Judith Schalansky/ Hanns-Josef Ortheil
An Inventory of Losses/ Die Berlinreise

An Inventory of Losses

The Book:
Each chapter in An Inventory of Losses follows the convention of a different genre and reveals insights from the fragmentary remains of unique things and places that have lost to time – the paradisal island of Tuanaki, the Caspian Tiger, Sappho’s love poems, Greta Garbo’s fading beauty, a painting by Caspar David Friedrich or the former East Germany’s Palace of the Republic.

The Writer:
Judith Schalansky
Judith Schalansky was born in Greifswald in former East Germany in 1980 and studied art history and communication design. Her international best-seller, Atlas of Remote Islands, won the Stiftung Buchkunst (the Art Book Award) for “the most beautifully designed book of the year”, while her novel The Giraffe’s Neck in an English translation by Shaun Whiteside won a special commendation of the Schlegel-Tieck Prize for the best translation from German in 2015. Both books have been translated into more than twenty languages. Schalanksy works as a freelance writer and book designer in Berlin, where she is also editor of the bibliophile book series Naturkunden published by Matthes und Seitz.
 

Berlinreise

The Book:
In the summer of 1964, Hanns-Josef Ortheil, then twelve years old, travels to Berlin with his father. A few years after the construction of the Berlin Wall and one year after Kennedy's visit to Berlin, the stay in Berlin brings father and son face to face with the present of the Cold War and at the same time becomes a journey back in time to the past of the Second World War. In October 1939, the newly married parents had moved from a small town in the Westerwald to the then capital of the Reich, where the father was employed as a surveyor by the Deutsche Reichsbahn and where they lost their first child in air raids. Day after day, father and son explore the traces of that time, visit the former family home, meet acquaintances and friends, and read the household books that the mother kept during the war years. The twelve-year-old writes a travel diary about his impressions that is incomparable in its kind, in which he dramatically tells of reliving the past in his own young body.

The Author:
Hanns-Josef Ortheil was born in Cologne in 1951; he lives in Stuttgart. He is a multi-award-winning writer and teaches as a professor of creative writing and cultural journalism at the University of Hildesheim.