I’ve been fascinated with the history-soaked city of Berlin where my novels are set since a school exchange trip as a teenager. It was the border that did it. Machine guns, dog runs, barbed wire, watchtowers. They were daunting. More striking still was our guide’s story about her sister who lived on the other side in the East. They were barely a mile apart but hadn’t seen each other in the twenty years since the Wall went up. I’ve been back many times since and have had a passion for German history from that day, particularly for the experiences of its people who have lived through such turbulent times.
The story of the resistance to the Nazis in wartime Berlin is made up of small acts of courage. This novel, which is based on a true story, is a devastating depiction of just such an act. I love Alone in Berlin for the quietness of its characters: Otto and Anna are the last people you would expect to stand up to the terrifying might of the SS and the Gestapo and yet the campaign of defiance they embark on is totally believable. They have lost hope and so they have lost fear, and their personal tragedy becomes a liberation. I have read the book twice now and its power grows with the re-reading. I know I will come back to it again.
A gripping portrait of life in wartime Berlin and a vividly theatrical study of how paranoia can warp a society gripped by the fear of the night-time knock on the door.
Based on true events, Hans Fallada's Alone In Berlin follows a quietly courageous couple, Otto and Anna Quangel who, in dealing with their own heartbreak, stand up to the brutal reality of the Nazi regime. With the smallest of acts, they defy Hitler's rule with extraordinary bravery, facing the gravest of consequences.
Translated and Adapted by Alistair Beaton (Feelgood, The Trial Of Tony Blair), this timely story of the…
The Berlin Stories was first published in the 1930s and is soaked in the dark, decadent, and delicious atmosphere of Berlin of that time. The characters who populate it are a fabulous bunch of chancers and reprobates, including Sally Bowles of Cabaret fame who makes her first appearance here. Isherwood was an American journalist who lived in Berlin between 1929 and 1933. He kept a detailed diary and clearly loved the city as much as I do, although he wasn’t blind to its problems and the shadow of the Nazis hangs thick. It is in that tension I think that his writing really excels: the lifestyles he was writing about could not withstand what was coming. It is impossible not to read this collection and feel the tragedy in that.
First published in the 1930s, The Berlin Stories contains two astonishing related novels, The Last of Mr. Norris and Goodbye to Berlin, which are recognized today as classics of modern fiction. Isherwood magnificently captures 1931 Berlin: charming, with its avenues and cafes; marvelously grotesque, with its nightlife and dreamers; dangerous, with its vice and intrigue; powerful and seedy, with its mobs and millionaires-this is the period when Hitler was beginning his move to power. The Berlin Stories is inhabited by a wealth of characters: the unforgettable Sally Bowles, whose misadventures in the demimonde were popularized on the American stage and…
I am utterly obsessed with the GDR, a country that existed for less than thirty years and was riddled with informers and forbidden zones. So many of the stories which have come out of it teeter on the edge of absurd: the punk scene, for example, which the Stasi (the state secret police) were so determined to infiltrate that one popular band was made up entirely of their agents. And so many of them, including the treatment of prisoners in the secret prison at Hohenschönhausen, are terrifying. In Stasiland, Anna Funder captures all the insanity and also the warmth of a country that now exists only in films and museums and memory. It is the best kind of accessible non-fiction and I cannot recommend it highly enough.
“Stasiland demonstrates that great, original reporting is still possible. . . . A heartbreaking, beautifully written book. A classic.” — Claire Tomalin, Guardian “Books of the Year”
Winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction: a powerfully moving account of people who heroically resisted the communist dictatorship of East Germany, and of people who worked for its secret police, the Stasi.
Anna Funder delivers a prize-winning and powerfully rendered account of the resistance against East Germany’s communist dictatorship in these harrowing, personal tales of life behind the Iron Curtain—and, especially, of life under the iron fist of the Stasi, East…
I stumbled on this novel when I was looking for something else (a common writers’ problem). It was written in 1932 and banned the next year by the Nazis and is set amongst the gangs of young men struggling to survive in a harsh and desperately impoverished Berlin. The descriptions of the hard side of the city are brilliantly drawn and the characters are so real you long for their lives to improve even when you know there is almost no hope of it. Haffner was a social worker who clearly knew Berlin’s streets well. To add to the poignancy of his writing, nothing is known about his fate beyond a summons before a Nazi tribunal in the late 1930s. After that, he disappears. I really hope his book doesn’t.
Blood Brothers is the only known novel by German social worker and journalist Ernst Haffner, of whom nearly all traces were lost during the course of the Second World War. Told in stark, unsparing detail, Haffner's story delves into the illicit underworld of Berlin on the eve of Hitler's rise to power, describing how these blood brothers move from one petty crime to the next, spending their nights in underground bars and makeshift hostels, struggling together to survive the harsh realities of gang life, and finding in one another the legitimacy denied them by society.
This is the heartbreaker, the one you need tissues for. Effi Briest was written by Theodor Fontane in 1894/5 and is a German classic. It’s also really good. When we first meet Effi she is a young, naïve girl about to be married off in the way of wealthy families to a suitable husband. The Baron she is given to might be suitable but he is also old and dull and Effi makes the fatal mistake of letting her head be turned by a dangerous man. Fontane’s writing is so spare and so knowing that you end up as angry with the hand poor Effie has been dealt and the hypocritical world she lives in as you are broken-hearted for her. Don’t miss this one, it really will stay with you.
Telling the tragic tale of a socially advantageous but emotionally ruinous match, Theodor Fontane's Effi Briest is translated from the German by Hugh Rorrison with an introduction by Helen Chambers in Penguin Classics.
Unworldly young Effi Briest is married off to Baron von Innstetten, an austere and ambitious civil servant twice her age, who has little time for his new wife. Isolated and bored, Effi finds comfort and distraction in a brief liaison with Major Crampas, a married man with a dangerous reputation. But years later, when Effi has almost forgotten her affair, the secret returns to haunt her -…
The Tower House, a crumbling villa choked with memories. Berlin 1940. Magda leads a dangerous double life working for the resistance and also as secretary to Himmler, leader of the SS. Her capture, and her death, seem inevitable.
Forty years later. Her granddaughter Nina flees the GDR carrying a forged passport and a scribbled address for the Tower House taken from a drawing she found hidden in her grandmother’s wardrobe. Separated from her family and betrayed by her country, Nina’s last hope is to trace her family’s history in the ruins of the past her grandmother ran from. But, when she finally finds the abandoned house, she opens the door to a forgotten story, and to secrets that will change everything: past, present, and future…
I once saw a play at the renowned Oregon Shakespeare Theatre. A play about Sor Juana. It was a good play, but it felt like something was missing like jalapenos left out of enchiladas. The play kept nudging me to look further to find Sor Juana, and so for the next five years, I did so. I read and read more. I listened for her voice, and that is where I heard her life come alive. This isn’t the only possibility for Sor Juana’s life; it is just the one I heard.
Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, this brilliant 17th century nun flew through Mexico City on the breeze of poetry and philosophy. She met with princes of the Church, and with the royalty of Spain and Mexico. Then she met a stunning, powerful woman with lavender eyes, la Vicereine Maria Louisa, and her life changed forever. As her fame grew, she dared to challenge the diabolical Archbishop once too often, and he threw her in front of the Inquisition, where she stood, alone.
Sor Juana's work is studied still today, and justifiably so. Scholars study her months on end; mystics…
This astonishingly brilliant 17th century poet and dramatist, this nun, flew through Mexico City on wings of inspiration. Having no dowry, she chose the life of a nun so that she might learn, so that she might write, so that she might meet the most fascinating people of the western world. She accomplished all of that, and more.
One day a woman with violet eyes, eyes the color of passion flowers, entered her life. It was the new Vicereine, Maria Luisa. As the two most powerful women in Mexico City, the bond between them crossed politics and wound them in…
