Judith Schalansky

The German author is celebrated by critics and audiences for her virtuoso storytelling. At the festival, Judith Schalansky talks with philosopher Barbara Bleisch about her new book.

After her bestseller Atlas der abgelegenen Inseln (Atlas of Remote Islands), she has succeeded with Verzeichnis einiger Verluste (Directory of Some Losses), for which she was awarded the prestigious Wilhelm Raabe Prize. The new book is about what was lost in world history, what was forgotten or destroyed. It is a Wunderkammer of the absent: A lost Murnau film can be found in it, the skeleton of a unicorn, a lost Pacific island, poems by Sappho.

At the center of the stories are people who fight against transience and dedicate themselves full of devotion to these lost things: an old man who hoards the knowledge of mankind in his garden in Ticino, a painter of ruins who creates the past as it never was, the aged Greta Garbo who wanders through Manhattan and wonders when exactly she might have died.