Dreams and dreamers

摘要

WITH its thin body and chunky head ("the seahorse with the sledgehammer muzzle"), the German island of Hiddensee faces northwest across the Baltic Sea towards the coast of Denmark. Part of East Germany during the cold war, Hiddensee became an "island of the blessed": an enclave of freethinkers where dreamers and idealists sought to escape the oppressive conformity of state socialism. Crucially, in "Kruso", an outstanding debut novel by Lutz Seiler which won the 2014 German Book prize, it became home to refugees-swimmers, or sailors in make- shift craft—who tried to flee the gdr. Many drowned. Most were intercepted; but hundreds succeeded.