2015 history of porcelain, The White Road.

The library of exile, the artist said, was an expression of a “political voice I’m inhabiting more and more”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Edmund de Waal in his ‘library of exile’, a porcelain pavilion with books by writers forced to leave home. The work will shown at the British Museum next March. Photograph: Mike Bruce/Courtesy of the artist

The Hare with Amber Eyes, which has sold more than 1.5 million copies and been translated into 30 languages, tells how De Waal’s ancestral Jewish family, the Ephrussi, were dispossessed of their fortune. He now regards that history as a reminder of “how quickly a society can turn on itself”, and it was with that in mind that he and his family decided recently to sell 79 of the 264 precious Japanese netsuke figurines, central to the plot of the memoir, to raise funds for the Refugee Council. The remainder of the collection is on long-term loan to Vienna’s Jewish museum.

“The council’s funds had been cut, reducing help for unaccompanied minors and legal aid for asylum seekers – obscene things that strip people of dignity,” he said. “At this moment of crisis it felt like there was no better use for our collection of migratory objects.” The remaining netsuke, he said, which are now part of an exhibition on his family and exile, “can help tell all kinds of stories about 1938, so the loan is also very much a political gesture, which feels like a good thing”.

De Waal and about 40 Ephrussi descendants will hold the first family gathering in Palais Ephrussi in more than eight decades.

But for now the artist is concentrating on his Berlin show, a sort of speech (lower case please), at the Max Hetzler gallery, which includes his trademark delicate porcelain vessels and wafer-thin tiles, embossed with the words of the late Swiss writer Robert Walser, which rest against marble and alabaster blocks and look like they are floating.

It melds De Waal’s roles as potter and writer, he said, putting the final touches to a long freestanding wall that he has painstakingly washed in delicate layers of French porcelain slip, and into which he is now inscribing in pencil, gold leaf and compressed charcoal, his own written tribute to the author.

“Here I am, a slightly migrant potter from south-east London, opening an exhibition in the middle of Berlin on a Swiss writer who died in the 1950s and wrote in German,” he said, looking up from his work with a wry smile. “You could say that’s a good bit of ordinary stake-in-the-ground Europeanness.”