100 books like The Quest for Christa T.

Although I love all her novels, this one is the easiest to love and recommend (and it is beautifully translated).

Anna Seghers hated the idea of “art & politics,” as though they were separable entities to be glued together. Seghers—Jewish, Communist, especially the latter—wrote this book quite literally on the run from the Nazis, in cafés in France, on ships in the Atlantic, and in Mexico, where she lived in exile during the war. But you would never know it; it is as fluidly written as anything she ever wrote. In general, Seghers thrived in high tension situations.

It is a detective story, love story, wartime journalism, yet very little happens. Kafka’s Castle minus the parables and mysticism. It is also one of the deepest reflections on the nature of writing and narrative I know. 

Ok, I cheated (already). This is not really about art, but it is about politics. There are some essays on art, but all of it is about how badly we have screwed up how we think about politics, especially in the United States.

We think and talk—incessantly, endlessly—about disparities between groups. What this book shows, from every angle, is that this way of talking and thinking is how exploiters want us to talk and think. Sounds counterintuitive, I know.

The point is to stop talking about disparities and disproportionalities of awfulness and start talking about class inequality. The point is also to say that addressing class inequality is addressing disparities, but not vice versa. 

I have to put Brecht on this list. Which Brecht? I don’t know, but I find myself coming back to the Journals more often than anything else. These record his responses to the world between 1934 and 1955, but the war years are the most gripping.

Once more, it is the seamlessness with which art and politics come together that characterizes Brecht’s achievement. Brecht is the touchstone, the rock, the ground to which I often return. Brecht’s prose—concrete, direct, transparent—has had more effect on me than any other author. I call it not just “getting to the point” but “getting it right.”

If Brecht is my nature, so are Cézanne’s paintings. Clark understands Cézanne better than anyone else (and there is a vast literature on Cézanne). Was Cézanne a “political” artist? Clark shows that Cézanne—the pillar of modern art—thought seriously about painting his world. And his world was changing, mostly for the worse.

Part of that change involved two-dimensional pictures (literally and figuratively) altering our environment. Cézanne takes the flattening of experience as his subject; that’s Clark’s point—and we’ll never see Cézanne the same way again. 

Forty Autumns is the story of a family divided by the Berlin wall. One half is stuck behind it living a severely limited life,while the other is able to travel around West Germany and eventually to the USA. Willner put a huge amount of research into this story of her family and the depth of it connects to your emotions. Knowing that your side of the family has freedom, not just to travel but to live, while it is so difficult just to contact the rest of your family, will pull on your heartstrings, hoping that one day, they will be able to reunite.

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. 

This is another book that drew me in with the title. I appreciated how McLellan fought the stereotype, advanced by some of her academic peers, of sexual repressiveness in East Germany. Though public discussions of sexuality were tightly controlled by the state, McLellan deftly shows that East Germany experienced a sexual revolution of its own.

Maybe not a revolution as loud and proud as in the West, challenging gender norms and sexual identities, but divorce rates soared as did birth rates outside marriage, nudism became a state-sanctioned activity, and erotica became increasingly available to the public and found in private collections.

McLellan’s narrative is fascinating, illuminating, and at times humorous, drawing on interviews, magazine publications, heterosexual and queer photography collections, films, and state-sponsored information guides and handbooks.  

A WWII P-51 pilot, lost in Germany during WWII, was not located by the Americans for decades. He left a widow and a baby daughter, who felt her father’s absence her whole life. The area where he fell became part of East Germany, so was inaccessible for decades. One local man buried his remains and cared for the grave for years.

This is the amazing story of how several people, speaking three different languages, eventually became a "society of the heart" through the internet and in person. The P-51 pilot's remains were brought home for a military burial. 

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.

Although it reads like a spy novel, this is the real-life account of a noted English journalist’s encounter with his own Stasi surveillance file. The file in question was compiled in the early 1980s by the East German secret police on Garton Ash (code name “Romeo”), then a young man living in Berlin and writing about Central European communism. Garton Ash opened his file fifteen years later, after the former German Democratic Republic made Stasi records accessible. Tracking those who tailed him, the book explores the uneasy sensation of reading one’s past life through the photographs, informant reports, surveillance notes, and speculations of those tasked with observing a target of suspicion. It’s a compelling and often chilling chronicle of the costs both of watching and being watched.