Here is a list of books that I have mentioned in the text. This isn’t a comprehensive academic bibliography. I have only listed ones that are easily available in English and that I can personally recommend as being a good read.
Some of them are available to read online for free. The other links go to Bookshop.org, a more ethical alternative to Amazon that supports independent bookshops. If you are in the UK and purchase the books through my links, I will receive a small commission. The full list is also here.
Marco Balzano- I’m Staying Here
A novel following an ordinary family in South Tyrol from the 20s to the 50s as history overtakes them- from Mussolini to the Nazis to the flooding of the Vinschgau valley.
Peter S. Beagle- The Last Unicorn
The cult favourite novel that the 70s film with Christopher Lee and Mia Farrow was based on. Combining a fairytale plot with an intense focus on characters’ internal emotional states and relationship dynamics. The characters know they’re in a fairy tale construction and comment on how they have to live up to the story they’re in, but the prince still has to peel his own potatoes. They also love to play the theme tune from the film in Graz supermarkets.
John Berger- Confabulations
Berger’s Ways of Seeing is compulsory reading for every art student, introducing the concept of the “male gaze” to wider society. Confabulations isn’t a groundbreaking work of collected thought though, it’s a collection of vignettes trying to “touch the vision or experience that prompted the words”. Berger mixes his critique of capitalism and neoliberalism with wandering discussions ranging over Rosa Luxembourg; Charlie Chaplin; attending his friend Sven’s funeral in an endless Swedish summer; swimming in the municipal pool; catching eels in Italy; Iraqi poet Adbul-Kareem Kasid; his favourite mosaic in a church in Ravenna; sign language; and Cape Verdean singer Cesaria Evora.
Laurent Binet- HHhH
A meta-fiction novel about the assassination of Heydrich in Prague. The title comes from the phrase Himmlers Hirn heißt Heydrich (Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich) which SS officers used to mock Himmler behind his back. It weaves in the story of the assassination with Binet’s own reflections on the research process and how other media has represented the story.
Julia Boyd- Travellers in the Third Reich
An interesting and disturbing read. It’s a collection of primary sources from visitors to Germany in the interwar period, all written at the time without the benefit of hindsight. From outright fascist sympathisers like Francis Stuart to committed anti-fascists like W.E Du Bois at the other end of the spectrum, with a whole load of ordinary tourists, students, diplomats and journalists in between. The excuses people made are disturbing and familiar.
Mikhail Bulgakov- The Master and Margarita
Russian, rather than German, but essential reading. Goethe’s Mephistopheles comes to Stalinist Moscow in the guise of stage magician Professor Woland, bringing chaos, magic and biting satire in his wake.
Christoph Dallach- Neu Klang
An oral history of Krautrock composed entirely of quotes from different musicians and artists involved. Dallach is a music critic for Der Spiegel (The Mirror), the most prominent quality news magazine in Germany, similar in stature to The Atlantic or The New Yorker. This high profile meant that he was able to interview pretty much every key player in depth, along with all sorts of other interesting people such as jazz musicians and visual artists who were also around the same scene.
Michael Ende- The Neverending Story
The book that the 80s film was based on, but far far darker than its adaptation. Well worth a read.
Michael Ende- Momo
Michael Ende’s other major work, known by everyone in German-speaking countries, but little-known in English. An anti-capitalist fairytale. The sinister Men in Grey turn up as sales reps for the Time Bank, offering customers interest on the time they save by giving up everyday pleasures and focusing only on work and profit, and trying to persuade children to give up on imagination in favour of expensive electronic AI toys. The Men in Grey aren’t time bankers however, they’re time thieves who sustain themselves by smoking dismal-smelling grey cigars made from the withered flowers of the time and happiness they’ve stolen from people.
Anna Funder- Stasiland
Probably the best book I’ve read about East Germany. A social history of the Stasi, but most importantly focusing on the impact on their victims. When the book was launched in Germany in 2004, it didn’t get a particularly good reaction from the commentariat- stirring up too many old wounds maybe, asking too many awkward questions, and an even less warm welcome from former Stasi men, who started harassing and trying to sue Funder. Ironically they made her take out a page in the German edition about them harassing and threatening people after the Wall came down.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe- Faust
One of the foundations of European literature. Dr Faustus is a scholar, depressed at the limitations of science in his era, feeling that he knows nothing, and considering suicide. God and Mephistopheles make a bet on whether the devil can tempt him or not. Mephistopheles offers Faust a deal, offering to show him the pleasures of life again in return for his soul.
Marlen Haushofer- The Wall
An unnamed woman goes on holiday with some friends to a cabin in the Austrian mountains. One day the others go into town to get supplies and never come back. When she goes looking for them, she finds she is trapped on the mountain within a forcefield. She can see other humans through the transparent wall, but they are frozen in time. It’s just the protagonist, her dog, a stray cat and some cows all alone from now on. She tries her best to survive, chopping wood, milking cows and planting potatoes, keeping a diary in an attempt not to lose her mind.
Jaroslav Hašek- The Good Soldier Švejk
Josef Švejk is a soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army who is cheerfully incompetent and lazy and somehow always survives dangerous situations by being completely useless and passively resisting authority. The book is anti-war, anti-authority, anti-religion, and also very funny. It was a huge hit, along with its illustrations by Czech cartoonist Josef Lada. The Czech now call skiving švejkárna (Švejkery).
Heinrich Heine- Poems (read for free online)
Heinrich Heine is one of the most celebrated poets of the 19th century (and the cousin of Karl Marx). His books of poetry mixing Romanticism with ironic humour became huge commercial hits, and were used as the basis for popular songs, but he soon fell foul of the authorities and censors for his anti-authoritarian views.
The Nazis hated Heine, because he was both Jewish and a radical, and they hated even more that it was difficult to completely ban and erase his words as they were the lyrics to well-known songs. Heine’s books were amongst those burned on Opernplatz in Berlin. The site now has a memorial engraved with one of his quotes Das war ein Vorspiel nur, dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen – “This was just an introduction, where they burn books, they eventually burn people too”.
Herman Hesse- Steppenwolf
Steppenwolf was written after Hesse briefly and disastrously remarried for a third time in 1924, and then had a breakdown and completely isolated himself. It follows isolated suicidal drifter Harry Haller as he tries to find his place in life and truly connect with others. After a chance meeting with a mysterious old man, he receives a self-help book called Treatise on the Steppenwolf, about the constant tension between humans’ higher spiritual nature and their animalistic one like “a wolf on the steppes”. He falls in with artists and jazz musicians, and experiences ego death at the “Magic Theatre”, a psychedelic maze of mirrors with dreamlike experiences behind each of its five doors.
Herman Hesse- The Glass Bead Game
My favourite Hesse book however is his sci-fi novel The Glass Bead Game, which was his final work, and a unique reading experience. It was published in Switzerland in 1943, as Hesse’s work was banned in Germany by that point, and was a major contribution to him winning the Nobel Literature Prize in 1946. It takes place centuries in the future, when intellectuals play the Glass Bead Game that somehow encompasses all aspects of life, combining music, maths and philosophy (Hesse deliberately never quite explains how it works). The book follows student Joseph Knecht as he attempts to becomes a master of the game without completely detaching himself from reality or connection with others.
Katja Hoyer- Beyond the Wall
A good start to learn about the DDR is Katja Hoyer’s Beyond the Wall because it’s both accessible, available from the average bookshop at a normal price, and recent. The book got a lukewarm response in Germany, where reviewers felt it covered very basic information and sometimes let the regime off the hook, but for English language readers it gives a good basic overview. I also agree with reviewers that she tried too hard to balance the “repressive police state” vs “people had very good childcare and sports facilities and my family did fine” arguments, but it’s still an informative and accessible read for people outside Germany or academia.
Christopher Isherwood- The Berlin Novels
If you ask people to think of Weimar Berlin, there’s a strong chance they’ll think of Cabaret. Bob Fosse’s musical is based on the books of Christopher Isherwood, a British writer who after dropping out of Cambridge came to Berlin in 1929 with his friend the poet WH Auden because there was more freedom and tolerance for gay men there. Sally Bowles was based on his flatmate Jean Ross, who at the time was a model and cabaret singer, but later became a political journalist. (Ross found Sally Bowles incredibly irritating, and thought Isherwood made the character too apolitical for plot reasons when in real life Ross was a committed Communist).
Franz Kafka- The Metamorphosis
A fresh new translation of the story, in a handsome annotated collection of Kafka’s short stories with all kinds of interesting background and cultural context for English speakers.
Franz Kafka- The Castle
Kafka’s collected novels in one book: The Castle, The Trial and Amerika.
Natascha Kampusch- 3096 Days
Natascha Kampusch- 10 Years of Freedom
Famous Austrian kidnap victim Natascha’s own accounts of her childhood in captivity, and then the experiences of returning to society.
Heinrich von Kleist- Michael Kohlhaas (read for free online)
An epic tale of feudal revenge over a mere seventy pages, based on a real story from the early sixteenth century. It is often considered one of the best short stories ever in German. Kohlhaas is a horse dealer from Brandenburg who goes to Saxony to sell some horses. A corrupt Saxon nobleman seizes his horses, mistreats them and beats up Kohlhaas’ assistant. Trying the official route of suing the noble goes nowhere because he’s too well connected. Kohlhaas’ beloved wife goes to speak to the nobleman and comes back beaten and fatally injured. After her death he can think of nothing but revenge, and leads an uprising. It’s basically a western set in the era of Martin Luther. Kleist fits an incredible amount of satisfying story into very little space, and I can’t figure out how he does it. You feel like chapters have gone by, drawing you in to this world and these characters, completely absorbed, yet somehow you’re only ten pages in.
Milan Kundera- The Joke
Kundera took advantage of the looser environment of the Prague Spring to explore the repression of 50s Czechoslovakia.. Through flashback it tells the farcical story of Ludvík, a man who was expelled from university and sent to a forced labour camp for making a mild joke about the regime. Back in his hometown a decade later, it’s time to attempt revenge on the former friends and girlfriend who snitched on him, but it doesn’t go to plan in any way. After the 1968 crackdown, Kundera was banned from publishing or teaching, and ended up fleeing to France as a refugee.
Milan Kundera- The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Written in exile, Kundera’s most well-known book, The Unbearable Lightness of Being was published in 1984 but takes place in The Prague Spring and its aftermath. Dysfunctional couple Tomáš and Tereza try to navigate the waves of history at the same time as their own messy lives, exploring questions about choice, consequences and how do you live your life in the face of overwhelming circumstances.
Primo Levi- If This is a Man
Primo Levi- The Drowned and the Saved
Primo Levi- The Periodic Table
The best books about the concentration camps I think can recommend are Primo Levi’s autobiographical If This is a Man (1946), The Drowned and the Saved (1986) and The Periodic Table (1975), which pull no punches and are also beautifully written. Levi was an Italian scientist from Turin, born to a secular Jewish family, who joined the Resistance after the Nazis invaded northern Italy in 1943. When the Italian Fascists found him hiding out in the Alps, he weighed up whether it was better to tell them he was there because he was Jewish (get sent to a camp) or a Partisan (be shot immediately). He opted for the camp, and was sent to Auschwitz, where he only survived due to a series of happy accidents.
Thomas Mann- The Magic Mountain
The book that won Mann the Nobel Prize. Written in the early 1920s after his wife was treated for tuberculosis, it tells the story of a German engineering student named Hans Castorp who originally goes to a sanatorium in the Alps to visit a relative, but finds himself living there for years on end. The sanatorium is a world to itself, a heightened and more ridiculous microcosm of pre- First World War European society. There are philosophers, hypochondriacs, mystics and proto-fascists. Everyone is simultaneously on the verge of losing their mind and making an intense philosophical breakthrough. Asking young lady to borrow a pencil becomes an incredibly charged moment. Seven hundred pages of surreal and heightened meditation on life and death are then deliberately smashed to pieces when Hans leaves the sanatorium to be thrown onto the horrors of the Western Front, his fate left undetermined.
Thomas Mann- Mario and the Magician
Mann’s prescient novella from the 1920s about the rise of Fascism. A German family go on a seaside holiday to Italy, but find Fascism has already had more of an effect on society there than they expected. They get thrown out of their original hotel because a rich lady from Rome complains about their child’s cough. Local children have become intense nationalists, and bully foreign kids. After the family get reported to the police and fined for “public indecency” because their seven year old daughter changed out of her swimming costume on the beach, they decide to go to a magic show to cheer everyone up.
Signore Cipolla (Mr Onion) the magician doesn’t turn out to be at all fun however. There was “not a trace of personal jocularity or clownishness in his pose, manner or behaviour”. He’s a cruel, manipulative fascist, who wields a riding crop on stage, and enjoys humiliating the participants in his shows via hypnotism or firing endless maths questions at them, leaves a cheerful local heckler in physical pain, and constantly lectures the audience about the importance of “the capacity for self-surrender, becoming a tool, the most unconditional and utter self-abnegation” as cover for his own insecurities. His authoritarian spell is only broken when local waiter Mario unexpectedly shoots him.
Thomas Mann- Death in Venice
The original book the 70s Visconti film is based on. Decadence, death and homoeroticism in Edwardian Venice.
Don Marquis- Archy & Mehitabel
Archy is a New York cockroach who types modernist poetry at night on an office typewriter when the humans go home. It takes him a long time to jump on each letter, so his style is brief, and he can’t do capitals.
Gustav Meyrink- The Golem (read for free online)
The 1915 dreamlike psychedelic horror novel The Golem uses the myth of the literal-minded clay man who comes to life with the right words to explore the magical yet oppressive atmosphere of the place, and using the Golem character as a kind of communal consciousness of the residents rather than a physical monster. It inspired the classic Expressionist silent horror film The Golem in 1920, which mixed the atmosphere of the book with a more straight-up retelling of the original legend.
Robert Musil- The Man Without Qualities
His unfinished epic The Man Without Qualities is considered one of the greats of modern German literature. The book explores Vienna society on the eve of the First World War, from the perspective of Ulrich, a mathematician who is strangely bland and unmemorable, and finds he can fit in anywhere. Ulrich’s ability to mix with all kinds of different people allows Musil to create a dizzying portrait of wildly different parts of society and the people within it. The first two parts were nominated for the Nobel Literature Prize in 1932. The third part was never finished. Musil was banned from publishing as a “degenerate writer”, and after the Anschluss he had to flee to Switzerland with his wife. The stress of the escape gave him a heart attack and then a stroke, and he died a few years later in 1942 aged sixty eight.
For a while after the war, Musil was forgotten, until his work was revived in the fifties, receiving its first English translation. He is still not as well-known in English as he could be.
Otfried Preußler- Krabat (read for free online)
German fantasy classic about an orphan boy who becomes apprenticed to a satanic miller, using it as an allegory to talk about the rise of Fascism. One of Hayao Miyazaki’s favourites.
Phoebe Power- The Shrines of Upper Austria
A collection of poems and microfiction by Phoebe Power, whose grandmother is Austrian (from Villach in the south rather than Upper Austria however). It absolutely captures small town Oberösterreich and was written on a residency in Gmunden in 2017. “The cakes are modestly presented in a glass cabinet: stripes of sponge alternate with chocolate cream: globes of mango gleam on mousse”, a street corner shrine in Gmunden has “brown-stained wood like a hut or shed, carved roof hood”, at Fasching “two headteachers smile and joggle in a pair, her Cruella fishnet makeup and his penguin suit”.
Erich Maria Remarque- All Quiet on the Western Front
An even more influential book demolishing the idea of the Wilhemine regime was Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, published in 1929. It follows Paul Bäumer, a teenage boy from a small village, who is inspired to join up and fight in the First World War by his teacher’s stirring speeches at school. The horrific reality of the trenches is completely different to the heroic fantasies of the propaganda he’s been fed, and as his friends are slowly killed, Paul realises he is fighting in a pointless war against opponents he has no reason to hate, which strips the humanity out of its participants.
Rainer Maria Rilke- Change Your Life: Essential Poems
One of the best known German-speaking poets to English readers, and a close friend and supporter of Kafka. His poetry has a very different tone to Kafka’s work however: intense, lyrical and full of emotion and musings about the human condition.
Bruno Schulz- The Street of Crocodiles
A collection of short stories by an avant-garde Polish Jewish author who was killed by the Nazis, used as a basis for the Brothers Quay film of the same name.
Robert Seethaler- The Tobacconist
A naive seventeen year old boy from the Salzkammergut moves to Vienna in 1937 to work in a tobacconists’ shop on Währinger Straße. The shop owner is a grumpy eccentric Communist who lost his leg in the First World War, but he turns out to be a kind and interesting boss. Sigmund Freud is one of the regular customers, and Franz and the professor become friends. However the Nazis are coming, and Franz’s new life is about to be blown to smithereens.
Lutz Seiler- Kruso
Hiddensee was a holiday island in the Baltic where the East German authorities tried to put dissidents and artists out of the way. Based the author’s own experiences working in Hiddensee in the eighties, and set in 1989, it follows a young literature student, who in an attempt to outrun his grief over the death of his girlfriend, abandons his thesis work on Georg Trakl and takes a dishwashing job in a restaurant on the island. He finds himself falling in with a group of dissidents trying to create some kind of freedom for themselves within the strictures of the system on the strange private world of the island, just as the regime is about to fall.
Alvydas Šlepikas- In the Shadow of Wolves
When the Red Army closed in on East Prussia in 1945, the Nazis refused to evacuate civilians until the last minute, telling farmers to fight the Soviets with pitchforks and shovels. When they finally let them leave, it was too late, and the resulting chaos left behind thousands of stranded children and orphans. Known as “wolf children” they wandered the countryside starving. Many were taken in by Lithuanian families and given fake identities to hide them from the Soviet soldiers, and were only able to openly discuss their history after the fall of the USSR.
Lithuanian poet Alvydas Šlepikas’ 2012 novella In the Shadow of Wolves follows the stories of these children and their mothers in the town of Gumbinnen, written in a icily sparse style mixing fairytale with bleak realism, and based on his interviews with former Wolf Children. Its original title was Mano vardas Marytė (My name is Marytė) after the phrase one of the girls desperately repeats to try to look Lithuanian to the Russian soldiers. Originally it was going to be a documentary, but the funding fell through, so the author decided to write it as a book because he felt the stories were still little-known and needed to be told.
Ben Smith- Doggerland
Doggerland was the land that connected Britain to Denmark (named after the Dogger Bank from the Shipping Forecast), which completely disappeared under the waves around five thousand BC, when the glaciers from the Ice Age melted. The existence of Doggerland was discovered by fishing boats pulling up mammoth skulls and stone age spears. A lost Atlantis of cavemen. Endless grassy plains roamed by hyenas and sabre-toothed tigers chasing after the herds of reindeer, submerged by a series of cataclysmic tsunamis. At the other end of history, Ben Smith’s dystopian novel Doggerland is set on a remote wind farm on the Dogger Bank in the near future. An old man and a teenage boy slog away fixing the decrepit turbines on behalf of a sinister faceless corporation, in a world disintegrating due to climate change, and hinted to have fallen to corporate fascism.
David Stubbs- Future Days
An extremely thorough, but also extremely entertaining history of Krautrock by a former Melody Maker journalist.
Olga Tokarczuk- The Empusium
Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk’s new book The Empusium riffs off The Magic Mountain however, re-imagining it as a psychedelic horror story.
Georg Trakl- Surrender to Night
Georg Trakl- 20 Poems (read for free online)
All roads in my book seemed to lead to the poet Georg Trakl. Like all rockstars, he died in 1914 of a drugs overdose at the age of twenty seven, but has been hugely influential in German literature. The Trakl household was wildly dysfunctional, the kind of Austro-Hungarian family who provided Freud with such fertile material. In the era of over the counter opiates, Georg was a laudanum and cocaine addict by the age of 17, and pursued a career as a pharmacist to gain easy access to drugs.
In 1914 he went to the Eastern Front as a military pharmacist. After the brutal Battle of Grodek in Galicia, Trakl was left alone to treat ninety horrifically injured men stranded in a barn, with almost no supplies. Many of the men begged him to shoot them and put them out of their misery. Trakl had a breakdown and threatened to shoot himself too, and was sent to a military asylum, where he died from a drugs overdose.
Trakl’s poems focus on isolation, decay and the fragility of the human condition, and have a style I can only describe as “T.S. Eliot, but goth”. The two writers have a similar elegiac tone, and sparse, atmospheric style, full of space and silence. Trakl’s poems are full of lines liked “her hair bristling with dung and worms” and “spiders look for my heart”. Silence, shadows, fading autumn afternoons, rotting fruit, death knells and worms. Critic James Wright says “one does not read them so much as explore them”. Unsurprisingly Trakl’s poetry has been an inspiration for black metal bands, and dark ambient acts like Ulver (who themselves started out as a black metal band).
Kurt Vonnegut- Slaughterhouse Five
Kurt Vonnegut’s seminal science fiction book Slaughterhouse Five is centred around the bombing of Dresden at the end of WWII. The main character Billy Pilgrim is an American prisoner of war who survives the bombing by sheltering in an old slaughterhouse. His trauma leads to him becoming “unstuck in time”, reliving his life non-chronologically after he is captured by aliens who want to study him. The book uses time travel to explore the themes of death, PTSD, trauma and free will.
Robert Walser- Jakob von Gunten
A wild satirical ride by an outsider Swiss author about a rich young man who rebels against his upbringing by training to become a butler. One of Kafka’s favourite novels.
Karolina Watroba- Metamorphoses: In Search of Franz Kafka
A slim volume of interesting and accessible essays looking at the impact Kafka’s life and work has had on his readers and society. Growing up in Catholic Poland, and then working with manuscripts in Oxford, Watroba makes an interesting point that we treat the original manuscripts and grave sites of famous writers almost like reliquaries of medieval saints. There’s no bones or strands of hair, just the “definitive”, “original” version of their words in their own handwriting.
Franz Werfel- The Forty Days of Musa Dagh
A lyrical novel examining the Armenian Genocide at the end of the First World War, written by one of Kafka’s closest friends.
Christa Wolf- What Remains (read for free online)
Christa Wolf- City of Angels
The canon of classic German literature is sorely lacking in women. One of the few exceptions is Christa Wolf, the giant of East German literature. She was born in 1929 in a town that is now in Poland, and was evacuated to Mecklenburg after the expulsion of Germans from the former East Prussia. Her work looks at power, patriarchy and the realities of living in a police state; always having to tread the fine line between expressing herself and not crossing the line of what was not allowed to be discussed in the DDR.
Stefan Zweig- The World of Yesterday
Stefan Zweig’s autobiography, written in exile from the Nazis, describing his youth in the Vienna of Freud and Schiele and the rise of Fascism in Austria.
Stefan Zweig- Chess Novel
Zweig’s masterpiece- a story of obsession, trauma and chess in Nazi Austria.
Stefan Zweig- The Society of the Crossed Keys
A collection of short stories and extracts from Zweig’s novels produced as a tie-in to The Grand Budapest Hotel. An excellent introduction to his work.
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