German Fiction Since 1900
Heinrich Boll The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (Minerva/Penguin). Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1972, Heinrich Boll is the most popular postwar German novelist - at least with non-Germans. This is the harrowing story of a young woman whose life is ruined by the combined effects of a gutter-press campaign and her accidental involvement with a wanted terrorist. The Clown (Marion Boyars/Penguin) again uses the backdrop of Cologne for a more detailed critique of modern German society. And Where Were You, Adam? (Minerva/Northwestern UP) is set in 1944, chronicling the effect of war and Nazism on ordinary German people. Bertolt Brecht Short Stories (Methuen/Routledge). A highly entertaining collection, proving that this side of Brecht's output has been unfairly neglected. In contrast, his single large-scale prose work, The Threepenny Novel (Penguin), a much-expanded version of the Opera , is stultifyingly verbose. Alfred Doblin Berlin-Alexanderplatz (Ungar). A prominent socialist intellectual during the Weimar period, Doblin went into exile shortly after the banning of his books in 1933. Berlin-Alexanderplatz is his weightiest and most durable achievement, an unrelenting epic of the city's underclass. Hans Fallada Little Man, What Now? (Libris/Academy Chicago Publishers). A once-famous but now unjustly neglected masterpiece, describing with style, humour and tenderness the story of a young couple struggling against the spiralling inflation of the final Weimar years. The German psyche on the eve of the Nazi takeover is captured and distilled far more effectively than in any history book. Gunter Grass From the Diary of a Snail, The Flounder, The Tin Drum (all Minerva/Random House). Grass, the Nobel Laureate of 1999, is one of Germany's best-known postwar personalities, concerned to analyse and come to terms with his country's awful recent heritage. His highly political novels are all studies of the German character, concentrating on how Nazism found a foothold among ordinary Germans and on postwar guilt, but also on postwar materialism and spiritual poverty. Hermann Hesse Narziss and Goldmund (Penguin/Holt). A beautifully polished novel, set in medieval Germany and narrated in the picaresque vein, about two monks, one a dedicated scholar, the other a wanderer, artist and lover. Steppenwolf (Penguin/Holt) is a bizarre fantasy about schizophrenia, while The Glass Bead Game (Picador/Henry Holb) is a monumental utopian novel, set in a future where an elite group develops a game which resolves the world's conflicts. Georg Heym The Thief and Other Stories (Libris). These seven Expressionist stories, notable for their rich imagery and relentlessly grim subject-matter, comprise the entire prose output of the author, who was already a well-established poet at the time of his death in a skating accident at the age of 25. Stefan Heym The King David Report (Northwestern UP). Heym was one of the many Marxist writers who chose to settle in the GDR, but he quickly became disillusioned and for decades functioned as a one-man opposition to the regime. This is his best novel, a devastatingly witty send-up of modern totalitarianism by means of a biblical allegory. Gert Hofmann The Parable of the Blind (Minerva/Fromm), Our Conquest (Minerva). Hofmann was a latecomer to fiction, but quickly established himself among the most original contemporary German writers. The Parable of the Blind is an imaginative rendering of the story behind Brueghel's enigmatic painting, while Our Conquest offers a child's-eye view of the aftermath of defeat in World War II. Ernst Junger The Glass Bees (Noonday Press), Eumeswill (Quartet), Aladdin's Problem (Quartet). Junger is the most controversial German writer of the twentieth century, mainly because, although never a Nazi, he was an avowed right-winger who willingly served as a soldier in World War II. His novels belong to the genre of utopian fiction and are multi-layered in approach, offering critiques which can be taken to apply to Germany in particular or to modern society in general. Wolfgang Koeppen Pigeons on the Grass (Holmes & Meier). A collage-like novel describing through a score of different characters the events in a single day in an occupied German city after World War II. It's part of an informal trilogy which also includes Death in Rome (Penguin), a ruthless dissection of the various component parts of the German soul as manifested through four members of the same family. Siegfried Lenz The German Lesson (New Directions). A classic German novel about World War II, focusing on the clashes between a father and son, and between duty and personal loyalty. The Lightship (Methuen) examines similar themes in a very different setting. Heinrich Mann Man of Straw (Penguin). The best novel by Thomas Mann's more politically committed elder brother, here analysing the corrupt nature of political and business life under the Second Reich. Klaus Mann The Pious Dance (Gay Men's Press), Mephisto (Penguin). The erotic novels of Thomas Mann's son were long banned; he now appears as a remarkable individual voice in his own right. His vivid descriptions of the Berlin underworld in the former strongly influenced Isherwood, while Mephisto is a striking roman a clef about an actor who sells his soul to the Nazi party. Thomas Mann The Magic Mountain (Minerva/Random House). Generally considered the author's masterpiece, this is a weighty novel of ideas discussing love, death, politics and war through a collection of characters in a Swiss sanatorium, whose sickness mirrors that of European society as a whole. Buddenbrooks (Minerva/Random House) is the story of a merchant dynasty in the author's native Lubeck; Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man (Minerva/Random House) is the great comic novel of German literature; Lotte in Weimar (Minerva/Random House) is a brilliant evocation of Weimar in the era of Goethe; while Doctor Faustus (Minerva/Random House) updates the Faust legend through the story of a twentieth-century German composer. Erich Maria Remarque All Quiet on the Western Front (Picador/Fawcett). The classic German novel of World War I, focusing on the traumatic impact of the conflict on the life of an ordinary soldier. Three Comrades (Fawcett Columbine) explores the theme of friendship in the uncertain atmosphere of late 1920s Germany. Herbert Rosendorfer The Architect of Ruins (Dedalus). This, the first and best novel of one of Germany's most admired contemporary writers, is an amusing, dreamlike work consisting of a series of stories within stories. The Night of the Amazons (Minerva) is a black comedy about Nazi Germany, while Stephanie (Dedalus) narrates a German housewife's trips back in time to her previous existence as an eighteenth-century Spanish duchess. Bernhard Schlink The Reader (Phoenix/Pantheon). The most widely praised German-language novel of recent years, this is a Holocaust book with a difference, based around the postwar love story of the narrator and an older woman. Written in spare, taut prose, it deals with the great themes of guilt, atonement, redemption, forgiveness and conscience with extraordinary power and economy of means. Peter Schneider The Wall Jumper (Allison & Busby/Pantheon). A series of vignettes about the Berlin Wall: about those who crossed it (in both directions), and about the two different states of mind it induced. Although billed as fiction, much of it is clearly autobiographical and factual, albeit larded with a few hoaxes. W.G. Sebald The Emigrants (Harvill). Billed as a work of fiction - notwithstanding the inclusion of numerous old photographs as evidence of its factual basis - this is a haunting lament for the vanished Jewish culture of Germany, illustrated through the lives of four exiles. Anna Seghers The Seventh Cross (Monthly Review Press). Now rather a neglected figure, Seghers was one of the literary stalwarts of the GDR. This, her best-known novel, is a stirring wartime adventure story about a Communist on the run from the Nazi prison camps. Kurt Tucholsky Germany? Germany! (Carcanet). A reader drawn from the writings of the sharpest German satirist of the century. The outrageously witty monologues of the complacent Jewish businessman Herr Wendriner are chillingly prophetic. Jakob Wassermann Caspar Hauser (Penguin). A masterly exposition of the theme of innocence betrayed, this novel is the finest of the many books inspired by the true story of the famous foundling. The Maurizius Case (Carroll & Graf) is a weighty novel about the pursuit of justice. Christa Wolf A Model Childhood (Virago/Farrar, Straus & Giroux). The author gained a reputation for literary integrity, despite her loyalty to the GDR. This book is a fictionalized account of her own youth in Bavaria in the 1930s, providing an excellent portrait of a child's confrontation with Nazi ideas and the shattering disillusionment that came from facing the truth as an adult.
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