My favorite books for people interested in German history who love to read novels

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.

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.

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. 

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.