Sanddornzeit

When Hanns Cibulka first visited Hiddensee in the early 1960s, the island felt foreign to him. Having grown up in a small town in the Altvater Mountains and experienced the historically rich, sun-drenched South as a prisoner of war in Sicily, he initially found the rugged North German landscape to be unyielding and silent. However, he soon could not resist the pull of this piece of land and began to translate its idiosyncratic nature into text through his dense diary entries. In the poetic surveying of a summer by the sea, not only geology and physics find their place, but also wind brides and daughters of fog; the constant changes in light and the monochrome of colors are documented alongside reading and listening experiences, reflections on fidelity to nature and artistic truth, as well as critiques of civilization and technology. In these diary pages, Hiddensee emerges as both a present and mythical landscape, and ultimately as a symbol of what requires protection and deserves preservation.