Here are 100 books that The Architects fans have personally recommended if you like
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I have always been interested in what makes people tick – in their unseen inner world. In my twenties, I literally embodied others in my work as an actor. In my thirties, I studied applied psychology and sat alongside others and talked. In my forties, I started my consulting business Changeable, working with group and organizational dynamics. Now in my fifties, I am accessing inner worlds through writing, placing myself imaginatively into other people and places. I have merely scratched the surface. These post-WWII books give a gripping, personal, and scorching window into truth-seeking.
A young Australian, Anna Funder, places an advertisement in the newspaper to find resistors and enforcers of the brutal East German regime, the Stasi. This naïve, but bold act leads her on a path to discover tales that reverberate through time.
Similarly, I felt ill equipped to face vestiges of censored war crimes, historical documents, and fragments of memory, but, inspired by Funder’s curiosity and dedication, I pressed on.
“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’m a Scottish journalist. In the 1980s, I studied German at Karl-Marx University in Leipzig, East Germany. It was a fascinating experience that changed my perceptions of the world. I didn’t become a communist, but I did begin to see that where you stand depends on where you sit and that principles are easy to maintain when it costs you nothing to do so. There was a bleak glamour to East Germany that I loved, and so I decided to set my first novel in the shadowy world of intense personal connections, underground artists, and unofficial informers that I’d found in Leipzig.
In Times of Fading Light is a masterful five-decade family saga that melds the personal and the political to create a fascinating portrait of East Germany before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Intelligent, fearless, and full of dark humor, it is both an ingeniously structured page-turner, moving back and forward in time, and a literary tour de force. Eugen Ruge was a 35-year-old playwright when the Wall fell, and In Times of Fading Light, published in 2011, was his first novel. It provides a rich understanding of how people lived and loved in East Germany that scotches both nostalgia for the old East and Western clichés. Shining a bright light into the darker corners of family dynamics, it is also a tale with universal resonance.
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.
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…
I’m a Scottish journalist. In the 1980s, I studied German at Karl-Marx University in Leipzig, East Germany. It was a fascinating experience that changed my perceptions of the world. I didn’t become a communist, but I did begin to see that where you stand depends on where you sit and that principles are easy to maintain when it costs you nothing to do so. There was a bleak glamour to East Germany that I loved, and so I decided to set my first novel in the shadowy world of intense personal connections, underground artists, and unofficial informers that I’d found in Leipzig.
Kairos is the story of an affair between a late-middle-aged man and a young woman set in the dying days of the German Democratic Republic. The disappearing nation is almost incidental to the main plot, which charts the peaks and troughs of an unequal and sometimes abusive relationship. For me, this light touch says everything about what it was like to live in East Germany. People were mainly just getting on with their lives, as they do everywhere. The book’s closing chapters explore emotions that were too often overlooked in the rush towards reunification: the dismay and disorientation that afflicted many East Germans, especially older ones, as their institutions were dismantled and they became foreigners in their own land.
Eine ganz und gar epische Erzhlerin eine der kraftvollsten Stimmen der deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur. NZZ am Sonntag ber Jenny ErpenbeckDie neunzehnjhrige Katharina und Hans, ein verheirateter Mann Mitte fnfzig, begegnen sich Ende der achtziger Jahre in Ostberlin, zufllig, und kommen fr die nchsten Jahre nicht voneinander los. Vor dem Hintergrund der untergehenden DDR und des Umbruchs nach 1989 erzhlt Jenny Erpenbeck in ihrer unverwechselbaren Sprache von den Abgrnden des Glcks vom Weg zweier Liebender im Grenzgebiet zwischen Wahrheit und Lge, von Obsession und Gewalt, Hass und Hoffnung. Alles in ihrem Leben verwandelt sich noch in derselben Sekunde, in der es geschieht,…
I grew up in Germany and have been living all over the globe since I was 18, including the US. I married a New Yorker 15 years ago. I am drawn to stories that combine both the German and American cultures — two worlds I feel at home in — and as reflected in my debut novel. The next one will take place between the US and East Germany - we had relatives on the other side of the Iron Curtain whom we visited frequently. I will never forget surprising my 17-year-old cousin sitting alone in the garden, crying… over a can of Coke that we had smuggled over the border to him.
First of all: am I the only one who thinks Franzen looks a bit like Stephen King? This resemblance might very well be the only thing they have in common (aside from both making a living solely with their writing). English isn’t my native language, so it probably took me a bit longer than the average native speaker to read his (long!) book - which is a stark contrast to Follett’s, and not only in terms of prose style. I had no idea that Franzen studied in Germany and is fluent in my mother language. I only looked this up after his chapter aptly titled "The Republic of Bad Taste" — Franzen’s name for East Germany.
With the character of Andreas Wolf, we’re looking into the mind of a criminal, the offspring of a high-level informant — his father. Andreas Wolf murders the sexually abusive father of a girl he…
The Sunday Times bestseller from the author of Freedom and The Corrections
Young Pip Tyler doesn't know who she is. She knows that her real name is Purity, that she's saddled with $130,000 in student debt, that she's squatting with anarchists in Oakland, and that her relationship with her mother - her only family - is hazardous. But she doesn't have a clue who her father is, why her mother chose to live as a recluse with an invented name, or how she'll ever have a normal life.
Enter the Germans. A glancing encounter with a German peace activist leads…
I’m a professor of modern European history. But before that, my first loves were Star Wars, heavy metal, and comic books. When I started my degree, it only made sense to combine my love of popular culture with my academic interest in the Soviet Bloc states. Cultural history and the history of everyday life, examining the world through cars, comics, film, food, music, or whatever, provide us with a lens through which to see how people understood themselves and came to terms with the society around them, and for my work, to understand how those living under dictatorship resisted and carved out their own niche within a police state.
Sometimes, I’m drawn to a book for its title, and this title sold me immediately. I was intrigued by the idea that local institutions and people could come together despite, or in spite of, waning faith in East German communism and the flagging legitimacy of the centralized regime.
I loved the idea that Leipzig’s population and local officials worked to save and renew their city during the last days of the communist regime by building a bowling alley, nearly synonymous with the American working class in the late twentieth century, as a shared public space.
Bowling for Communism illuminates how civic life functioned in Leipzig, East Germany's second-largest city, on the eve of the 1989 revolution by exploring acts of "urban ingenuity" amid catastrophic urban decay. Andrew Demshuk profiles the creative activism of local communist officials who, with the help of scores of volunteers, constructed a palatial bowling alley without Berlin's knowledge or approval. In a city mired in disrepair, civic pride overcame resentment against a regime loathed for corruption, Stasi spies, and the Berlin Wall.
Reconstructing such episodes through interviews and obscure archival materials, Demshuk shows how the public sphere functioned in Leipzig before…
My mother grew up in Germany during World War Two and her family (or what was left of it) settled in the Soviet Zone that eventually became East Germany. She managed to get out in 1953 by sneaking across the border with a weekend pass, but other members of the family remained. This history has been close to my heart as a result and is what inspired me to write my novel, The House of One Thousand Eyes. I had to do a lot of research to evoke an authentic setting for my novel. This reading list comes from my research of, and fascination with, that time in history.
This is a memoir written by a young man who grew up in East Germany. I picked this one up for research but found myself completely enthralled by the story. His attention to detail is excellent. If you ever want to know what it was like to grow up in East Germany on a day-to-day basis, this is a great source of information. When the author finally goes to West Berlin for the first time in his life, it made me cry.
Ever wondered what it must have been like growing up behind the Iron Curtain, on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall? Would your days have been haunted by the shadow of the omnipresent secret service, the Stasi, or was reality somewhat more mundane? In this humorous and touching memoir, Oliver Fritz takes us behind the myths, into a world of bottled fruit, corny commie jokes, socialist folk songs, sticky-taped plastic bags and Trabant cars. Where kids are counting the years to retirement, pensioners have no qualms breaking the law, holidays involve smuggling western newspapers from the Soviet Union or…
My mother grew up in Germany during World War Two and her family (or what was left of it) settled in the Soviet Zone that eventually became East Germany. She managed to get out in 1953 by sneaking across the border with a weekend pass, but other members of the family remained. This history has been close to my heart as a result and is what inspired me to write my novel, The House of One Thousand Eyes. I had to do a lot of research to evoke an authentic setting for my novel. This reading list comes from my research of, and fascination with, that time in history.
The author of this non-fiction book interviews eight people who were born and raised in East Germany’s totalitarian regime and have had to adjust to a new life after the Wall comes down. I liked this book because it gave me a different perspective on East Germany and how people felt about the regime. Turns out it was a little more complicated than simply thinking everything was bad. And once the Wall came down, many things became difficult for easterners, particularly the higher cost of living and the scorn they experienced from westerners.
The changes that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 were particularly dramatic for East Germans. With the German Democratic Republic effectively taken over by West Germany in the reunification process, nothing in their lives was immune from change and upheaval: from the way they voted, the newspapers they read, to the brand of butter they bought.
But what was it really like to go from living under communism one minute, to capitalism the next? What did the East Germans make of capitalism? And how do they remember the GDR today? Are their memories dominated by fear…
I grew up in Germany and have been living all over the globe since I was 18, including the US. I married a New Yorker 15 years ago. I am drawn to stories that combine both the German and American cultures — two worlds I feel at home in — and as reflected in my debut novel. The next one will take place between the US and East Germany - we had relatives on the other side of the Iron Curtain whom we visited frequently. I will never forget surprising my 17-year-old cousin sitting alone in the garden, crying… over a can of Coke that we had smuggled over the border to him.
Did you know that the beautiful German city of Dresden was part of what the Eastern Germans called ‘The Valley of the Clueless’? Dresden, along with another section in the north, wasn’t able to receive any broadcasts from the West German TV channels existing at that time. Tellkamp’s novel sheds light on the last decade of the German Democratic Republic, leading all the way up to its fall in 1989. None of its three protagonists are too likable, and this is exactly what I appreciate about Tellkamp’s writing. He isn’t afraid to sketch them as such. The speed of the novel varies, and I can’t lie: I have to say that some passages took me an effort to get through. Still, I’d recommend this book to anyone who wants to dwell in Tellkamp’s memories of a time long gone - and ironically, still so present.
In derelict Dresden a cultivated, middle-class family does all it can to cope amid the Communist downfall. This striking tapestry of the East German experience is told through the tangled lives of a soldier, surgeon, nurse and publisher. With evocative detail, Uwe Tellkamp masterfully reveals the myriad perspectives of the time as people battled for individuality, retreated to nostalgia, chose to conform, or toed the perilous line between East and West. Poetic, heartfelt and dramatic, The Tower vividly resurrects the sights, scents and sensations of life in the GDR as it hurtled towards 9 November 1989.
I have always loved history—in both fiction and nonfiction forms. The events from history that tend to stick with me the most are stories of individuals or groups who face enormous odds in their quest to live a life of freedom. History is full of oppression, tyranny, and tragedy, but it’s also full of individuals and groups that have stood against evil, even when it’s dangerous or difficult or unlikely to succeed. Immersing myself in those stories is one of the ways I honor those who have struggled and sacrificed.
When the Berlin Wall goes up, Gerta’s family is divided.
Her father and one brother are in the west. Gerta, her mother, and her brother Fritz are in the east. Four years later, the Statsi has their eye on Gerta’s family, Fritz is due to be drafted, and then Gerta catches sight of her father on the other side of the wall, signaling something about digging.
If they’re ever going to be free, they must do something daring, and do it soon. Though written for young readers, the excellent pacing, realistic characters, and powerful themes about freedom and family make this book a great read for all ages.
A stunning thriller from NYT bestselling author Jennifer A. Nielsen about a girl who must escape to freedom after the Berlin Wall divides her family between east and west.
A Night Divided joins the Scholastic Gold line, which features award-winning and beloved novels. Includes exclusive bonus content!With the rise of the Berlin Wall, Gerta finds her family suddenly divided. She, her mother, and her brother Fritz live on the eastern side, controlled by the Soviets. Her father and middle brother, who had gone west in search of work, cannot return home. Gerta knows it is dangerous to watch the wall,…
