Catalog of Lost Things

Judith Schalansky’s book explores losses in world history—what disappeared without return or was accidentally destroyed. She tries to grasp the remnants of the lost: echoes, erased traces, rumors and legends, signs of oblivion, and phantom pains. The book presents such lost objects as a painting by Caspar David Friedrich, an extinct species of tiger, a Roman villa, an ancient Greek love poem, and a vanished island in the Pacific Ocean. These stories form a kind of ark—twelve narratives that unfold where traditional history is powerless. The main characters are people and their spirits, resisting the fleeting nature of time: an elderly man who preserves knowledge in his garden in Ticino; an artist recreating a past that never existed; the aging Greta Garbo wandering around Manhattan and contemplating her hypothetical death; and Judith Schalansky herself, investigating traces of the GDR in forgotten corners of her childhood.