For Paul Scraton, a British writer who has lived in Berlin for over 20 years, place is what you carry around in your imagination. The acknowledgments to his second novel inform us that on Holy Island/Ynys Gybi in north Wales there is a rock face called A Dream of White Horses. The novel transposes this name to the Baltic Sea, which surrounds an unnamed island – evidently Hiddensee on the German coast – where an itinerant photographer, Pascal, once spent his childhood summers. His grandfather was originally from German Swinemünde, which became Polish Świnoujście, and his parents lived in the GDR before moving to Lancashire when he was nine.
They are all exiles from Germanys that, in a memorable phrase, have been “separated from their dead” by the redrawing of European frontiers. All three generations restlessly seek escape and rest from escape, and all return to a beloved island where none of them was born. The desire for homeland is not an atavistic birthright but a voluntary sense of belonging to Europe’s “continent of refugees”.
