Journey to Nowhere: Among the Lands and History of Courland

"Courland is an entity that no longer exists. With the Gulf of Riga to the north, the Baltic to the west, and Lithuania at its southern border, and now part of modern Latvia, the region was occupied by Nazi Germany and returned to Soviet Russia after the war, remaining largely inaccessible until 1991. Once ruled by descendants of the Teutonic Knights, it is now a nowhere land of wide skies and forests, deserted beaches, ruined castles and stately homes, empty towns and former K.G.B. prisons. For many years Jean-Paul Kauffmann has been irresistibly drawn to this buffer between the Germanic and Slav worlds. His digressive travels at the wheel of a Skoda became an investigation into the whereabouts of a former lover, a search for an excavator of tombs, and he follows in the footsteps of the French monarch, Louix XVIII, for whom Courland was once a place of exile. 'A Journey to Nowhere' is a rich, literary journey in the tradition of Claudio Magris and W.G. Sebald. The author of several remarkable books which defy classification, Jean-Paul Kauffmann has come to be known as an erudite and engaging observer of the world's most desolate reaches"--Publisher's description, p. [2] of dust jacket.