The Castaways of Hiddensee: Collective Losses in Kruso by Lutz Seiler:

Abstract

Lutz Seiler's novel Kruso (2014) places the narrative on the geographical (on the Baltic island of Hiddensee) and temporal (in the summer and autumn of 1989) boundaries of the German Democratic Republic. This is the setting for a particular group of intellectuals, artists and critics of the system, but also for the citizens who try to flee the country across the Baltic. In a poetic tone that is close to magical realism, Seiler not only offers a literary recreation of the time, but also takes part in contemporary discourses on memory and problematises the insufficient memory policies regarding the victims drowned in the Baltic. The aim of this article is to analyse the way in which the characters in the novel deal with loss and how it conditions their relationship with the space they inhabit. Based on the concept of 'contaminated landscape' coined by Martin Pollack, this article points out the mechanisms in the novel that establish the Baltic as a ‘contaminated landscape’ and shows the way the lives of the victims' relatives are also determined by the experience of loss. Finally, it will be analysed how the text, in its representation of the mourning processes that the characters go through, leads us from approaches to grief understood from a private and individual perspective to others that require a response to collective loss.