Island Enigmas

Dirk Liesemer is a writing Wandervögel, an epistolary inheritor of the romantically-imagined movement that flourished in Germany between the late nineteenth century and 1933. The “wandering birds” took their inspiration from medieval myths, and made a cult of the outdoors and walking. Liesemer likewise revels in stories of improbable journeys, and follows ancient and overshadowed trails. His parents’ professions—his father a seafarer, his mother an antique dealer—seem almost to predestine him to antiquarian travellers’ tales. He has written on the November 1918 revolutionaries who triggered the German Revolution of 1918-19, and traced the tank-tracks of the 11th Panzer Division (nicknamed “the Ghost Division”) as it roared through the Ukraine during Barbarossa. He is presently writing Wanderings Through the Night, accounts of roaming under Germanic stars—slumbering Leipzig, Zurich’s sadly playing fountains, the snowy tips of the Allgäu.

In Phantom Islands,…