Ghosts on the Shore: Travels Along Germany's Baltic Coast by Paul Scraton

Germany’s Baltic coast. A place of escape, of carefree summer holidays, of spa towns and health retreats. A place where some of the darkest stories of 20th Century German history played out.

Inspired by his wife’s collection of family photographs from the 1930s and her memories of growing up on the Baltic coast in the GDR, Paul Scraton set out to travel from Lübeck to the Polish border on the island of Usedom, an area central to the mythology of a nation and bearing the heavy legacy of trauma.

Exploring a world of socialist summer camps, Hanseatic trading towns long past their heyday and former fishing villages surrendered to tourism, Ghosts on the Shore unearths the stories, folklore and contradictions of the coast, where politics, history and personal memory merge to create a nuanced portrait of place. 

About the author

Paul Scraton is a writer and editor based in Berlin. Born in Lancashire, he moved to the German capital in 2001 where he has lived ever since. He is the editor-in-chief of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place and his essays on place and memory have been published as the pocket book The Idea of a River: Walking out of Berlin by Readux Books in March 2015, and in Mauerweg: Stories from the Berlin Wall Trail, published by Slow Travel Berlin in 2014 to mark the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Among other publications, you can find more of Paul’s writing on place on Caught by the River and in hidden europe magazine. T: @underagreysky W: underagreysky.com

Ghosts on the Shore discussed on the YYY Podcast and the Papertrail Podcast

Praise for Ghosts on the Shore

Ghosts on the Shore is a powerful story of human tragedy and its inheritances, of “the hubris of territorial ambition” – less a story of a landscape than of a shifting culture and people.
– Times Literary Supplement

A fascinating exploration of the folklore, identity, politics and at times tragic history of Germany’s northern coast.
– The London Magazine

This is a beautifully written book that breathes a kind of mythical life into a forgotten corner of Europe. Read it and be transported by glittering prose.
– Ian McMillan

The best book I've read this summer.
– Hidden Europe

Succeeds in forging an approach that explores the personal, the historical and the literary, engaging these elements in subtle and unexpected ways.
– Glasgow Review of Books

He looks hard. He doesn’t want to miss anything... I urge you to read this book.
– Caught by the River

It’s about the wider world and what personal knowledge brings to our understanding of that world, its places and our place(s) within it. It delights as travel writing but resonates as writing about the purpose and consequences of travelling.
– Turnaround Blog

Through this writing he asks us all to see what is no longer there, including those events that are conveniently forgotten, because the stain of them on our collective memory is too much to bear; so we switch our sight, we rebuild, we don’t return.
– Decoding Static

Further Reading

Paul Scraton interviewed by Tom Jeffreys at The Learned Pig

Paul Scraton interviewed at the Papertrail Podcast (AUDIO)

Island of the imagination: Gerhart Hauptmann & Hiddensee (extract)
– The Island Review

Book of the Month: June 2017 (extract)
– Caught by the River

Paperback ISBN: 978-1910312100

Ebook ISBN: 978-1910312117

Publication date: June 2017

Formats: Paperback / eBook