The most recommended books on Germany

Bergen’s classic study of the German Christian movement explores the origins and influence of this sizable movement within German Protestantism that sought to synthesize Christianity and Nazism. The German Christians’ mission to transform Christianity into a ‘racially pure’ church manifested in practical ways, including denying the Jewishness of Jesus and excluding Christians of Jewish heritage. The book emphasizes the movement’s theological and political foundations, dispelling the myths that the German Christian movement was a purely Nazi creation imposed on the church or that the movement’s adherents were merely opportunistic. A central component of Bergen’s analysis is focused on gender, arguing for the centrality of gendered rhetoric and what would today be recognized as toxic masculinity. The narrative continues into the postwar period, revealing how many German Christians were able to reintegrate into German Protestant life after the war.   

Good historical novels concentrate on gaps in the historical record, and use fiction to fill them – and in doing so, they illuminate the facts. Robinson Crusoe, the first historical novel in English (some claim the first English novel), used the story of a fictional sailor who left home in 1651 and returned in 1687 to show how the mental world in which his character grew up, riven by confessional conflict and civil war, differed from the mental world of his readers, in which colonies and capitalism had combined to produce great wealth. 

Among more recent works of fiction set in the 17th century, I particularly enjoyed Günther Grass, The meeting at Telgte (1981), set in Germany in 1647; and Iain Pears An instance of the fingerpost (1997), set in Oxford in 1663. Both include real historical figures.

Wyman’s later book, The Abandonment of the Jews got all the attention, but Paper Walls, about how immigration to the United States actually worked and how the US government alternately tried and refused to aid Jews desperately attempting to escape increasing Nazi persecution and violence, is my go-to recommendation. If this is your family’s story, or if you want to know why Jews couldn’t just leave, Wyman’s book will explain a lot.

Just who was the Germanic God who carried many variations of the name, Wodin, Odin, Oðin, Votan, Wodan, Photan? What is the actual story behind the Germanic/Norse mythology he features in? This novel is an extremely amusing explanation that in fact he was a rather dodgy trader who, partly because of his earlier occupation as a doctor, ends up as a god in all of Germania, as do his also dodgy mates and promiscuous wife. 

A previous knowledge of the mythology helps, but is not essential. I found it very funny and it was one of the inspirations for my own tales.

The main character, an armaments engineer, becomes a target of the (then) Nazi government in Germany to prevent his expertise from being used to cement an Anglo-Turkish alliance in 1939. Their aim is to assassinate him. The story details the situation of an ordinary citizen caught up in international intrigue and how he manages to cope with it.

My liking and recommendation of this book is similar to that of my first choice, an innocent and ordinary individual who finds himself on the run to avoid capture and possible death by enemy agents, the means he utilises to make himself inconspicuous and evade them, and his fury at the end which enables him to turn the tables despite being out of his depth. 

I’m not normally one for biographies but I read two excellent ones this year (the other being Ruth Franklin’s Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life). This one though, the excellent telling of the life of one of Philosophy’s, and indeed Literature’s, greatest practitioners, the titan that was Frederick Nietzsche, I simply have to call attention to. 

Meticulously researched, scholarly but never stuffy, it makes the life of Nietzsche an intellectual page-turner, recommended not only for fans of the great thinker, but anyone curious about one of the most remarkable intellectuals we were lucky to have tread our planet.

Marthe Cohn played a major role in the final year of World War II, spying for the French troops in Germany. She grew up in Metz, France speaking flawless French and German, and became a spy when members of her family and friends were tortured and killed. Faced with death many times, she survived to be decorated by the French government and finally told the story to her children. She lived for many years in Palos Verdes, California, where I live. When I heard her speak, I couldn’t believe that a woman who never reached five feet could have done all the things she did.

Since its publication, I have assigned this book every time I taught my course on Nazi Germany at Williams College.

Through his use of diaries, letters, and anecdotes, in combination with his profound knowledge of the history of the Third Reich, Fritzsche shows how, after January 1933, when Hitler became Reich Chancellor, the German people came rapidly to support and even to create National Socialism in Germany. The German people here were not simply duped or terrorized by the Nazis. Fritzsche shows how, in various different ways and to various different degrees, Germans became Nazis.

And, through empathy with those Germans, he helps the reader to understand why they did so. If you want to read only one book on the history of the Third Reich, this is the book I would recommend.

In this beautifully written, well-researched book, Showalter explains how German generals won a spectacular victory on the eastern front. Although able to deploy only one army group – while seven were deployed in the west – they prevailed in the famous Battle of Tannenberg (1914) against two ineptly led and poorly armed Russian armies. Germany achieved the kind of success that eluded them in the west, but was unable to knock Russia out of the war – in fact, the victors had only bought time against enemy forces increasing in number. Not until the communist revolution three years later would Germany wriggle free of enemies in the east.

This is a noir-style detective novel set in Berlin in the 1930s. The protagonist, private detective Bernie Gunther, is a disaffected police officer who has left its service because of the Nazi takeover of public institutions - and all the corruption and brutality that come with it.

I loved the book, the first of a trilogy, and I immediately read the next two because of its main character, Berlin. I have been visiting Berlin for 40 years and am fascinated by its seedy, gritty, and tragic history and its resilience as a city. Berlin Noir evokes the Berlin of the 1930s in a way that only fiction can do. Brilliant.