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Alone in Berlin
Hans Fallada
Novel, 1947. Translated from German
Ordinary Berliners live under Nazi terror in 1940s Berlin, based on a real couple's resistance.
Books set in Germany
Seven books that put you in Germany. Five are by writers from Germany and set there, starting with Alone in Berlin and All Quiet on the Western Front. The other two are wider picks: books by long-time residents and outsiders who know the place well.
About the literature of Germany
German literature runs from Goethe, whose play Faust is a cornerstone of the canon, to Günter Grass, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1999. Thomas Mann won in 1929, and Herta Müller, born in Romania and now living in Berlin, won in 2009. The two world wars and the Nazi years run through much of the best-known fiction of the twentieth century.
Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front gives a German soldier's account of the First World War and the disillusion at home. Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin, based on a real couple's resistance, shows ordinary Berliners living under Nazi terror. Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz, set in Weimar-era Berlin, tracks an ex-convict trying to go straight.
By writers from Germany
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All Quiet on the Western Front
Erich Maria Remarque
Novel, 1929. Translated from German
A German soldier's experience of the First World War, with the home front and its disillusion.
Berlin Alexanderplatz
Alfred Döblin
Novel, 1929. Translated from German by Eugene Jolas
Weimar-era Berlin's streets, underworld and poverty shape an ex-convict's struggle to go straight.
This House Is Mine
Dörte Hansen
Novel, 2015. Translated from German by Anne Branscombe
Follows an East Prussian refugee woman and her niece in the fruit-farming Altes Land near Hamburg, showing postwar displacement and village-versus-newcomer tensions.
The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum
Heinrich Boll
Novel, 1974. Translated from German by Leila Vennewitz
Shows 1970s West Germany amid terrorism fears, where a sensationalist tabloid press destroys a young woman's reputation during Carnival season in the Rhineland.
Wider picks
By long-time residents and outsiders who know the place well, or folk tales, poetry and history with a strong feel for Germany.
Goodbye to Berlin
Christopher Isherwood
Novel, 1939
Wider pick: By a British writer who lived in Berlin
Berlin's bedsits, cabarets and street politics in the last years of the Weimar Republic, as the Nazis rise.
The Glass Bead Game
Hermann Hesse
Novel, 1943. Translated from German by Richard Winston and Clara Winston
Wider pick: Set in fictional Castalia; Hesse was German-born but Swiss-resident.
A future intellectual order in the German-speaking cultural tradition, reflecting its devotion to music, scholarship and Bildung, though Germany is never named.
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