Best German Literature Books

On the eightieth birthday of Heinrich Fähmel, three generations of a German architect family reckon with what was built and what was destroyed: the grandfather designed an abbey, his son destroyed it during the war, his grandson—a billiards player—must decide what to do with what remains. Böll's most structurally ambitious novel.

Danzig, World War II: the narrator Pilenz obsessively remembers Mahlke, his schoolmate with an enormous Adam's apple—the 'mouse' to a cat's pounce—who became a war hero and then a deserter. The second book of Grass's Danzig Trilogy is the most concentrated and the most disturbing.

A German shepherd dog—passing from a miller's family to a German boy to Hitler himself—becomes the thread connecting three narrators' accounts of Danzig, the Nazi period, and postwar West Germany. The third and most complex volume of the Danzig Trilogy.

Mann's four-volume retelling of the Joseph story from Genesis — sixteen years in the writing — treats the biblical narrative not as sacred history but as myth that characters know they are living inside. The most sustained act of literary ambition of the twentieth century.

The aging writer Gustav von Aschenbach travels to Venice for rest and becomes obsessed with a beautiful Polish boy, unable to leave even as cholera spreads through the city — Mann's most concentrated masterpiece.

Four generations of a Lübeck merchant family are traced from their commercial peak in 1835 to their dissolution by the turn of the century — the novel that won Mann the Nobel Prize, and the German equivalent of The Forsyte Saga.

A German composer of genius makes a Faustian bargain — syphilitic infection in exchange for twenty-four years of musical creativity — as Germany makes its own bargain with Nazism. Told through the biography of his lifelong friend, Mann's most ambitious novel.

Ravic, a German surgeon living illegally in Paris in 1939, practises medicine under a false name and pursues the Gestapo officer who destroyed his life. Remarque's wartime novel was written in American exile and captures the atmosphere of Paris just before the German occupation with the precision of someone who knew the city and understood what was about to happen to it.

Three veterans of the First World War try to build ordinary lives in the Weimar Republic while Nazi violence rises around them, and one of them falls in love with a woman dying of tuberculosis. Remarque's most romantic novel is also his most political — the personal tenderness and the historical catastrophe are inseparable, and the love story is written with the knowledge of what is coming.

A German soldier on the Eastern Front is given three weeks' leave, returns to his bombed city, falls in love, marries, and must return to the front. Remarque's most compassionate novel about the Second World War gives a German protagonist genuine humanity in a story almost no fiction had attempted: the ordinary German soldier who is neither hero nor monster, simply a man caught in what his country has done.

An unnamed researcher interviews dozens of people about Leni Pfeiffer—a German woman who survived the Nazi period, the war, and the postwar economic miracle by simply being, refusing ideology and staying human. The novel is assembled from testimony. Böll's most humanist and most comprehensive work—the book that won him the Nobel Prize.

The direct sequel to All Quiet on the Western Front follows the surviving soldiers as they return to a Germany that has changed beyond recognition — where their sacrifice is simultaneously celebrated and disregarded, and where the civilian world has no framework for what they have seen. Remarque's second novel asks what happens after the war ends: harder to read and less celebrated than its predecessor, but in some ways more honest.

Josef Bloch, a former goalkeeper, wanders Vienna after being fired. He picks up a woman and, for no reason he can articulate, kills her. Then he flees to a border town and watches a football match. Handke's first novel—and Wim Wenders made it into a film—is an existential thriller about the breakdown of linguistic meaning.

A retelling of the medieval legend of Gregorius — a man born of incest who unknowingly marries his own mother and atones by living on a rocky island for seventeen years before being elected Pope — Mann's most playful late novel.