The poetry volume „Swantow“ is part of the trilogy of Hanns Cibulka’s „Baltic Sea Diaries“ and leads the reader to the island of Rügen. „Swantow“ was published in 1982 and, due to its criticism of the environmental destruction at that time, also established Cibulka’s reputation as a „green man“, whose books were almost conspiratorially passed around and widely read at that time.

Hanns Cibulka had been working in Gotha in Thuringia since the 1950s, where he was the head of the “Heinrich Heine Library” in the “Orangerie Gotha” until his retirement.