The author, filmmaker and psychoanalyst Elisabeth Schlebrügge opens access to her repertoire of memories, perceptions and readings. Behind the present, she opens the crowded echo chamber of individual and collective memory—ancient myths and modern ruins, places of childhood, the joy of departure, the thirst for adventure, and stories of discovery and illusion that can only be preserved in writing. Historiography and geography appear as fragile attempts to order the world, voices speak, seafarers, travelers, dream-interpreters: always searching for the significant detail that brings long-gone inner worlds close to our present. Fragments of narrated lives begin to glow in her texts like sketches for a modern mythology of the private sphere.
Elisabeth Schlebrügge worked out and realized many themes and motifs in her film Niemals wieder ist eine Insel so weit gewesen (2015), which she made with Kurt Mayer. Her polyphonic essay, which functions like a kaleidoscope, is now being published.