‘A powerful story of human tragedy and its inheritances.’
– Times Literary Supplement

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.