lost cities in literature

I have read several historic novels set in Oxford recently (see list at the bottom), enjoying the discoveries to be made even in a familiar environment (having lived here for more than 30 years now). This set me thinking about my lost cities series (about towns and cities where my direct ancestors lived before 1972) - it would be doubly interesting to read fiction set in these places both from the perspective of knowing (most of) the cities and to gain insights into the kind of places they were when (or before) my ancestors lived there. It's all about getting a sense of place, so I expect that some of the books I find will be good at conveying that and others won't. I also appreciate some real historic people among the fictional characters.

Off the cuff I can think of only one historic novel I've read that is set in a city from my series, and that's the very impressive Riemenschneider by Tilman Röhrig (about the late Gothic / early Renaissance sculptor who lived in Würzburg and the rather gory Peasants War).

In an effort to find more novels, I'll paste in my list of cities here and try to fill it with lots of book titles too (and make them bold once I've read them). Books are all in German so far but I will consider other languages as well.

Cities listed in chronological order, sorted by the year in which the city was lost to my direct ancestors (where a second end year is given, it indicates the continued presence of other relatives):

• Idstein 1714-1804 - Die Hexe von Nassau: by Nicole Steyer
• Breslau 1830 - 1877 Schuhbrücke: Ein Breslau-Roman by Wolf Kampmann
• Strasbourg 1901 - 1908 - Die Patisserie am Münsterplatz a trilogy by Charlotte Jacobi; Wie der Weihnachtsbaum in die Welt kam by Astrid Fritz (Author), Andrea Offermann (Illustrator)
• Bruchsal 1889 - 1909/2023
• Tangermünde 1888 - 1916 - Grete Minde, a famous novella by Theodor Fontane
• Krefeld 1764 - 1924/current - Der Seidenweber, Thorsten Weiler
• Gütersloh 1825 - 1928/1950s
• Bad Münster 1919 - 1930/1952;
• Bonn 1929 - 1934
• Rheydt 1923 - 1935
• Münster 1928-1929, 1934-1936 - Die Stadt der Auserwählten Michael Römling
• Lorsch 1890 - 1938/1973
• Aachen 1936 - 1940
• Königsberg 1935 - 1945 - Die Buchhändlerin von Königsberg by Christian Hardinghaus
• Bad Kreuznach 1945 - 1951
• Minden 1903 - 1952/ca.1970
• Elberfeld / Wuppertal 1919 - 1961 - Und morgen eine neue Welt: Der große Friedrich-Engels-Roman Tilman Röhrig
• Freiburg 1928-1930, 1957-1961 - Der Totentanz zu Freiburg: Historischer Kriminalroman by Astrid Fritz (Author) - 7th of a whole series of crime novels set in medieval Freiburg
• Idar-Oberstein 1940 - 1962
• Würzburg 1961 - 1968 - Riemenschneider, Tilman Röhrig
• Bad Nauheim 1945 - 1972/1983
• Hamborn inlaws: 1922 - 1979/2015

Cities organised geographically, many are in Northrhine Westphalia (NRW), some further south, a few further east:

NRW: Aachen Bonn Elberfeld / Wuppertal Gütersloh Hamborn Krefeld Minden Münster Rheydt

Southwest: Bad Münster Bad Kreuznach Bad Nauheim Bruchsal Freiburg Idar-Oberstein Idstein Lorsch Strasbourg Würzburg

East Breslau Königsberg Tangermünde

Tilman Röhrig's big novel on the other Tilman, Riemenschneider, which vividly brings Renaissance Würzburg to life. The author was born in the next village up the hill from where my great-great-aunt, my grandparents and my father lived their retirement years, but I understand that his father, a vicar, was banished there for disobedience in Nazi times, so this doesn't make him a relative.

Historic novels set in Oxford

• Folly Bridge, by D. L. Murray (now reading, watch this space)
• The looking-glass house, by Vanessa Tait
• The dictionary of lost words, by Pip Williams
• The bookbinder of Jericho, by Pip Williams

Not counting fantasy versions of the city as in Philip Pullman's books or in R.F.Kuang's Babel.

nature in recovery

I needed cheering up after covering 30 years of climate failure in the penultimate feature of the year, so I followed a suggestion from the editorial team and chose species recovery as the topic for the last one. From the global moratorium on whaling to the European ban on neonics, if we just stop destroying nature, it actually helps the planet to heal, so we should really do more of that.

The feature is out now, completing my set of 24 features in this calendar year:

Roads to recovery

Current Biology Volume 35, Issue 24, 15 December 2025, Pages R1165-R1167

Restricted access to full text and PDF download
(will become open access one year after publication)

Magic link for free access
(first seven weeks only)

See also my new Mastodon thread where I will highlight all this year's CB features.

My mastodon posts are also mirrored on Bluesky (starting 22.2.2025), but for this purpose I have to post them again, outside of the thread. (I think threads only transfer if the first post was transferred, so once I start a new thread it should work.)

Last year's thread is here .

Global populations of humpback whales have made a remarkable recovery since the whaling moratorium, offering opportunities for scientific studies as well as for recreational whale watching.
(Photo: NPS Photo/Kaitlin Thoresen.)

what happened in Hamborn

I'm trying to figure out what happened to the ca. 15 children of the East Prussian patchwork family we met in the Every picture series, so let's tag the three patches. There are the litters Faust 1 and Faust 2 sharing Franz Faust (1857-1938) as a father, and the Wittke family from Wilhelmine Domscheit's (1863-1942) first marriage.

Of the (at least) four children of Faust 2, we know that the sisters Auguste and Hanna moved west to the short-lived industrial city of Hamborn in the 1920s, wheras Luise landed in Lippstadt via a refugee camp in Denmark so presumably stayed in East Prussia until January 1945. We know that their brother Otto Faust (born 1895 as the first child of Faust 2) died in January 1945 in the attempt to defend East Prussia.

Browsing lots of address books of Duisburg, I now discovered that the semi-mysterious aunt Therese Vietz (who could be from any of the patches) also lived in Hamborn for several decades, actually two doors down from her sister Hanna. So from 1950 to 1980 we have three patchwork sisters living on a geographically very limited patch in the former city of Hamborn, now part of Duisburg, less than a mile apart.

The iconic town hall of Hamborn, which reminds me of the one at Elberfeld, built only a few years earlier.
Own photo. More photos from my recent visit to Hamborn in this flickr album.

So to gain some clarity I need to spell this out as a timeline. Dates before 1950 are from documents and addresses on envelopes; from 1950 onwards from the excellent collection of addressbooks of Duisburg) in the city archives.

Timeline: 100 years in Hamborn

1922 13.10. Auguste registers at Weseler Str. 95 as a lodger with a resident called Hirsch. At the time, Weseler Str. and especially its intersection with Kaiser Wilhelm Str. were becoming the big shopping destination in the new city, with the Arnold Pollmann department store completed in 1929, after which the area is now named Pollmannkreuz.

1923 2.2. Auguste moves to Wittfelderstr. 189a (still in Hamborn but on the southern edge of the city).

1923 23.3. Auguste marries Ernst.

1924 2.8.; 21.11. They live at Kampstr. 140a, which is the northern edge of the Dichterviertel (poets'/writers' quarter) , a major development of workers' accommodation built by the Thyssen company (mines and steelworks).

By 1927 they move one block further east to Knappenstraße 43 which may have been new then, as this northeastern part of the Dichterviertel was developed later than the bit around Goethestraße.

1930s Auguste's sister Hanna and her husband Fritz Krieger also live in Knappenstr., at number 51 (based on a list of residents compiled by Auguste's son born 1926 who refers to the residents listed as the "Ureinwohner", ie original or indigenous residents). Other neighbours include the Kuhwald family.

section of a map from 1936. Schachtstraße is on the left under the red number 15, Knappenstraße runs diagonally into the top right corner. Hamborn town hall, post office, and the protestant church where Auguste and Ernst married are all on the large through road Duisburger Straße just southwest of the centre of this map. Although chronically overrun by cars now, it is essentially a 15 minute city, as everything is within walking distance and there are trams too.

1943 Hanna and Fritz now live Schachtstr. 27.

1945 Ernst dies, Auguste continues to live in Knappenstraße 43 with her sons.

1950 Therese now lives in Schachtstraße 23, two doors down from Hanna and Fritz. Therese is recorded as a widow in the address book of 1950, but we don't now what happened to Mr Vietz (or even what his first name was). We also don't know whether Therese arrived at Hamborn before the war like Hanna and Auguste or whether she had to flee from East Prussia like Luise.

1973 last addressbook entry for Auguste and her son Erwin in Knappenstraße.

Around 1975 Auguste has to leave her home of five decades in Knappenstraße as the site is cleared for a new development. She moves to Obere Holtener Str. 87. This is on the northeastern edge of Hamborn, the street leading towards Holten which is now part of Oberhausen. She was in a way unlucky to be in the newer and less coherent part of the Dichterviertel, as the older part around Goethestrasse has largely survived to this day (see my photos from Goethestraße on flickr). As do the Schachtstrasse houses where Hanna and Therese lived for several decades.

1977 First addressbook entry for Auguste and Erwin in Obere Holtener Str. In Knappenstraße, the odd numbers from 29 to 59 are now missing from the address book.

1979 Auguste dies. Two of her sons still live in Hamborn. Therese and the Kriegers are still living in Schachtstraße. The town of Walsum, which in 1975 also became part of Duisburg, also has a street called Schachtstraße. Therefore:

by 1981 the former Schachtstraße has become Dr-Heinrich-Laakmann-Straße, named after a catholic priest who taught at the nearby Abteischule and died in Hamborn. Therese is still there in the address book of 1981, but the Kriegers no more.

1982 Last entry for Therese Vietz in the address books.

1984 Therese Vietz no longer appears in the address book.

2015 The last survivor of Auguste's sons dies in Hamborn.

2025 A new development of 80 homes goes up on the north side of Knappenstrasse. where the lower odd house numbers must have been. Google Street View shows vegetation on that side of the road right now, and then the 1970s four-storey apartment blocks from around number 47 onwards. So maybe the development in the 70s never extended to this area of the new project? Meanwhile the relevant houses in the former Schachtstrasse are looking really lovely on Street View.

Resources

• Lovely website from Duisburg city about the district Hamborn.
• History of the Dichterviertel (in German), the area of which Knappenstrasse is a part.
• Havenburn, Hamborn, Duisburg-Hamborn: Geschichte und Geschichten. Walter Braun Verlag Duisburg 1979. I found a copy of this at a book exchange when I visited.

PS some of the patchwork grandchildren emigrated to Australia in the 1950s, so if anybody down there sees this and has ancestors in East Prussia named Faust, Domscheit, Wittke or Witt, do let me know.

looking for Milena

After watching the amazing new Kafka movie in November, I started reading his letters to Milena Jesenská in the old paperback edition that has been in the family since August 1966. (I can actually remember seeing it on my parents' bookshelves as child.) I stopped reading half-way in, however, when a glance at the afterword informed me that the editor had left out lots of material for fear of offending people who were still alive at the time of publication. I understand that more recent editions are more comprehensive, and have also reconsidered the chronology which is a bit of a challenge. So I'll look out for one of those to read instead.

The situation is similar for the biography of Milena and the anthology of her work that I read a couple of years ago (but forgot to review). Both have now been bettered by the efforts of Alena Wagnerová who wrote a new biography and edited a new compilation of the journalistic work as well as one with Milena's letters to other people (those to Kafka are lost). All three are in Czech originally and have been translated to German, but apparently not into English according to the references list in the Wikipedia entry.

I'll look out for all of these books, but in the meantime here's my (now somewhat antiquarian) collection of earlier Milena-related sources:

When I was looking for other Kafka-related movies, I also discovered one about Milena which I had never heard of before:

Milena by Véra Belmont, starring Valérie Kapriskie in the title role. This dates from 1990 so may not exist on DVD?

refugees in the family

In my Every Picture series, we met Luise Faust from the East Prussian patchwork family as a young woman in 1925 and then later in life meeting up with her sisters Auguste and Hanna in Luise's garden at Lippstadt. We didn't know anything about her life other than that she had a husband and three children.

Looking up an address book of Lippstadt from 1951, we now found out that we had Luise's married name wrong, it was Hieske (not Hießke). The addressbook lists her husband Adolf Hieske as a pensioner.

With this additional information, some googling revealed that the Hieske family did not move westwards in the 1920s like the other two sisters did. They stayed in East Prussia and had to flee from there at the end of the war, which is why we find them in a refugee camp in Copenhagen in 1946. This lovely handwritten list notes that their son, Herbert Otto Hieske was born 15.4.1932 in Klein-Nuhr, Kr. Wehlau, Ostpreussen, baptised at an unknown date in the same place, and received confirmation 10.11.1946 in the refugee camp. There is a whole database of names of refugees in Denmark here.

Reading up on the little-known history of these refugee camps (eg here), we found out that at the time of Germany's capitulation there were some 250,000 refugees (plus 300,000 soldiers) in Denmark. The Allies allowed the soldiers to return to Germany but not the refugees - they were detained in camps and many of them remained stuck for several years, with the last ones returning in February 1949.

From 1946, the British Occupation Zone in Germany allowed refugees from Denmark in if they had family members livingin the zone already, which was the case for Luise (as both her sisters lived in Duisburg-Hamborn, having migrated westwards in the 1920s). Still, it appears she and her son (and possibly her husband too) were still in Denmark in November 1946. According to her nephew, Luise also had another son and a daughter, but we know nothing else about them.

I think we don't have any other photos of Luise apart from the three I've already used in the blog entries linked above, but I've made a new edit of the portrait of young Luise, improving the contrast and the crop:

30 years of climate failure

I get a bit of an anger management problem around the time of year when another COP climate summit confirms that humanity has spent another year not doing anything to stop the climate catastrophe. Even worse when it's a round number, like this year's COP30 marking three decades of failure to even stop emissions from rising, never mind reducing them. I think my first COP-related article was this one on the preparations for COP15 in Copenhagen (2009). We still had hope back then.

By way of therapy, I channel that anger into a vaguely climate-related feature. This year's climate-rage writeup is about the Lancet climate report on the health impacts of the climate catastrophe. Obviously depressing, but then again it is also refreshing that the Lancet authors name the acute dangers we're facing loud and clear whereas the normal media coverage has all but given up on this emergency.

So, well, I've calmed down and my feature is out now:

An unhealthy climate

Current Biology Volume 35, Issue 23, 1 December 2025, Pages R1127-R1129

Restricted access to full text and PDF download
(will become open access one year after publication)

Magic link for free access
(first seven weeks only)

See also my new Mastodon thread where I will highlight all this year's CB features.

My mastodon posts are also mirrored on Bluesky (starting 22.2.2025), but for this purpose I have to post them again, outside of the thread. (I think threads only transfer if the first post was transferred, so once I start a new thread it should work.)

Last year's thread is here .

The city of Belém, shown in this satellite view, is surrounded by Amazonian rainforest. (Photo: Coordenação-Geral de Observação da Terra/INPE (CC BY-SA 2.0).)