I was born in England, live in America, and write history books about Germany. I’ve published eight books in all (and co-edited two others), and I’m proud that two of them won prizes. I review books, too, in publications like the Guardian and the London Review of Books. History is how I make my living, but it is also a calling and a passion. I can’t imagine doing anything else. I have always enjoyed reading literature and find I am reading even more avidly since the pandemic. There are so many German novels I love it was hard to choose just five. I hope you enjoy my choices.
Reading this book made me feel as if I was watching a great magician perform several impossible tricks.
It is both clever and funny, it teems with wonderful characters but never seems overstuffed, and it does what very few historical novels manage to do. We absolutely believe that the people are living their lives in the past (this really is Germany in the 1790s), but we also recognize them as our contemporaries.
I find it a magical book, lighter than air, a poignant, gorgeous love story that also satisfies the historian in me.
One of the ten books - novels, memoirs and one very unusual biography - that make up our Matchbook Classics' series, a stunningly redesigned collection of some of the best loved titles on our backlist.
The year is 1794 and Fritz, passionate, idealistic and brilliant, is seeking his father's permission to announce his engagement to his 'heart's heart', his 'true Philosophy': twelve-year-old Sophie. His astounded family and friends are amused and disturbed by his betrothal. What can he be thinking?
Tracing the dramatic early years of the young German who was to become the great romantic…
I first read this book more than fifty years ago, before I began to teach and write about German history for a living. I knew the great nineteenth-century novels of adultery, like Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina, but didn’t think there was a German counterpart worth mentioning in the same breath. But there is, and this is it!
I love the psychological insight Fontane brings to portraying his characters, especially the youthful and headstrong title character, Effi, and the sharply etched social relations and stifling moral codes of the time.
Another incidental pleasure of the book, for me, is the way it moves back and forth between the countryside and the city, the old and the new. All this, and a ghost story sub-plot.
'I loathe what I did, but what I loathe even more is your virtue.'
Seventeen-year-old Effi Briest is steered by her parents into marriage with an ambitious bureaucrat, twenty years her senior. He takes her from her home to a remote provincial town on the Baltic coast of Prussia where she is isolated, bored, and prey to superstitious fears. She drifts into a half-hearted affair with a manipulative, womanizing officer, which ends when her husband is transferred to Berlin. Years later, events are triggered that will have profound consequences for Effi and her family.
If I were allowed to have only one novel about German culture and the coming of the Nazis, this would be it. And, if I were allowed only one novel about the price paid by those who create great art, this would also be it.
I have never read a better fictional account of what it means to make music, and there is something truly thrilling (but also quite chilling) about the story of the composer Adrian Leverkuhn’s Faustian pact with the devil.
I was also captivated by the way that Thomas Mann has his narrator tell this story, from the recent German past, from the “present” of bombs falling on Germany at the end of World War II.
I came to this book much later than the others. My wonderful editor sent me a copy, and I was instantly smitten. The historian in me loved the scathing indictment of the early Federal Republic, with its obsessive materialism and its idealistic narrator surrounded by a world of political opportunists and sleazy lobbyists.
But it’s the language of the book that made me sit up, the strange, almost uncanny mixture of urgent, tumbling, staccato thoughts, but at the same time, an extraordinary lyricism. I found that I wanted to taste the words, to roll them around in my mouth; this may be a book to read out loud. I found it melancholy yet somehow energizing.
A progenitor of both W. G. Sebald and Gunter Grass, Wolfgang Koeppen emerges with an existential masterpiece. Harrowing, moody, and supremely powerful, The Hothouse, first published in 1953, stands among the finest novels written in postwar Germany. Largely unrecognized beyond Germany during his lifetime, Wolfgang Koeppen sought to make sense of German life amid the vast political and social reconstruction of the war-ravaged nation. The Hothouse traces the final two days in the life of a minor German politician, Keetenheuve, a man disillusioned by the corruption of German politics and grieving after the sudden death of his wife. With the…
This is the best book I know (even better than a complex spy thriller!) about what the Berlin Wall meant to individual East Germans.
I first read this novel about divided lovers in a West German edition back in the 1980s, when the “other” Germany still existed. I have often used the book in classes since then because I like it so much, enjoying it more and more as I peeled back the layers, admiring how cleverly Christa Wolf interweaves the personal and political.
She talks about “this strange stuff called life,” and that is one of the things I most love about the book: how it makes things that are apparently obvious and familiar seem strange.
First published in 1963, in East Germany, They Divided the Sky tells the story of a young couple, living in the new, socialist, East Germany, whose relationship is tested to the extreme not only because of the political positions they gradually develop but, very concretely, by the Berlin Wall, which went up on August 13, 1961. The story is set in 1960 and 1961, a moment of high political cold war tension between the East Bloc and the West, a time when many thousands of people were leaving the young German Democratic Republic (the GDR) every day in order to…
This is a global history of Germany for a global age. It tells the story of the millions of Germans who have moved or settled around the world and the German institutions like the Kindergarten that have traveled around the world.
Readers will encounter mapmakers and slave traders, soldiers and scientists, merchants and missionaries. They will also discover how familiar landmarks of German history, from the Reformation to Hitler’s Third Reich, look different when viewed through a global lens. This book upends the idea that a nation’s history can be written as if it took place entirely within that nation’s borders. German history will never seem the same after you’ve read this book.
My book is fantastical historical fiction about two characters who're wrestling with the monstrosity of their grief.
It takes you into London high society, where Ambrose tries to forget about how much he misses Bennett and how much he dreads becoming as cold as their Grandfather. It takes you to the family's country manor house, where Mattie isolates and old ghosts start to come out of the woodwork.
It's a story about loss and depression; it's a story about friends who don't let you walk through the valley of death alone.
Ambrose Bancroft returns to London society with his younger sister, hoping they'll leave ghosts of memory behind. They have only each other left. While Ambrose attempts to draw Mattie out, dragging her to balls and threatening to seek suitors for her, his sister recoils from his meddling. Finally, when Ambrose compels her to attend art class before she's ready, Mattie paints something horrific enough to banish them from society in public disgrace.
At Linwood Manor, Mattie and Ambrose aren't as alone as they think. Taking advantage of Mattie's desperate need to find freedom, a vanishing room lures Ambrose's sister into…
