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Books
Books carry the knowledge and the dreams, the feelings and the stories of people throughout time.
Skip next section All Content on this topic
All Content on this topic
Judith Schalansky: 'The Giraffe's Neck'
The fading years of a brilliant yet belligerent teacher stuck in an East German province at the dawn of reunification.
Frank Schätzing: 'The Swarm'
In this novel, the ocean fights back. It's an exciting ecological thriller about unfettered nature.
Eugen Ruge: 'In Times of Fading Light'
This autobiographical debut novel shifts between an imagined East German utopia and the ultimate failure of communism.
Wolfgang Herrndorf: 'Why We Took the Car'
A young adult novel about wanderlust, friendship and growing up.
Esther Kinsky: 'Summer Resort'
Esther Kinsky takes us along on a journey through a Hungarian summer colony, a wasteland of dreams.
Zsuzsa Bánk: 'The Swimmer'
A woman flees Communist Hungary, abandoning her two children. The family tries to find new meaning — amid great despair.
Sibylle Lewitscharoff: 'Apostotoloff'
A German-Bulgarian funeral grotesque, a road novel and family drama centered on unfulfilled fatherly love.
Herta Müller: 'The Hunger Angel'
Müller’s novel tells of a Romanian-born German forced to toil away in a Soviet labor camp to atone for Nazi crimes.
Juli Zeh: 'The Method'
Mourning leads to doubt, and doubt is a threat to the state — in July Zeh's highly topical novel about the future.
Sven Regener: 'Berlin Blues'
Regener succeeds in creating an authentic, atmospherically dense impression of Kreuzberg in the late 1980s.
Johanna Adorján: 'An Exclusive Love'
In her debut book, Johanna Adorján intimately explores the life and death of her Hungarian grandparents.
W.G. Sebald: 'Austerlitz'
A melancholy book about memory and loss, told in a unique way that mixes fact and fiction.
Siegfried Lenz: 'A Minute's Silence'
A tragic love story that captures life in a small seaside village and reflects Germany's own post-war growing pains.
Veza Canetti: 'The Tortoises'
Veza Canetti describes what it means for a writer to be driven from her homeland in a novel based on her own experience.
Hans-Ulrich Treichel: 'Lost'
A boy tells the story of his brother who went missing during the war. It's a sad, yet funny view of post-war Germany.
Peter Stamm: 'Agnes'
Peter Stamm is a master when it comes to purity of language. His very first novel, "Agnes," shows off his skill.
Uwe Timm: 'Midsummer Night'
Uwe Timm's books capture German history: In "Midsummer Night," he remembers when Christo wrapped up the Reichstag.
Monika Maron: 'Animal Triste'
What does it mean to feel desire and to be desired when one grows older? Monika Maron dissects a love story.
Bernhard Schlink: 'The Reader'
How intense must the fear of being exposed as illiterate be for one to admit to having committed mass murder?
Robert Schneider: 'Brother of Sleep'
A musical, self-pitying genius lives among village idiots. Robert Schneider's novel delves into German Romanticism.
Emine Sevgi Özdamar: 'Life is a Caravanserai'
The author is a wanderer between worlds, and her book is an autobiographical fairy tale.
Elias Canetti: 'Auto-da-Fé'
Elias Canetti received the Nobel Prize in Literature for his novel about a man who goes mad from his love of books.
Bertolt Brecht: 'Threepenny Novel'
Brecht wrote the "Threepenny Novel" while living in exile in Denmark in 1934.
Angelika Schrobsdorff: 'You Are Not Like Other Mothers'
The story begins with a rather unconventional woman in Weimar-era Berlin. It also personalizes 20th century history.
Gert Hofmann: 'The Film Explainer'
Gert Hofmann's novel is not only a nostalgic cultural take; it also attempts to unravel the German mentality.
Patrick Süskind: 'Perfume'
Several publishers rejected the manuscript before the novel became an international bestseller.
Jörg Fauser: 'Raw Material'
He wrote faster, harder, more concisely than anyone else. Jörg Fauser was the king of the literary underground.
Thomas Bernhard: 'Woodcutters'
A writer who berated all — and whose rants inspired literary masterpieces.
Ernst Haffner: 'Blood Brothers'
They steal, they sell their bodies and beat each other up in Berlin during the 1930s in Ernst Haffner's novel.
Rainald Goetz: 'Insane'
Rainald Goetz's first novel is set in the world of psychiatry. It's a mad world — and a book that is hard to digest.
Irmgard Keun: 'The Artificial Silk Girl'
Weimar-era Berlin, a riot of color and criminality, is brought to life through the eyes of 18-year-old Doris.
Erich Kästner: 'Going to the Dogs'
An intoxicating book, like a ramble through Berlin's seedy side, published shortly before the Nazis came to power.
Peter Schneider: 'The Wall Jumper'
Peter Schneider wrote "The Wall Jumper" in 1982. In retrospect, it almost seems prophetic.
Gregor von Rezzori: 'Memoirs of an Anti-Semite'
Gregor von Rezzori relies on humor and sarcasm to expose the ignorance that goes hand in hand with nationalist delusion.
Joseph Roth: 'Job'
The loyalty of a young Jewish believer is put to a hard test in Joseph Roth's novel.
Edgar Hilsenrath: 'The Nazi and the Barber'
The history of the Shoah as a dark comedy of mistaken identities told by a mass murderer.
Heinrich Böll: 'The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum'
A young woman at the center of a community's hysteria becomes the victim of a media smear campaign.
Vicki Baum: 'Grand Hotel'
This book reflected the spirit of the times in the 1920s, and turned its creator into a best-selling author.
Ulrich Plenzdorf: 'The New Sorrows of Young W.'
Plenzdorf's book from 1973 was a shock for the East German establishment, but it also made him famous.
Peter Handke: 'Short Letter, Long Farewell'
Peter Handke’s coming-of-age tale of a journey through the US in the 1970s and a troubled search for a lost brother.
Ingeborg Bachmann: 'Malina'
Living and loving is torture, as Bachmann's controversial novel reveals.
Uwe Johnson: 'Anniversaries'
Four volumes, 366 chapter and 1891 pages: Uwe Johnson's ambitious novel is truly the work of a lifetime.
Alfred Döblin: 'Berlin Alexanderplatz'
It's a classic of world literature and masterpiece of German modernism that bears witness to the Weimar Republic.
Jurek Becker: 'Jakob the Liar'
Hope, life's elixir: Becker's novel about Jews in a ghetto in Nazi-occupied Poland is gripping, melancholic, humorous.
Marlen Haushofer: 'The Wall'
What remains of a person who lives in complete isolation — confined entirely to the wild?
Anonymous: 'A Woman in Berlin'
Berlin in the last months of World War II was no place for a woman, as this diary by a 30-something journalist reveals.
Ernst Jünger: 'Storm of Steel'
He captured the horrors of World War I in his novel, garnering him intense criticism.
Günter Grass: 'The Tin Drum'
Oskar Matzerath and his tin drum — an unforgettable literary figure that is world-renowned.
Max Frisch: 'Homo Faber'
How can a person deal with an irrational coincidence challenging one's very existence in this modern day and age?
Gert Ledig: 'Payback'
Gert Ledig's "Payback" describes the bombing of a German city by an American air regiment.
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