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German Literature – a personal survey
Wednesday 9 March 2016, by
You will find in this compilation of works a reasonably comprehensive, albeit necessarily incomplete, sampling of the outstanding German-language short stories, novelettes, novellas, novels and plays that have been written by German, Austrian and Swiss authors over the past several hundred years.
| No. | Date | Author________ | German Title | English_Title_______ | Genre | Synopsis/Commentary__________________________________________ |
| 1 | 1668 | Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelschausen | Der Abenteuerliche Simplicissimus Teutsch | Simplicissimus | novel | The devastating Thirty Years War seen by the first giant of German literature, a baroque monument. |
| 2 | 1774 | J.M.R. Lenz | Der Hofmeister | The Tutor | theatre | A sometimes hard-to-follow but interesting and most important drama about social relationships, teachers and students in the late 18th century, with much frank talk about sex, marriage, family attachments, the meaning of life and so on, with very many outstanding passages. |
| 3 | 1775 | Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | Die Leiden des jungen Werthers | The Sufferings of Young Werther | novel | The original "Bildungsroman" (novel of learning) about a young man’s initiation to life – the book that put Goethe on the map and whose sensitive, soulful, searching and suicidal hero Werther was a founding figure for the Romantic movement throughout Europe. |
| 4 | 1779 | Gottfried Lessing | Nathan der Weise | Nathan the Wise | theatre | Lessing’s magnificent verse drama is set in Jerusalem during the Crusades, and portrays in an extraordinarily favourable light the central character Nathan, a rich and cultivated Jewish merchant, who strives to defend both his adopted daughter and his ancestral faith in dramatic confrontations with a hostile Christian knight from Germany and with the Muslim ruler Saladin. Lessing’s earlier play The Jew had aroused great hostility and criticism for its favourable presentation of a Jew – unheard of at the time – so it was in all connaissance de cause that Lessing made this profoundly moving, premonitory and courageous statement that came to embody the very spirit of the Enlightenment throughout Europe.
– An eternal lesson of courage and humanism of the very highest literary quality. |
| 5 | 1781 | Friedrich von Schiller | Die Räuber | The Brigands | theatre | This intense drama about the lust for liberty in late-18th Century Germany, considered there and elsewhere to be an all-time classic, is dramatic and powerful and one can easily understand why its hero, the rebel-turned-brigand Moor, has made such an impact on the minds of enlightened Europe ever since its initial performance in 1781. |
| 6 | 1808 | Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | Faust. Eine Tragödie | Faust. A Tragedy | theatre | The summit of the great master’s art, an enormous monument. |
| 7 | 1808 | Heinrich von Kleist | Die Marquise von O... | The Marquise of O... | novelette | On page 1 of this stark investigation of the feminine condition in a rigid society ruled by pitiless moral strictures, the young widow Marquise of O. finds herself in an unexpected condition with no idea of how or why this situation came to be, and courageously puts an ad in the local paper proposing marriage to the (unknown) person responsible for this state of affairs. We then flash back, in rapid succession, to a violent military assault on the fortified town of which her father was the governor, an equally violent assault on her own person by marauding soldiers, a rescue by a heroic young officer who spends the rest of the story pursuing her with all his considerable means, and the ups and downs of her relationships with him and with her loving but very obdurate family.
– Bold and intense in content and innovative in form, this remarkable story seems as up-to-date today as it must have appeared avant-garde in its own time. |
| 8 | 1809 | Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | Die Wahlverwandt-schaften | The Elective Affinities | novel | Goethe’s classic novel set new standards for straightforward adult attitudes towards moral issues such as extramarital relations, adultery and even incest(?), but its main interest as far as I am concerned is the remarkable quality of the prose and dialogues. Not a particularly easy read, but I found myself increasingly impressed and enthused by the calm but Olympian overall tone that permeates the text, and finished the book with the sensation of having shared some very privileged moments with a writer of truly unusual breath and scope. |
| 9 | 1811 | Heinrich von Kleist | Die Verlobung in St. Domingo | The Engagement in St. Domingo | novelette | In the midst of the campaign of extermination of the thousands of white-skinned people left on Haiti (then called St. Domingo) after the successful uprising of slaves there in 1804, a young officer desperately seeks shelter and food for his small company of civilians in a wayside house, where he is lured into a very false sense of security by the family of the local killer-in-chief whose abode it is and who is absent for the moment. We follow the ups and downs of the attempts of the officer to survive in the face of apparently-hopeless odds with the help of the very seductive daughter of the house — but in the context of apocalyptic ultra-violence that permeates this dramatic story, we know that there will not be a happy end and there isn’t (the hero ends up blowing his brains out in the same way Kleist himself did a few months after the story was written).
– What a story! Breath-taking and timeless! |
| 10 | 1811 | Heinrich von Kleist | Der Findling | The Foundling | novella | A wealthy Roman merchant on a trip to plague-ridden Raguse loses his son and gains a young foundling (who was probably the cause of his son’s deadly infection!) whom he rapidly adopts. Naturally, this being a Kleist story, the bright and handsome foundling grows up to be a less than perfect scion of the family, perfectly ungrateful for all the love and education and riches that have always been piled on him. The bad deeds and disasters and violence – a constant Kleist theme – build up until the really violent end. |
| 11 | 1811 | Heinrich von Kleist | Der Zweikampf | The Duel | novella | A stark account of an honour duel in the late middle ages to establish – by death of the guilty party, necessarily conform to the will of divine justice according to the strictures of the time – the innocence or guilt of a noblewoman whose honour has been publicly besmirched. Couched in a complex, almost heraldic prose which most effectively recreates the mental and moral atmosphere of those far-away times, this striking tale is a kind of early (Romantic-era) murder mystery, with continual twists and turns of plot, a good dose of suspense, much intense emotion, remarkable protagonists and a most satisfying concern with old-fashioned notions of honour and moral rectitude. |
| 12 | 1811 | Heinrich von Kleist | Prinz Friedrich von Homburg | The Prince of Homburg | theatre | Written shortly before his early (self-inflicted) death at the age of 34, this powerful war drama set in 1635 during the Thirty Years War is Kleist’s crowning achievement. A patriotic plea for national resistance to foreign aggression (Swedish in the play, French at its time of writing) it is also a discourse on the upsides and downsides of wartime army discipline via a passionate and poetically-charged exploration of the theme of the death penalty.
– Strong stuff indeed! |
| 13 | ca. 1812 | Jakob u. Wilhelm Grimm | Das blaue Licht und andere Märchen | The Blue Light and Other Stories | fairy tales | The classic Grimm Brothers tales, including Hänsel and Gretel and Rapunzel, with all their sharpness and cruelty – no punches pulled for the kiddies in those days! The title story, The Blue Light, about the revenge a soldier wreaks on the king who had dismissed him without a cent, thanks to a magic light which he stole from a wicked witch (before getting her killed!), is typical of the pitiless methods applied by one and all, children included, on their enemies. The most striking feature of these stories – extremely well known in German-speaking countries – apart from their fairy-tale and magical elements, their princesses and kings and witches and strange gnomes, is their almost breathless pace, the way they zoom along and tell their story in a rush that leaves no time for the reader, young or old, to worry too much about the morality of what is going on. And they get right to the often-gory point without beating around the bush – no doubt one of the main reasons for their long-lasting success with the younger generations since they were first published in the 1810s. |
| 14 | 1813 | E. T. A. Hoffmann | Don Juan | Don Juan | short story | A traveling salesman discovers that his hotel room leads directly to a private lodge in the neighbouring theatre, where a performance of Mozart’s opera “Don Juan” is about to be given. Delighted, the music lover rushes over to the lodge, where not only is the performance exceptional, but where he also has a quasi-supernatural encounter with Donna Anna herself, the outraged and distressed victim of the infernal charmer Don Juan. The story enables the future author of The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr, a distinguished composer himself who adulated Mozart to the extent of adopting ‘Amadeus’ as one of his forenames, to convey his enthusiasm for Mozart’s celebrated masterwork and to provide the reader with his own insights into its profound significance. |
| 15 | 1814 | Rudolf Eric Raspe | Wunderbare Reisen des Freiherrn von Münchhausen | The adventures of Baron Munchausen | novel | An extravagant series of adventures purportedly recounted by the authentic Baron Karl Friedrich Hieronymus Freiherr von Münchhausen (1720-1797) to the scholar and sometime author Rudolf Eric Raspe on returning to Germany after ten years of serving in the Russian army. This lively and hard-to-believe but hard-to-leave account first published in London in 1785 almost instantly became famous all over Europe of the time. It was translated into German in 1786 (and considerably extended) by the poet Gottfried August Burger (1747-1797) – to whom the authorship was for a long time incorrectly ascribed – and has continued to be read and enjoyed ever since. |
| 16 | 1814 | Adelbert von Chamisso | Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte | The Marvellous Story of Peter Schlemihl | novella | At the very beginning of this justly-famous story the young Peter Schlemihl becomes so alarmed by the amazing powers of a very strange man at a social gathering that he runs away only to be pursued by the man in question, who insistently offers him an ever-renewable purse in exchange for his shadow. When he finally succumbs to the insistency of the diabolical fellow he discovers that in spite of his unlimited supply of money he is an object of ridicule and abhorrence to one and all because of his shadow-less abnormality, and he spends the rest of the tale desperately trying to recuperate the precious object. – A brilliantly-recounted moral fable in the fantastic vein with an expansive, the-sky’s-the-limit flavour to it from the great period of Romantic ferment in Germany in the early 19th Century. |
| 17 | 1814-1821 | E. T. A. Hoffmann | Fantasiestücke | Fantastic tales | short stories | Hoffmann is a master of the short story in the fantastic vein, an inspired writer whose taste for extravagance and the bizarre combined with his gift for imaginative writing and a way of whisking his story along with never a pause or a dull moment make him in my eyes one of the great writers of his romantic-era times. Among the most outstanding works in this celebrated opus were his Kreisleriana series of stories and essays on a musical theme, Don Juan and the first version of The Golden Pot. |
| 18 | ca. 1815 | Ludwig Tieck | Der Pokal und andere Märchen | The Mysterious Cup and Other Tales | fairy tales | Captivating and entrancing tales, notably perhaps his best-known story The Mysterious Cup, a tender love story featuring notably a magnificent young woman, her ardent but too-poor lover and an alchemist who tries very hard to sort things out for them with his unusual and very strange instruments.
– A striking portrait of the sociological lifestyle of those days not as different from our own as one might think, from one of the key figures of the German Romantic movement. |
| 19 | ca. 1815 | Jakob u. Wilhelm Grimm | Märchen | Fairy Tales | fairy tales | The original versions of these famous tales are a good deal bloodier and tougher than their modern edulcorated versions – they tell stories with hard-hitting morals, with no punches pulled and with no vagueness about the horrible dangers lurking out there in the big wide world for people in general and for children in particular. Nor about what parents are sometimes capable of doing to their children (like leaving them to starve in the forest when food runs short) or about what kids can do when they really get going (like pushing nasty old ladies into burning ovens).
– Fascinating. |
| 20 | 1816 | E. T. A. Hoffmann | Die Elixieren des Teufels | The Devil’s Elixirs | novel | This novel, Hoffmann’s first, about the doings of a strange monk who guards a mysterious elixir of the devil’s own making, is as wild and extravagant and complex as anything he ever wrote, which is saying a lot. In Hoffmann’s inimitable manner he adroitly introduces supernatural elements, or rather the possibility or suspicion of supernatural elements, into the ordinary everyday world, intermingled with fraternal admonitions to the reader to be wary of false appearances, that combine with the verve of the prose to elevate this story above the more straightforward Gothic novel in the vein of M.G. Lewis’s The Monk, which had caused a literary sensation throughout Europe at the end of the previous century and on which this book is in a way modelled. As seems to usually be the case with Hoffmann, a number of separate strains and themes run in parallel and criss and cross, and one is constantly subjugated by the vigour and originality of the prose that surges along like an unstoppable tidal force throughout the story – one can just sense the words flowing out from his pen as he frenetically writes to get them down on paper fast enough. |
| 21 | 1816 | E. T. A. Hoffmann | Nussknacker und Mausekönig | Nutcracker and the Mouse King | novella | Marie’s godfather is a very talented watchmaker who gives to his grandchildren one Christmas Eve a castle with a marvellous set of animated figures – and a strangely realistic little figure with a large head that can crack nuts with its teeth. These presents are carefully put away by the parents for safekeeping out of reach of the children in a large showcase in the front hall, and Marie lingers there at midnight after the party to admire them when she hears rustling and bustling and sees a big group of mice led by their strange king with seven horrible heads that come along with aggressive intentions on the showcase. So the toy soldiers of Marie’s brother, led by the nutcracker, come to life, climb down and engage in tremendous battle with the vicious invaders. That is the beginning of a series of dramatic and amazing adventures involving the nutcracker, the mice and their fearful king and queen, Marie’s dolls, the marzipan figurines Marie has lovingly salvaged from the Christmas feast, the enigmatic godfather and his even more enigmatic nephew, and especially Marie herself.
– A charming and even moving fable overflowing with a spirit of love and affection for small children, a brilliant foray into the realm of fantasy that Hoffmann was so gifted at evoking. A masterpiece of almost-realistic fantasy that is far more complex than the simplified version that Alexander Dumas translated-transformed which was used as the basis for the libretto for Tchaikovsky’s celebrated ballet. |
| 22 | 1816 | E. T. A. Hoffmann | Der Sandmann | The Sandman | novella | Nathaniel has vivid memories of being terrified in his childhood of the Sandman, an evil being who punished children who didn’t want to go to bed by sprinkling sand over their eyes and then taking their eyes out to feed to his own monstrous brood (!). And of the fearsome advocate Coppelius who visited his father every evening just after Nathaniel had to go to bed, and who had a most nefarious and eventually catastrophic influence on both his parents. Things go from bad to worse when in later years he is visited by a strange optician calling himself Coppola who bears a startling resemblance to the fearful Coppelius, and whose dark powers prevent Nathaniel from carrying out his planned union with the lovely Clara. And when he begins to follow the lectures of Coppola’s countryman Professor Spalanzani he falls under the spell of the professor’s mysterious daughter Olympia, who never leaves her room and never talks to anyone, except at a final ball that proves to be Nathaniel’s final undoing. – A striking story imbued with Hoffmann’s fascination with the darker side of life, brilliantly recounted in the vivid, powerful prose of one of the most outstanding masters of the German Romantic movement. |
| 23 | 1817 | E. T. A. Hoffmann | Erzählungen: Das öde Haus, Das Sanctus, Das steinerne Herz | The Deserted House; The Sanctuary; The Stone Heart |
stories | Tales with a supernatural tinge, but set in a charming, most attractive and realistic environment such that the possibility of ghostly apparitions and influences is there without being all that obvious – stories for believers in the occult and unbelievers alike, written by a master of language. |
| 24 | 1817 | Clemens Brentano | Geschichte vom braven Kasperl und dem schönen Annerl | The Story of the Good Gaspard and the Pretty Annette | novella | A remarkable old woman of eighty-eight who has walked for a very long time to come to the Duke’s residence to plead for mercy and forgiveness for her grandson Kasperl and her goddaughter Annerl, both of whom have come to a sad end, recounts in an irresistibly authentic way that cannot fail to charm the most blasé reader the gloomy and frankly gory not to say ghastly destiny of her loved ones, and the narrator, who has become devoted to her cause and does everything in his power to help her, infuses the tale with an added dimension of drama and even humour, in spite of the black destinies of the good Kasperl and the pretty Annerl.
– This unusual tale, that had a resounding popular success when it was first published in 1817 and that has continued to be read ever since, is Clemens Brentano’s best-known story. |
| 25 | 1818 | E. T. A. Hoffmann | Rat Krespel | The Cremona Violin | novelette | Councillor Krespel is an eccentric and somewhat mysterious fellow who plays the violin marvelously, specializes in repairing ancient instruments and who lives with (!) a particularly talented young singer Angelina whose voice – for those lucky enough to hear it – moves one and all like none other. But when the narrator falls in love with the beauty he discovers the secret connection between the tragic destiny of the young woman and a particularly prized ancient violin from Cremona that had always had pride of place in the Councillor’s heart.
– A tale by the great Romantic writer and musician just imbued with musical lore and insights. |
| 26 | 1819 | E. T. A. Hoffmann | Der goldene Topf | The Golden Pot | novella | An extravagant fairy-tale for grown-ups, the story of how the student Anselmus blundered his way to eternal happiness through a maze of mysterious not to say magical water-snakes, elder-trees, a golden pot and fantastic events of all sorts – one of the most brilliant and successful stories of the celebrated master of German Romanticism.
– A really terrific fable with a touch of the fantastic – you are just swept along, caught up by the author’s enthusiasm and irresistible charm and the way the words just flow along with brio and poetry. What a writer! |
| 27 | 1819 | E. T. A. Hoffmann | Klein Zaches, genannt Zinnober | Little Zaches, called Zinnober | novella | Little Zaches is a very small, misshapen, evil-tempered, utterly selfish and vainglorious little boy who’s a complete burden to his poverty-stricken mother, until one day the kindly Fräulein von Rosenschön – actually the Fairy Rosabelverde in the shape of the mistress of a convent – takes pity on him, so that somehow, once he’s sort-of grown up (in years but hardly in size or beauty) all of the outstanding acts and achievements of everyone in his surroundings are credited to him, and he is considered by one and all to be the model of handsomeness and intelligence. This causes no end of distress to those who come into contact with him, notably the young student and poet Balthasar who’s dismayed to see the beautiful Candida, the object of his passion, fall under the incomprehensible charm of the misfit who has usurped claim to his poetry. But the kindly Prosper Alpanus, who drives a mussel-shell coach and is surrounded by strange birds and animals, comes finally to the rescue.
– A clever, sparking novella full of the invention, humour, social mockery, quasi-supernatural elements, somewhat anti-Enlightenment spirit and notably elegant prose that characterized Hoffmann. |
| 28 | 1819 | Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff | Das Marmorbild | The Marble Statue | novella | Florio is a young poet traveling through Italy who, on coming to the ancient town of Lucca, meets in rapid succession a boisterous fellow poet and singer, a beautiful young Greek maiden, a strange cavalier and a mysterious and somewhat evanescent lady who bears a strange resemblance to a lovely statue he comes across one night in the splendid countryside around that ancient centre of Renaissance civilization.
– All of these encounters are imbued with a sense of mystery and even other-worldliness in this charming tale of romance overflowing with song and music, splendidly recounted by the author of the masterful Romantic classic From the Life of a Good-for-nothing. |
| 29 | 1820 | E. T. A. Hoffmann | Prinzessin Brambilla | Princess Brambilla | novel | Impossible not to be quite subjugated by the charm, the fantasy, and the brio of this splendid 42,000-word (in German) fable. |
| 30 | 1820 | E. T. A. Hoffmann | Spielerglück | Gambler’s Luck | novella | A fascinating account of gambling, loving and losing in the Paris of the 18th century with, of course, mystical overtones. |
| 31 | 1820 | E. T. A. Hoffmann | Das Fraulein von Scuderi | Mademoiselle de Scuderi | Novella | Brilliant, Hoffmann is a champion, light and amusing and somehow mysterious at the same time – I can’t get enough of him. |
| 32 | 1821 | E. T. A. Hoffmann | Lebensansichten des Katers Murr | Views on Life of the Tomcat Murr | novel | I just loved this story about – in part, but what a part ! – a particularly gifted cat who is not only smart enough to learn the language of humans but who is lucky enough to have a superior kind of master who reads aloud to him so that he learns how the letters in the book he is staring at correspond to the sounds that he is hearing, and thus learns to read as well. After that, writing is a piece of cake for this super-cat, and this book is his auto-biography, recounting not only his intellectual attitudes to life but the conversations of his master with his erudite friends as well as his own thoughts and escapades and involved love-life. To help stir things up, the manuscript is presented as having been mixed up in the printer’s shop with the biography of a strange and inspired musician and writer-intellectual named Kreisler, also the theme figure in Hoffmann’s Tales in the Manner of Calot (the basis of Offenbach’s celebrated operetta Tales of Hoffmann), who has his own scrapes and escapades and expansive semi-mystical meditations, so the Murr chapters alternate with the Kreisler ones in a bizarre and unsettling but totally original and intriguing way that leaves the reader quite overawed at the vigour and scope of this work like none other.
– The overall result is a funny, brilliant and profound parody of a Bildungsroman (a novel of a young man’s learning-about-life process) that just explodes with the individualism and the fascination with the mysteries of life and with the world of fantasy that characterized the romantic spirit of the time, of which Hoffmann was a leading figure. |
| 33 | 1826 | Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff | Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts | From the Life of a Good-for-nothing | novella | In the first sentence the youthful and very carefree narrator rubs the sleep out of his eyes, listens to the twittering of the starlings and the murmurings of his father’s mill and sits on the doorstep to bask in the warm spring sunshine, only to hear his father’s outraged admonition "You Taugenichts (Good-For-Nothing)! Getting up at noon while we have all been slaving away since daybreak! Take your things and get out of my house forever !" So our young hero takes off down the road in front of his father’s mill with his beloved violin and a few pennies to visit the wide world. Taugenichts, who is just about always either singing or playing his violin or listening to birds trilling away or admiring the glories of nature or the charms of the many females who pass his way, in no time at all is – because of his singing and musical ability and perhaps also because of his quite irresistible easy-going charm – first taken on as a gardener and then as a gatekeeper at a splendid castle, where he can indulge to his heart’s content his inclinations for singing and listening to the sounds of nature and bringing flowers to lovely young ladies. But when his love for the lovely lady of the castle is unrequited, he unhesitatingly sets off without a penny down the road again, on the way to the Rome of his dreams – the Rome not only of saints but also of Venus-worshipping pagan rites – and rapidly becomes involved in a bewildering set of dramas and misunderstandings and rococo adventures which do lead him to the Rome of his ambition. Where he finds and loses again the mysterious lady of the castle back home, where he somehow manages to finally end up again amidst many imbroglios and much confusion. – Steeped in music and poetry and the love of nature, deceptively erudite and ambitious in spite of the bucolic simplicity of its wandering but quite unforgettable hero, brimming over with humour and vitality, this complex masterpiece both looks back to the baroque and rococo past while magnificently incarnating the exuberance of the Romantic spirit of its time. |
| 34 | 1826 | Wilhelm Hauff | Märchen-Almanach auf das Jahr 1826 | Caliph Stork and other fairy tales | fairy tales | Wilhelm Hauff, a rising star of the rich "Biedermeier" period of German literature in the early 19th century, was able to publish outstanding collections of fairy tales that he called Almanacs in each of his last three years before his tragic death by typhoid fever in 1827 at the age of 24. This is his Almanac of 1826, featuring his celebrated story about a Caliph and his Vizier who were transformed into storks by a magician, at their request, in order to be able to understand the language of birds and animals, but then forgot the magic word that would bring them back to human form because they had started laughing – contrary to the magician’s instructions – when they realized what nonsense the various birds and animals were saying to each other. |
| 35 | 1835 | Georg Büchner | Dantons Tod | Danton’s Death | theatre | An intense, passionately-felt and extremely brilliant portrayal of the dramatic last five days of the great revolutionary’s existence, meticulously faithful to the historic acts and declarations of all of the leading protagonists in that epic drama. A theatrical masterpiece. |
| 36 | 1835 | Georg Büchner | Lenz | Lenz | novella | Jakob Lenz was one of the best-known members of the 18th-Century Sturm und Drang literary movement of social and intellectual protest, which fascinated Büchner and which preceded the more idealistic German Romantic movement. He had suffered a nervous breakdown during a twenty-day visit to a friend in Alsace in 1778, the Protestant minister Johann-Friedrich Oberlin, who maintained a detailed diary describing in detail Lenz’s state of mind during his visit. Closely based on Oberlin’s journal and on letters by Lenz during that period, this is an intensely-charged and lyrical narrative told in the third-person indirect-narrative style that puts the reader inside Lenz’s mind as he travels to the remote village and wanders through the mountains where he can communicate with his friend and with nature and seek the solitude and the relief from the anguish of existence which he so much needs and never fully finds. A powerful and very moving exploration of the process of mental illness. |
| 37 | 1836 | Georg Büchner | Woyzeck | Woyzeck | theatre | A kaleidoscopic mosaic in 31 short and explosive scenes portraying the life and destiny of a common labourer whose murder of his common-law wife was a much-talked-about cause célèbre in Büchner’s time. The text is dramatic and forceful to a degree. Its deconstructionist structure, its highly-charged expressionist style and its anti-establishmentarian Weltanschauung (attitude) caused this uncompleted work, never published or performed even in part during the poet-dramatist’s tragically short existence, to be rediscovered and brought to the public’s attention only at the end of the century, since when it has been elevated to the rank of a major precursor of the experimental theatre of our own time. We note that the celebrated atonal operatic version by Alban Berg, first performed in 1925, was called Wozzeck as a result of a printer’s typo error that was discovered too late to be corrected! |
| 38 | 1845 | Heinrich Hoffmann | Der Streuwelpeter | Shock-Headed Peter | cartoon stories | Written by a father for his 3-year-old son, this short series of moralistic tales about the (really) awful things that happen to children who step out of line is full of the give-it-to-them-straight approach to the brutal side of life, aimed at scaring kiddies into staying on the straight and narrow path, that was so very prevalent (in Germany at least) in those days.
– Kids loved it then and still do: it’s a classic in the German-speaking cultural sphere (that was translated into English by Mark Twain). With an absolutely wonderful series of drawings by the author. |
| 39 | 1849 | Theodor Storm | Immensee | Immensee | novelette | An elderly man meditates on the great love of his life, a young girl who had promised to follow him around the world but who had married one of his oldest friends while he was away from her pursuing his university studies.
– Delicately told in the light, poetical and nature-loving style of one of the most gifted and prolific German writers of his time, the distinguished jurist, poet, novelist and story-writer Theodor Sturm (1817-1888). |
| 40 | 1851 | Arthur Schopenhauer | Nachträge zur Lehre vom Leiden der Welt | On the Sufferings of the World | philosophy | Particularly brilliant, astonishingly pessimistic, packed out with stunning aphorisms and comments on man’s (dismal) lot in life. |
| 41 | 1853 | Adalbert Stifter | Granit | Granite | novelette | An account of life and death and nature in the high alps in upper Austria long before modern life changed the ancient ways in those remote parts, recounted with strong poetic overtones by the narrator as he remembers a striking incident from his youth in that magnificent region.
– A charming, captivating and finally very moving reading experience by the Austrian writer, painter and teacher Adalbert Stifter (1805-1868), one of the leading figures of the Biedermeier literary movement that played a long-lasting role in the literary life in the German-speaking countries during the greater part of the 19th century. |
| 42 | 1853 | Adalbert Stifter | Begkristall | Mountain Crystal | novella | Two children go over into the neighbouring valley high up in the Austrian Alps to visit their grandmother on the day before Christmas and get lost on their way back when a terrible snowstorm unexpectedly hits the whole region and covers up not only their tracks but all the recognizable landmarks that usually guide them on their way.
– A story about life in the mountains, a story about the diverse and ever-changing environment in the mountains, a story about Christmas in the mountains and the intensity by which it was celebrated there in those times, a splendidly-recounted story with universal significance about children and communities and love and death that just cannot leave a dry eye in any reader’s eye at the end. |
| 43 | 1855 | Edouard Mörike | Mozart auf der Reise nach Prag | Mozart’s Journey From Vienna to Prague | novella | A particularly charming and renowned (in German-speaking countries) fictional account, by one of the major poets of the 19th century, of the encounters and adventures and (brilliant) conversations of the great composer on the way from Vienna to Prague in the autumn of 1787 where his new opera Don Giovanni was to be completed and then premiered. |
| 44 | 1864 | Adalbert Stifter | Nachkommen-schaft | Descendants | novelette | A quite enchanting account of a painter (the author was an extremely gifted painter himself) determined to recreate a rather unattractive swamp perfectly on canvas before the rich owner of a nearby castle – with whom he has long and very in-depth conversations daily about art and life and its purpose – can finish draining it off and filling it in. The painter has independent means and a fierce drive to concentrate full-time on his objective, and will not let anyone watch him working or even look at his finished works, which he systematically always destroys anyway through dissatisfaction with the result. He has in fact become quite a hermit cut off from social life – but the rich neighbour has a daughter... |
| 45 | 1874 | Gottfried Keller | Kleider machen Leute | Clothes Make People | novelette | This famous story by the Swiss writer Gottfried Keller (1819-1890) was first published in 1874 in the second volume of his collection of stories The People of Seldwyla about the mores and adventures of the people of the mythical but somehow very typical Swiss town of that name. It recounts – brilliantly – in a very humorous vein the adventures of a penniless, unemployed tailor whose only possession in the world is a set of rather nice clothes that he has fabricated for himself, thanks to which he is mistaken for a visiting young lord when, after hitching a ride from a passing four-horse coach, he stops off in the neighbouring town of Goldach, where he is plied with fine food and wines and spare clothes and accessories of all sorts by the good people of that wealthy town. And where he is presented in a very favourable light to a most memorable person indeed, the lovely and very forceful daughter of one of the town’s leading citizens, a certain Nettchen who sort of takes over the story and the reader’s interest too as soon as she enters the scene. – In addition to its quite hilarious comical aspects, it’s a fascinating portrayal and a subtle parody of the mores and foibles of the wealthy Swiss merchants and business men who had already in the earliest parts of the century – we are in the thirties or forties of that momentous century, during the period of the author’s youth – risen to prominence throughout that peaceful land in the wake of the Industrial Revolution and the explosion of world trade. |
| 46 | 1881 | Theodor Fontane | Ellernklipp | Ellernklipp | novel | A touching tale about Hilde, a young orphan girl in a mountainous region of central Germany, centered on the mores and lifestyle of the local population and the splendours of the scenery around the Ellernklipp cliff that plays a central role in the drama of Hilde’s all-too-short life. Powerfully and poetically written. |
| 47 | 1888 | Theodor Storm | Der Schimmelreiter | The Rider of a Pale Horse | novella | An interesting, realistic and dramatic evocation of life in the flatlands of Friesland – a part of Holland today that used to belong to the German Reich – centred on the ever-present menace of the sea and on the critical role of those responsible for maintaining the dikes. |
| 48 | 1894 | Theodor Fontane | Effi Briest | Effi Briest | novel | Fontaine was an extremely prolific writer of novels, short stories, poetry, articles, travel diaries, letters and just about everything else (he wrote almost non-stop every day) who however only wrote his first novel at the ripe old age of fifty-nine, in 1878. Like all the rest of his oeuvre (notably his celebrated five-volume travel journal Wanderings in Brandenburg), this novel, Fontaine’s last and most famous, analyses the mores and the mindset of the traditional aristocratically-minded Prussian society struggling, ultimately unsuccessfully, to maintain its status and moral standards in the face of the rise to pre-eminence of the more commercially-minded and dynamic (and – oh horror – sometimes Jewish) middle class. In an elegant but straightforward way we follow the title heroine as she gets involved in an almost-inevitable adulterous relationship with a brilliant and attractive officer friend of the family and has to face the terrible consequences of her flouting of the rules of the established society in the essentially agriculture-oriented, traditional Prussia of her day.
– Sensitive, beautifully written, Fontaine’s fine intellect and penetrating insights into human nature implicate us in the tensions of this intense social drama in as subtle and artful way as could be desired. |
| 49 | 1900 | Hugo von Hofmannsthal | Andreas | Andreas | novella | Baroque and modern at the same time, captivating. |
| 50 | 1900 | Arthur Schnitzler | Leutnant Gustl | Lieutenant Gustl aka: None but the Brave |
novella | Terrific, you are plunged into the (fascinating) mindset of those pre-WW1 days as if you were there. An intense "stream-of-consciousness" account that passes entirely in the mind of the Lieutenant throughout, more than twenty years before James Joyce rendered the technique celebrated in the Anglo-Saxon world with Molly Bloom’s meditations in Ulysses. |
| 51 | 1900 | Thomas Mann | Buddenbrooks: Verfall einer Familie | Buddenbrooks: The Downfall of a Family | novel | The saga of the rise and fall of a family in the Hanseatic (Baltic) town of Lübeck, written when Mann was only 25, an enormous best-seller at the time and afterwards. Splendidly recounting in many memorable chapters and passages – notably that unforgettable chapter about a catastrophic day at school of the young Hanno Buddenbreooks – the ups and especially downs of a once-distinguished and wealthy family, this masterwork was cited by the jury as the main reason for awarding the distinguished author of The Magic Mountain (1924) the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927. |
| 52 | 1900 | Stefan Zweig | Vergessene Träume | Forgotten Dreams | short story | An elegant lady relaxing on the terrace of her magnificent mansion on the Riviera is called upon by a man she had known in her younger days. About to leave for America, he has come to ask her for an explanation of why she had decided to marry into money rather than take her chances with him back then.
– Stefan Zweig’s first published story, a remarkable achievement by the 19-year-old author. |
| 53 | 1900 | Stefan Zweig | Praterfrühling | Springtime in the Prater | short story | A young woman in an elegant building in the most select part of Vienna is quite beside herself with annoyance because the new gown that she has ordered for Derby Day has failed to arrive on time, obliging her to miss the fancy event. Finally she decides to put on her oldest dress and just go out for a walk on that lovely spring day. When she’s admired by a young student who finally works up the courage to ask if he might accompany her she accepts out of a spirit of adventure, and they have a most enjoyable outing in Vienna’s great Prater park. The simplicity of it all quite enchants her and one thing leads to another and so on.
– This subtle, sensitive tale was the author’s second story, published when he was only 19. |
| 54 | 1900 | Arthur Schnitzler | Frau Berta Garlan | Berta Garlan | novel | The author’s first and one of his best-known novels. |
| 55 | 1901-1922 | Stefan Zweig | Der Amokläufer | Amok and other stories | short stories | A terribly impressive and most moving collection of stories that turn around one of the central themes of Zweig’s work and life: despair and death by suicide. The 50-page title novella Amok with its multiple ebbs and flows and its final rush of folly and overwhelming passion is the literary equivalent of one of Beethoven’s unclassifiable final sonatas: a masterpiece that stands out even taller than the others. But Geschichte eines Untergangs (History of a Downfall), Das Kreuz (The Cross), Ein Verbummelter (A Loser), Die Mondscheingasse (Moonbeam Alley), Leporella and Episode am Genfer See (Episode on Lake Geneva) are all just about as original and moving and unforgettable as that tragic title story. |
| 56 | 1901-1929 | Stefan Zweig | Die Hochzeit von Lyon u. a. | The Wedding in Lyon and other stories | short stories | Seven brilliant, varied, precisely-chiselled stories with an emotional and intellectual impact that confirmed for me once again the immense stature of this great writer formed in the golden age of pre-WW1 Vienna. The title story, The Wedding in Lyon should really be read after the others, its account of a night of a love match in the face of imminent death during the ferocious Stalinist-type repression of enemies of the state during the 1794 Terror period of the French Revolution so powerfully and vividly recreates the atmosphere of those tragic days that anything else must necessarily be anticlimactic. But no, in In the Snow there is a hair-raising account of the anguish that racks a Jewish ghetto on the Polish border in Germany in the late Middle Ages when news arrives of widespread and approaching pogroms by rampaging mobs blaming Jews for an outbreak of the plague; there is a particularly evocative and sensitive tale (History of a Downfall) of a queen of high society in France who is unexpectedly banned overnight from the court and her desperate efforts to regain her lost social position; an account of the desperate struggle to survive of a French colonel cut off from his troops during Napoleon’s atrocious war in Spain in The Cross; a particularly subtle and moving story (Compulsion) of a pacifist’s debate with his conscience on receiving his mobilization papers during WW1, and more.
– One of the great masters of the short story form, without a doubt. |
| 57 | 1902-1942 | Stefan Zweig | Menschen und Schicksale | People and Destinies | essays | 22 articles on the leading intellectuals and writers and artists of his time, most of whom he knew personally and all of whom he had met and empathized with: Verlaine, Romain Rolland, Joseph Roth, Rilke, Arthur Schnitzler, Tagore, Theodore Herzl, Jean Jaurès, Mahler and Freud amongst others, as well as essays on some of the outstanding intellectuals of the previous century, notably Chateaubriand, E. T. A. Hoffman, and Nietzsche. Full of tenderness and admiration for the brilliant spirits he is writing about en connaissance de cause, Zweig’s penetrating mind and incisive pen bring us new insights into the works and characters of every one of the objects of his scrutiny. Most appropriately and effectively, the opening essay is a powerful tribute to the genius of that prince of writers Marcel Proust, entitled The Tragic Destiny of Marcel Proust, that sent shivers of emotion down my spine.
– What a book! What a writer! |
| 58 | 1903 | Thomas Mann | Tonio Krüger | Tonio Krüger | novella | This shortish novel is a must for anyone who has ever enjoyed Buddenbrooks, with which there are distinct links, notably the young-man-growing-up-and-searching-for-aesthetic-and-moral-and-philosophical-frame-of-reference theme as well as the distinctly detached tone in which Tonio K’s mental and physical travels are related. |
| 59 | 1904 | Stefan Zweig | Die Liebe der Erika Ewald | The Love of Erika Ewald | novelette | An intense exploration of the emotional impulses of a young pianist who falls hopelessly in love with a seductive violinist who almost but not quite succeeds in seducing her. A remarkable achievement for the 24-year old author. |
| 60 | 1906 | Robert Musil | Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß | The Bewilderment of the Pupil Törless | novella | This no-doubt autobiographical account by the author of the monumental The Man Without Qualities of the emotional and sexual growing pains of a young adolescent in a prestigious boarding school for the youth of the nation’s elite on the far-flung borders of the pre-1914 Austro-Hungarian empire has a premonitory tang to it as our central character gets progressively involved with a rather nasty set of domineering and bordering-on-sadistic fellow students who clearly prefigure the bad people doing very bad things that were to wreak such havoc in later years in that part of the world. An honest, lucid and sophisticated treatment of the theme of schoolboy homosexuality that was way ahead of its time that has larger, societal overtones, written in a smooth but meditative style that impressed the critics of the day and impressed me too. |
| 61 | 1907 | Robert Walser | Geschwister Tanner | The Tanner Siblings | novel | A charming, very brilliant and often very moving account by the future author of The Promenade about the relations between a twenty-year-old quasi-vagabond and his three brothers and a sister in the Switzerland of the pre-WW1 period, told from the viewpoint of the young Simon Tanner whose only interests in life apart from his siblings are to go for long, long walks in the city and especially in the countryside and in the mountains, feeling an extraordinary empathy with the all the objects of the universe: the trees, the leaves, the grass, the lakes, the sun and the moon and the stars and sometimes – but not very often – with the men and women who cross his path and with whom he somehow immediately establishes a strangely intense relationship and to whom he almost inevitably recounts at length his joie de vivre and his anti-establishmentarian values in the most captivating way imaginable. Written in a flowing, natural, intense and very communicative style that just sweeps the reader along on a very special reading experience indeed. |
| 62 | 1908 | Stefan Zweig | Scharlach | Scarlet Fever | novelette | A young medical student comes to Vienna and has enormous difficulties adjusting to life in the big town, not only because he is under-developed, immature and shy but also because he’s quite overwhelmed by the force of the extroverted and quite domineering older student in the next room, not to speak of the latter’s outspoken and somewhat aggressive girlfriend. But one day the woman nest door, to whom he had never paid any attention, comes to him in tears pleading for his help as a medical student to save her young daughter who has come down with scarlet fever. He does his best to help the child’s doctor care for the young thing, sitting up night after midnight to help her, even though scarlet fever can rarely if ever be overcome by grownups… A story that starts off slowly about a perfectly-normal young man from the provinces quite unsure of himself in the hostile urban environment of a big city, that builds up, thanks to the magic of the author’s smooth, incisive prose, into a dramatic existential quandary that can leave no reader with a dry eye, quite impossible. |
| 63 | 1908 | Stefan Zweig | Geschichte in der Dämmerung | Twilight Story | novelette | A fifteen-year-old English boy on holiday in the grand Scottish castle of his relatives wanders into the grounds late at night, fascinated by its somewhat eerie atmosphere. Where he’s abruptly accosted in the dark by a passionate young woman who vigorously embraces him before fleeing. Unable to identify his mysterious aggressor he lurks under the same tree again the next night and has another encounter with the ghostly girl, and thereafter desperately seeks to identify the culprit and to deepen their relationship.
– A life-changing encounter splendidly recounted by the twenty-six-year-old future author of The Fantastic Night and Letter From an Unknown Woman. |
| 64 | 1908-1918 | Hermann Hesse | In einer kleinen Stadt | In a Little Town | short stories | A collection of impressive stories centred on the theme of the values and hidden tensions of life in comfortable "bourgeois" provincial Germany at the beginning of the 20th Century. Written at various times from 1908-1918 (i. e. – both before and after Hesse’s definitive emigration to Switzerland in 1912) these multi-layer stories both subtly and openly question the value system of our modern materialistic society. |
| 65 | 1911 | Hugo von Hofmannsthal | Jedermann | Everyman | theatre | A remarkable modern version in rhymed verse of a medieval Christian morality play, we here have on-stage (!) God (giving orders to “get” the too-worldly and too-rich Jedermann), Death (who goes to get him), the Devil (likewise), Jedermann, the lady he loves, his friends and hangers-on, Angels, a monk and others. With a very powerful and poetic text, this impressive work has been performed every year at the Strasburg Festival since 1920. Because of the rhyme and rhythm and poetry and medieval speech patterns, this work is practically untranslatable though, I would think. |
| 66 | 1911 | Stefan Zweig | Brennendes Geheimnis | Burning Secret | novella | In in the celebrated Austrian mountain resort of Semmering an experienced ladies’ man sets his sights on an attractive woman who has come there with her sickly twelve-year-old son for a cure, and cleverly first strikes up a friendship with the boy as a way to his mother’s heart. This stratagem is brilliantly successful, but the baron makes the mistake of ignoring the boy from then on. |
| 67 | 1912 | Thomas Mann | Der Tod in Venedig | The Death in Venice | novella | Gustave Aschenbach (like the Gustave in Mahler and the Wolfram von Eschenbach in Tannhäuser), the central figure in this 120-page-long, erudite and very intense exploration of the values that an artist aspiring to greatness or possibly already having attained it should or could or perhaps cannot ever really have, is no doubt a mix between Mann’s idol Goethe and Mann himself, with touches of Mahler and Wagner thrown in. We follow the quite famous Gustave A. and his elevated thoughts (at the beginning – they tend to go steadily down as the narrative unfolds) from his native Munich to the Adriatic coast to Venice, where he is plunged into the thralls of physical desire for a very beautiful fourteen-year-old boy whose family is staying at the same hotel on the Lido, and who quite innocently (?) sets our man off on dithyrambic meditations on the lessons of Plato’s The Banquet and Phaedrus and down a long path to moral and physical perdition. The Death in Venice (why is it usually translated as Death in Venice? Mann wanted a singular definite article in there and who are we to take it out? And we are not talking about any old death – after all not only Gustave A. but Mahler and Wagner also finished their days there!) is a quite breath-taking literary feat, involving a number of seemingly bizarre but significant background figures, profound moral and artistic themes, myriad literary and philosophical references and a style involving a breathtakingly rich vocabulary and innumerable long, involved, and complex sentences which somehow never seem to have an excess word in them.
– All in all: very Germanic and very Mann and very worth while reading. |
| 68 | 1913 | Stefan Zweig | Angst | Fear | novella | A well-to-do married woman who has faulted with a seductive young pianist is aggressively blackmailed by a coarse young woman who threatens to denounce her to her husband. The blackmail is increasingly successful and the lady is overcome with fear and anguish and finally sees only one fatal way out of her dilemma.
– One of the major works of the celebrated author of Letter From an Unknown Woman. |
| 69 | 1913 | Franz Kafka | Das Urteil | The Judgement | short story | A subtle shocker written in Kafka’s detached, almost otherworldly way, where a man-to-man conversation between a father and son brings out long-suppressed thoughts and attitudes and hitherto-hidden facts, and quasi-instantaneously triggers off a final catastrophic conclusion to what had seemingly been a straightforward and even banal relationship.
– A fictional counterpart to Kafka’s long, real-life letter to his own father, published posthumously as Letter to the Father. |
| 70 | ca. 1913 | Franz Kafka | Der Heizer | The Stoker | short story | A most impressive story about a teenager cast adrift to fend for himself in a very strange and foreboding place indeed – a huge German ocean liner in the port of New York. Apparently an initial script for what became the posthumous novel Amerika, this vision of a boy-man trying to survive in a strange new German-American New World is of great interest. Strong stuff! |
| 71 | 1915 | Franz Kafka | Die Werwandlung | The Metamorphosis | short story | A young man – the since-famous Gregor Samsa – wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into an man-sized beetle and tries, increasingly unsuccessfully, to cope with his new ostracized status as an outcast from society and progressively but firmly also from his own family, even – ultimate moral blow – from his dearly-beloved and loving sister.
– A stunning parable of the modern man’s psychic and emotional isolation in an uncomprehending and uncaring world. |
| 72 | 1916 | Hermann Hesse | Schön ist die Jugend | Youth is Beautiful | novelette | Hermann Hesse, the celebrated author of Siddharta and Steppenwolf, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1947, was also a masterful writer of short stories, of which this delicate, charming account of a young man returning to his birthplace is an outstanding example. |
| 73 | 1917 | Robert Walser | Der Spaziergang | The Promenade | novella | A wonderful account of one seemingly-normal-but-inwardly-rather-zany man’s thoughts while walking around his neighbourhood in (peaceful and neutral) Switzerland, a masterpiece! |
| 74 | 1918 | Arthur Schnitzler | Casanovas Heimfahrt | Casanova’s Homecoming | novella | Casanova was a very talented person and so was Schnitzler – when the two meet, sparks fly! Unforgettable! |
| 75 | 1919 | Franz Kafka | Brief an den Vater | Letter to Father | letter | The long letter that Kafka wrote (but never delivered) to his father to explain to him in great detail why he (Kafka junior) had always had so much difficulty communicating with him. An extraordinary document, told from the heart by a son who may not have been as good a talker as his domineering and self-assured father but who sure knew how to put words together in a flowing, expressive way.
– A prose masterpiece. |
| 76 | ca. 1920 | Franz Kafka | Das Urteil und a. Erzählungen | The Judgement and Other Stories | short stories | All of these stories are shockers in Kafka’s specially bleak, detached, almost otherworldly way, in particular the title story, The Judgement, where a man-to-man conversation between a father and son brings out long-suppressed thoughts and attitudes and hitherto-hidden facts, and quasi-instantaneously triggers off a final catastrophic conclusion to what had seemingly been a straightforward and even banal relationship. That comes as no surprise to readers familiar with Kafka’s long, real-life, never-delivered letter to his own father, published after his early death as Letter to Father, but the build-up is so artful and the comedown so awful that the reader is nevertheless as aesthetically and emotionally shaken as is so often the case with prose by the author of The Metamorphosis, another overwhelming reading experience to be found in this precious selection of his stories. Also included in this quite fabulous collection are the jaw-dropping In The Penal Colony about the weird goings-on in a tropical penal colony, A Country Doctor, recounting an everyday tragedy in the life of a country doctor, and A Report to an Academy, where a talking ape reports to an assembly of scientists in an officious, academic manner on the use or rather misuse that humanity had made of his talents: a moving account of insensitivity and stupidity in a second-degree and not at all funny way, quite the contrary. |
| 77 | 1920 | Ernst Jünger | In Stahlgewittern | In Steel Storms | war novel | One of the most important works of literature to come out of WW1, by a major writer who was also one of the most decorated soldiers of the German Army in the First World War (and who had enrolled in the French Foreign Legion before the start of that war!). |
| 78 | 1920-1940 | Hermann Hesse | Der Dichter | The Poet | short stories | HH is a master of the short-story genre. |
| 79 | 1922 | Franz Kafka | Forschungen eines Hundes | Investigations of a Dog | novelette | A solitary dog recalls the investigations he had undertaken in his youth to understand the whys and the wherefores of such questions as food, hunger, language and communication with other members of his community. In the course of his investigations he had encountered strange and quasi-mystical phenomena and had never quite achieved his goals of understanding, but even in his old age he has never stopped meditating on the findings of his investigations. Transposed into a different, surrealist kind of world – a world not only of dogs, but a world without humans where dogs are at the top of the evolutionary ladder – this is an intense exploration of a solitary being frustrated by his lack of understanding of the world around him and of his fellow creatures, an investigation that no doubt mirrors some of the most essential preoccupations of the author of A Hunger Artist, The Burrow and The Metamorphosis. |
| 80 | 1922 | Hermann Hesse | Siddharta. Eine indische Dichtung | Siddharta, an Indian Poem | novel | The search for internal peace and spiritual understanding of Siddharta, told in a way that is halfway between a novel with dialogues and internal monologues and a sacred text recounting with awe the spiritual messages of Buddhism and Hinduism.
– Much easier to read and even assimilate than I had been expecting, this book’s awesome reputation is on the whole well justified, although I wasn’t as shaken by its eastern spirituality (I don’t look for spiritual guidance in a novel, anyway) as many of its reader-believers seem to have been. |
| 81 | 1922 | Stefan Zweig | Brief einer Unbekannten | Letter from an Unknown Woman | novella | A well-known novelist returns home after a holiday in the mountains to find a long letter awaiting him there from a woman he had once known but quite forgotten. She on the other hand has never forgotten him, for good reasons as the letter explains.
– A very intense, very moving reading experience. A true masterpiece, perhaps Stefan Zweig’’s finest work. |
| 82 | 1922 | Stefan Zweig | Phantastische Nacht | The Fantastic Night | novella | We follow the events in one day of the life of a well-off and very blasé reserve officer in Vienna in June 1914 as he quite by hazard finds himself at the races in the Prater, the great Viennese public park, and watches with a detached eye the excited behaviour of the crowd during the races. His day and his whole existence are thrown head over heels when he starts paying attention to an alluring person next yo him and he rapidly goes through a life-changing experience that ends very late that night. A memorable account of the glories of a summer pre-WW1 Viennese day, of the festive atmosphere on a Sunday at the immense Prater park, of the passion of a large crowd at a major horse race, of the interplay between the different strata of society, and of one man’s existential quest for meaning in his life. One of the master’s finest masterpieces. |
| 83 | 1922 | Stefan Zweig | Der Amokläufer | Amok | novella | An expatriate doctor on the verge of a nervous breakdown in a remote outpost in the Dutch East Indies after seven years of service in the jungle there receives the visit of an elegant lady from the European community in the area’s capital who offers him a large sum of money to perform an illegal operation. Although he does need the money, her arrogant and humiliating attitude provokes him into making her a dishonourable counter-proposition that she tauntingly refuses. Losing all sense of reason and his mental equilibrium, he runs amok – goes on what might be called a psychological rampage – and there is intense drama for him and the lady and her entourage from that instant onwards.
– a tale well told of a tragic sequence of events that casts an interesting light on the way of life in the European colonies in the Far East in the earlier part of the 20th Century, even if the weak moral fibre of the central personage lessens somewhat the impact of the tale. |
| 84 | 1922 | Franz Kafka | Der Bau | The Burrow | novelette | A fascinating exploration of an undefined creature’s psychosis as it wanders around its enormous underground complex worrying about how to protect the domain from being discovered and invaded by enemies and, towards the end, about strange sounds that it hears constantly and anguishing about what menacing creature must be making them.
– Brilliant and profound and disturbing, surely one of the best things that Kafka ever did. |
| 85 | 1922 | Franz Kafka | Ein Hungerkünstler | A Hunger Artist | novelette | Written in 1922 and published as the title story in the first collection of his stories to be published after his death two years later at the age of forty, this account of a man’s determined and obsessive drive to surpass himself in the art of fasting explores the theme of eating in a calmly compelling way tinged with Kafkaesque strangeness and intimations of the inutility of ambition, achievement and acclaim. |
| 86 | 1923 | Leo Perutz | Der Meister des Jüngsten Tages | The Master of the Day of Judgment | novel | A brilliant evocation of the social and literary atmosphere of Vienna circa 1909 in the form of an extremely original, fast-moving murder mystery with supernatural overtones. A writer who counted in the vibrant days of the could-have-been-great Weimar Republic. |
| 87 | 1923 | Joseph Roth | Das Spinnennetz | The Spider Web | novel | A political fantasy featuring an embittered nonentity who rises to power in a post-WW1 Germany riddled by political and social strife, by means of a totally unscrupulous, unprincipled, opportunistic and mindless – but nevertheless effective – manipulation of the wave of patriotism, xenophobia, antisemitism and anticommunism that had engulfed that unlucky land. By one of the finest writers produced by the glorious civilization of the pre-WW1 Austro-Hungarian Empire. A violent fantasy, only published posthumously 25 years after Roth’s death by suicide in 1939, written in a telegraphic fairy-tale style that, it must be said, fails to provide the depth and credibility so necessary for such a big subject, a style very different from the smooth, penetrating prose of Hotel Savoy and The Radetzky March. |
| 88 | 1924 | Joseph Roth | Hotel Savoy | Savoy Hotel | novel | Life in the provinces in the ultra-cosmopolitan atmosphere of eastern Europe after the Great War by a major Austrian writer. |
| 89 | 1924 | Thomas Mann | Der Zauberberg | The Magic Mountain | novel | Reading this extraordinary book is an unforgettable experience. No one who has read this masterpiece can ever forget the young Hans Castorp’s visit to a sanatorium nestled high in the Swiss mountains, where he meets and becomes so intensely involved with its cosmopolitan patients from all over Europe, especially the tantalizingly mysterious Clawdia Chauchat, her explosive protector Mynheer Peeperkorn, and the impetuous philosopher M. Settembrini. Their encounters and discussions and intense relationships have an epic tonality that permeates the novel and creates an aura of significance that leaves the reader profoundly shaken and moved by the exceptional scope of this magnificently-written book with its vast themes of life and death and health and sexuality and passion and search for meaning. Many of its scenes are particularly unforgettable: the day where Hans gets lost in a blinding snowstorm on a mountain top and has an almost mystical vision, the Walpurgis Night encounter with Clawdia when all constraints are lifted for one intensely-lived night, his confrontations with the extraordinary personality of Meinheer Peeperkorn and his intense conversations with M. Settembrini are some of the most remarkable scenes that I have ever read. – One is a different person after having read this magical book. |
| 90 | 1925 | Arthur Schnitzler | Traumnovelle | Dream Story | novella | A dream night that finishes badly, a story that has perfectly passed the test of time. |
| 91 | 1925 | Franz Kafka | Der Prozess | The Trial | novel | Kafka’s masterful account of the struggle of Mr. Average Citizen with the state apparatus, written in 1912 but never completed and published posthumously in 1925. But can a book like this about the difficulty if not the impossibility of communication in the modern world ever be finished? Kafka opened up the whole field of absurdity and incommunicability in modern literature with this theme and with the detached mock-realist style of this seminal work. |
| 92 | 1926 | Arthur Schnitzler | Spiel im Morgengrauen | Cards at Dawn aka: Night Games |
novella | A young officer in Vienna decides to help a former comrade in need by risking his meagre funds in a card game with fellow officers and a selection of respectable local citizens. A decision that leads inexorably to drama and downfall culminating in a final existential crisis that plunges him into the very depths of his soul and a final understanding of just what kind of a man he really is. This engrossing tale is a fascinating account of the mores, values, atmosphere and lifestyles in the capital of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire in the period prior to the outbreak of World War I. This late work is perhaps Arthur Schnitzler’s crowning masterwork. |
| 93 | 1926 | B. Traven | Das Totenschiff | Death Ship | novella | This extraordinary account of the life and hardships of a penniless but very articulate and anti-establishmentarian not to say revolutionary sailor in the chaotic post-WW1 world of the twenties was first published in Germany in 1926 under the pen-name of B. Traven. It was translated into English by its mysterious author himself in 1934. It’s a fascinating, hard-to-put down epic about the quite unbelievably bad working conditions of vagrant workers at the bottom on the social ladder practically forced to accept work on the myriad of broken-down tramp steamers of the time. Written in an earthy, no-holds-barred and often highly creative language, it’s liberally infused with humour and sarcastic comments on bureaucracy, nationalism, capitalism and the working-class condition in general and on passports, identity papers and food and sleep – or rather the lack thereof – in particular. – The author of this remarkable book was later discovered to (probably) be Otto Feige (1882-1969) aka Ref Marut, an adventurous German mechanic, actor and sailor who had emigrated to Mexico in the early twenties under a series of aliases and initiated there an eventually very successful writing career, particularly after the release in 1948 of John Huston’s Academy Award-winning film version of his novel The Treasure of the Sierra Madre starring Humphrey Bogart. |
| 94 | 1927 | Hermann Hesse | Der Steppenwolf | The Wolf of the Steppes | novel | Although I have always liked what I have read by this great German-Swiss writer I was not as interested by this famous book as I had thought I would be, finding it much calmer and more staid than I was expecting. I suppose that the spiritual and intellectual implications of his prose passed way over my down-to-earth positivist Anglo-Saxon head. |
| 95 | 1927 | Stefan Zweig | Verwirrung der Gefühle | Confusion of Feelings | novella | This intense drama gets us into the mind and heart of a university professor of sciences (Zweig is not one of your aesthetes who ignores the very existence of the scientific dimension of mankind’s achievement) who progressively reveals and relates the key event in his life: his encounter and subsequent complex relationship with a particularly gifted student at the start of the professor’s distinguished – but essentially mundane and disappointing – academic career.
– As usual with Zweig one has the impression that every word is just perfect as you are carried along in a calm and classy but quite irresistible manner from start to finish that is somehow characteristic of the finest writers of that extraordinary concentration of European art and culture and civilization (and science!) that flourished in and around Vienna before the horrible catastrophe of The Great War. |
| 96 | 1927 | Stefan Zweig | Vierundzwanzig Stunden aus dem Leben einer Frau | Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman | novella | In this story within a story, both on the theme of deep-running sensual passions overriding all other considerations, subtly enlarged to encompass the overwhelming passion of gambling, a woman recounts a decisive moment in her life when she had tried to help a young nobleman whose passion for the roulette table had lead him to the brink of self-destruction.
– sensual passion over-riding all other considerations in the context of high-flying passion for the roulette table at Monte Carlo, soberly recounted with sensitivity and in-depth psychological penetration: a powerful, moving, thought-provoking story, a masterpiece. |
| 97 | 1927, 1940, 1943 |
Stefan Zweig | Sternstunden der Menschheit | Decisive Moments in History | essays | 14 essays (5 in the original 1927 publication, then 12 in German in 1943 – 10 of which had already appeared in a 1940 English translation published in New York – and all 14 in later editions) on key turning points in mankind’s history according to Zweig: for example, The Conquest of Constantinople in 1453 that almost didn’t happen, and the battle of Waterloo when Field Marshal Grouchy with his 30,000 crack French troops failed to appear on the battlefield for perfectly trivial reasons.
– Extremely engaging. |
| 98 | 1927 | Vicki Baum | Frauensee | The Ladies’ Lake | novel | As romantic as you could wish, very classy. |
| 99 | 1928 | Franz Werfel | Der Abituriententag | The Class Reunion | novel | A finely-wrought short novel of quite theatrical intensity, describing the confrontation of a renowned judge with a man accused of murder, whose past turns out to have been intimately linked with the judge’s own past, and whose descent into the depths menaces to sweep the judge along with him. A psychological drama of great intensity and power, set in the Vienna of both the glorious pre-First World War and the more sedate twenties, in the great Viennese tradition of Schnitzler and Zweig and Musil for whom Werfel is a most worthy kindred spirit. |
| 100 | 1928 | Bertolt Brecht | Die Dreigroschen Oper | The Threepenny Opera | theatre | Adapted from John Gay’s early-18th Century play The Beggar’s Opera] (1728), this musical drama was written by Brecht in collaboration with Elizabeth Hauptmann, the translator of Gay’s work into German who worked with him closely on its adaptation to the stage, and, to a lesser extent, with Kurt Weill, the composer of the play’s celebrated musical score. Not to mention John Gay, much of whose text was integrated into this account of the deeds and misdeeds of the elegant but too profligate gang leader Macheath, alias Mack the Knife, vaguely set in the London of the Victorian era.
– A huge and quite unexpected success at the time, this effervescent new kind of socially-oriented drama manages to epitomize with its verve, its cynicism and its anti-establishmentarianism both the dynamism and the burning social tensions of the (unfortunately) ill-fated Weimar Republic. |
| 101 | 1929 | Erich Maria Remarque | Im Westen nichts Neues | All Quiet on the Western Front | novel | Probably the best novel to come out of the Great War: moving, fascinating, unforgettable. |
| 102 | 1929 | Stefan Zweig | Die Reise in die Vergangenheit | Voyage into the Past | novella | Separated unexpectedly by the First World War and having each gone their separate ways, a couple meet up again and explore to what extent time and the travails of life have affected their former passion. This delicate but intense exploration of the impossibility of reviving the past was only discovered many years after Zweig’s death in the archives of a London publishing house, fortunately for us. |
| 103 | 1929 | Stefan Zweig | Buchmendel | Mendel the Book-dealer | novelette | The narrator recounts how he had taken shelter unexpectedly in a suburban café where he suddenly remembered having met twenty years before Mendel, a book-handler who possessed a phenomenal memory for the slightest details of any book he had ever seen or read about. Famous in his day, he had now been quite forgotten by everyone in the café where he had officiated all day every day, except by the washerwoman who recounts the sad fate of the famous expert whose life, like so many others, had been utterly uprooted by the First World War. – A striking evocation of the intensely active intellectual climate in pre-WW1 Vienna. |
| 104 | 1930 | Hermann Hesse | Schön ist die Jugend | Youth is Beautiful | short stories | Difficult, but moving and even poetical. |
| 105 | 1930 | Carl Zuckmayer | Der Hauptmann von Kopenick | The Captain from Kopenick | theatre | A rather famous satire of the germanic respect for authority, dated now (the writing, not the theme!) but still quite interesting. |
| 106 | 1930 | Ernst von Solomon | Die Geächteten | The Outcasts | memoir | The violence and chaos in immediate post-WW1 Germany and the Baltic States, recounted by one of the most important writers of his time |
| 107 | 1930 | Vicki Baum | Menschen im Hotel | Grand Hotel | novel | I loved this even more the second time around: all the magic and glamour and excitement of the ultra-cosmopolitan Berlin of the Weimar Republic. |
| 108 | ca. 1930 | Stefan Zweig | Auf Reisen | Travelling | travel journal | Sparkling, as usual with SZ. |
| 109 | 1931 | Erik Kästner | Der 35. Mai | The 35th of May | novel for young people | This is one of my very favourite stories for children, an utterly charming and joyful tale about a boy who meets a talking horse who accompanies him and his rather zany uncle through a secret passage to a marvellous Land of Plenty where tarts grow on trees among other wonders, by the very talented author of Emile and the Detective and The Conference of Animals, not to mention the early-thirties best-seller Fabian. |
| 110 | 1932 | Joseph Roth | Radetzkymarsch | The Radetzky March | novel | A large, sweeping saga of the social rise and fall of three generations of the newly-ennobled Trotta family in the Austro-Hungarian empire over the 80-odd years preceding the final catastrophe that ended the world as it was and really ushered in the new and terrible 20th century, the First World War. Set mostly in various outer reaches of that multinational, far-flung proto-European empire, in what are today Slovenia, the Czech Republic and the Ukraine, the sense of impending decline and doom assumes ever more tragic overtones as the novel approaches its end and the news from Sarajevo and elsewhere sets the wheels of war and ethnic-national conflicts in motion.
– With a touch more emotion and central characters easier to relate to than the feeble Trotta tribe, this would have been an absolute masterpiece; it remains a fascinating study of a bygone epoch that saw change of unprecedented proportions invade every sphere of industrial, cultural and social activity. |
| 111 | 1932 | Ödön von Horváth | Geschichten aus dem Wiener Wald | Stories from the Viennese Forest | theatre | Charged with the troubled atmosphere of the thirties. |
| 112 | ca. 1932 | Hans Fallada | Erzählungen | Short Stories | short stories | Light and charming. |
| 113 | 1933 | Ernst von Solomon | Die Kadetten | The Cadets | memoir | To understand the patriotic-militarism that dominated German thought in the decade 1910-1920 there is nothing better (or better-written). |
| 114 | 1934 | Stefan Zweig | Triumph und Tragik des Erasmus von Rotterdam | Triumph and Tragedy of Erasmus of Rotterdam | essay | Wonderfully enlightening. |
| 115 | 1934 | Stefan Zweig | Unvermutete Bekanntschaft mit einem Handwerk | Unexpected Acquaintance with a Craft | novelette | Returning to Paris after a two-year absence, the narrator decides to just do nothing other than soak up the atmosphere of the boulevards and watch the crowds passing by there. Which enables him to identify a pickpocket and to study the fellow’s expert technique. When he follows the man on his peregrinations to the central auction house at the Hotel Druot the man passes into action and the narrator himself gets involved.
– A very Maupassant-like episode impregnated with the atmosphere of the time, the excitement of uncovering the secrets of a timeless profession and the author’s innate empathy with the underdogs of life. |
| 116 | ca. 1934 | Joseph Roth | Die Legende vom heiligen Trinker | The Legend of the Holy Drinker | novella | A very moving account of a man’s very major problem (referred to in the title), one which proved to be the author’s own undoing only a few years later. |
| 117 | 1935 | Elias Canetti | Die Blendung | Auto-da-fé (The Burning) | novel | A book about books, and one man’s overriding passion for books, and book collecting, that is itself a whirlwind of words that swirl around the reader to sweep him effortlessly along to the final paroxysm of an ending that leaves one quite breathless with admiration for the force and power of this exceptional book. |
| 118 | 1936 | Leo Perutz | Der schwedische Reiter | The Swedish Cavalier | novel | An historical novel set in the early 18th Century in Germany on the Polish border, the story of how the encounter of a vagrant thief with a young noblewoman inspired him to a meteoric rise in both the lower and upper levels of the society of his time and how his intense relationship with his one and only daughter became the driving force of his life. A forceful, fascinating, intensely convincing and superbly well-written plunge into a chaotic period in European history. |
| 119 | 1936 | Ernst Jünger | Afrikanishe Spiele | African Games | memoir | Jünger recounts his adventurous enrolment in the French Foreign Legion at the age of 17. You have here pre-1914 Paris, Marseilles, Algiers and the Algerian bled (backwoods) and especially and above all the colourful and oh-so-believable characters that the young and resourceful Ernst meets on the way. Everything I have read by Jünger is close to perfection, including this fascinating memoir. Decidedly one of my favourite writers. |
| 120 | 1939 | Ernst Jünger | Auf den Marmorklippen | On the Marble Cliffs | novel | Jünger’s great poetical novel, set in a mythical and deformed but recognizable Europe, about the desperate and probably-doomed struggle of the forces of enlightenment to defend civilization against the forces of destruction and inhumanity surging out of Europe’s dark forests that are led by a charismatic, utterly determined leader known as the Great Forester. In spite of Jünger’s immense prestige as one of Germany’s most decorated First World War veterans and celebrated author of the war novel In Steel Storms, it required great courage on his part to publish this book in the Germany of 1939. |
| 121 | 1939 | Joseph Roth | Die Geschichte von der 1002. Nacht | The Story of the 1002nd Night | novel | A remarkable evocation in a somewhat-light tone of the atmosphere in pre-WW1 Vienna, centred on the dilemma of the Viennese court when the visiting Shah of Persia sees a very lovely countess dancing at his reception and orders his Vizir to get her for him for the night. A seemingly-impossible-to-satisfy request, but then the very resourceful Baron Taittinger knows a certain Mitzi who is the splitting image of the countess in question and a lot easier to get into the Shah’s bed for the night. But the apparently-successful episode has an impact on the lives of all those involved in the adventure... |
| 122 | 1940 | Bertolt Brecht | Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder | Mother Courage and Her Children | theatre | A musical-tragedy (!) portraying a widow’s determined struggle to survive, with her three grown children, by travelling around Europe with a wagon trading whatever goods she can obtain in the wake of armies on all sides during the terrible Thirty Years War that ravaged Germany in the 17th Century (and reduced its population by 50%). The musical element, many mostly bitter songs commenting on the common man’s poor lot, is clearly influenced by the enduring success of The Threepenny Opera – which was though a parody of mainstream opera, wherefore the songs – and surprises somewhat in the sombre context of extreme violence so predominant throughout the play. And the play’s subliminal pacifist message that war is a crime against humanity only fostered by those in power to for ignoble mercantile aims strikes me as being oddly out of tune with its time, as the play was written and published in 1940 when Hitler’s armies were on the march and threatening the very foundations of Western civilization and its humanist heritage (but then it is true that at that time the author’s beloved Soviet Union was at peace with Germany and had been rewarded with half of Poland for its services). Still, the central figure of Mother Courage, with her earthiness and her resourcefulness and her capacity for facing up to the worst disasters and to still be able to carry on, stands out as one of the most remarkable theatrical personalities of our time. |
| 123 | 1940 | Stefan Zweig | Montaigne | Montaigne | essay | One is filled with admiration after this for Montaigne and for Zweig. |
| 124 | 1941 | Franz Werfel | Eine blaßblaue Frauenschrift | A Pale Blue Woman’s Handwriting | novella | A very short novel with the feel of a long short story but the emotional impact of something much vaster, this account of a top civil servant’s unsuccessful struggle in the mid-thirties with his conscience when faced with a secret from his past that threatens his social position is a relentless (and ever-contemporary) condemnation of the moral turpitude of an Austrian society almost effortlessly integrating the brutal antisemitism of Hitlerian Germany in a vain attempt to preserve their comfort, tranquillity and independence. |
| 125 | 1941 | Stefan Zweig | Die spät bezahlte Schuld | The Debt Paid Late | novelette | A middle-aged woman writes to an old friend to recount how during a brief holiday in the Tyrolean mountains she’d encountered an actor that they both had utterly worshipped in their adolescence and who’d since fallen on hard times. She reveals to her old friend how the actor had played a key role in an absolutely crucial moment in her life, and how she finally paid back the debt she owed him. |
| 126 | 1942 | Stefan Zweig | Die Welt von Gestern | The World of Yesterday | memoir | A sober, penetrating and often moving evocation of an extraordinary period of world civilization, pre-World War I Vienna at its height. |
| 127 | 1942 | Stefan Zweig | War er es? | Did He Do It? | novella | The narrator has retired with her husband to a lovely spot on a small hillside overlooking an abandoned canal in the countryside near Bath in England, and she recounts their relationship with their young neighbours, an extraordinarily warm-hearted fellow and his wife, to whom she’d given a puppy for company as the couple had remained childless. The dog becomes the central figure in this increasingly-dramatic story as he assumes ever-greater mastery over his owner until the arrival of a long-awaited baby relegates the animal to a secondary role that the arrogant, very clever and very powerful dog absolutely refuses to accept. Written in a straightforward, clear, uncomplicated style at the peak of the author’s powers during his stay in England in the thirties en route to his exile in Brazil, this in-depth study of two most unusual personalities – one of which is a dog as memorable as any of Jack London’s four-footed villains – was only ever published during the author’s lifetime in a Portuguese translation in Rio de Janeiro in 1942. The original text was first published posthumously in Leipzig in 1987 and it has rarely if ever been translated before into English. |
| 128 | 1942 | Stefan Zweig | Schachnovelle | Chess Story | novella | Having learned that the world chess champion is on board the ship that’s taking him from New York to Buenos Aires, the narrator organizes a match at high stakes – the hard-nosed champion only plays for money – against the combined forces of the chess enthusiasts on the boat. The champion scornfully humiliates them but in the revenge match a bystander intervenes to prevent the group from playing the obvious move, and then plays the rest of the game to a draw. Recognizing the force of the newcomer the champion proposes another match just with him, that take place in an atmosphere of great tension and drama, and we learn that the newcomer had used mental chess in his cell to overcome the intense psychological torture that he had been submitted to by the Gestapo after the fall of the democratic government in Austria. A tour de force – the last work completed by its author before his tragic suicide shortly afterwards – that vividly brings alive the charged political atmosphere of the time, and that requires no chess knowledge whatsoever on the part of the reader. |
| 129 | 1944 | Hans Fallada | Fridolin der freche Dachs | Fridolin the Bold Badger | novel for young people and the others too | This starts off with a bang on p. 1 when Fridolin is out for a stroll with his family and one of the little ones slips and rolls downs a slope into the stream below, where it is snapped up by a waiting and very hungry pike. F’s mother senses that something has gone wrong and recounts her brood: one, two, many (that’s as high as badgers can go) and is reassured that all is well and so the story continues.
– This is the best animal story ever written (with Jack London’s) in my humble opinion. |
| 130 | 1945-1947 | Wolfgang Borchert | ausgewählte Erzählungen | Chosen Stories | short stories | Ultra-stark, stream-of-consciousness-style evocations of life in war-torn quasi-apocalyptic post-WWII urban Germany. Several of these highly original and mostly very bitter short tales scale great heights, notably Die Hundeblume (“The Dandelion” – about a prisoner’s quasi-maniacal longing for a lone flower in the prison courtyard) and Schischyphusch (“Sisyphus” – where two stutterers clash in a restaurant) are particularly impressive and urgently need to be read by everyone. |
| 131 | 1946 | Albrecht Haushofer | Moabiter Sonette | Sonnets from the Prison of Moabit | poems | An extremely rich, profound, intense, introspective, erudite, moving series of 80 sonatas written in the Moabit prison in Berlin by a 42-year-old professor of geography specialized in the Far East who had been condemned to death for having been associated with the attack on Hitler’s life in July 1944, and who was murdered without trial, covertly at night in a vacant lot, by an SS detachment at the end of April 1945, only two days before Russian tanks stormed the city. |
| 132 | 1947 | Wolfgang Borchert | Draußen vor der Tür | Outside the Door | theatre | A young soldier just back from captivity in Siberia wanders around devastated post-war Hamburg after a first unsuccessful suicide attempt, searching in vain for warmth and shelter and a reason to live in spite of the loss of his wife (who is with another man) and his parents (who have “denazified” themselves with their gas stove). He and we experience intense encounters with emblematic figures of his past and present time – DIE ELBE (personifying the river Elbe, where he had tried to drown himself), DER ANDERE (The Other, a caring bystander), DIE FRAU (The Wife, whom he finds living with another man), DAS MÄDCHEN (The Young Woman, who finds him on the river bank and shelters him), DER OBERST (The Colonel, a former officer of his on the Eastern front), DER EINBEINIGE (The One-Legged Man, the young woman’s wounded husband, devastated to find her with our soldier), DER KABARETTDIREKTOR (The Theatre Director, a potential employer) and others – notably, for one extremely forceful scene, GOTT (God or The Old Man, in whom nobody believes any more). A singular cry from the heart, infused with moving, poetic language from start to (inevitably-dark) end. The very gifted 26-year-old author of this outstanding work, surely one of the most significant theatrical creations of that momentous period, died of tuberculosis one day before its opening night in Hamburg in 1947. |
| 133 | 1949 | Heinrich Böll | Der Zug war pünktlich | The Train Was On Time | novella | A very powerful account of a German soldier’s fateful train odyssey towards the eastern front towards the end of WW2 – unforgettable! |
| 134 | 1949 | Ernst Jünger | Heliopolis | Heliopolis | sci-fi novel | the powerful prose of Jünger applied to some formidable themes (science and politics in a future ultra-sophisticated world) – most readable. |
| 135 | 1949 | Erik Kästner | Die Konferenz der Tiere | The Conference of the Animals | novel for young people | Birds and animals of all kinds from all over the world congregate in Africa, in spite of the difficulties and dangers of the enterprise, for a mighty conference to decide how they can best act to prevent mankind from destroying the world in another cataclysmic world war. A timeless and premonitory metaphor from the late forties that carries about as much political punch as ever while remaining eminently readable for young and old alike. |
| 136 | 1952 | Heinrich Böll | Das Brot der frühen Jahre | The Bread of the Early Years | novella | An interesting evocation of the immediate post-war period seen through the eyes of a young working-man who narrates his love-at-first-sight encounter with a young woman in harsh conditions indeed. HB is a modern reference and this is one of his best-known works. |
| 137 | 1952 | Friedrich Dürrenmatt | Der Richter und sein Henker | The Judge and His Hangman | novella | Hard-nosed, cruel and difficult, but well worth the trouble. Original and most striking. |
| 138 | 1956 | Friedrich Dürrenmatt | Der Besuch der alten Dame | The Visit of the Old Lady | theatre | Most impressive, an important work. |
| 139 | 1956 | Ernst Jünger | Gläserne Bienen | Glass Bees | sci-fi novel | Uneven but full of interesting and striking poetical meditations. |
| 140 | 1956 | Ernst Jünger | Rivarol | Rivarol and Other Essays | literary essays | The erudition of this great writer is a royal treat for the reader. |
| 141 | 1962 | Siegfried Lenz | Stimmungen der See | Sea Moods | stories | I like the short story genre in general and I really liked these two somewhat bizarre stories filled with atmosphere by one of the most prolific and respected German writers of the post-war period. |
| 142 | 1967 | Ernst Jünger | Subtile Jagden | Subtle Hunts | memoir | The author of On The Marble Cliffs was also an amateur etymologist who spent a great deal of time throughout his very long life (1895-1998) chasing after specimens of insects all over the world, and this well-titled memoir subtly but powerfully succeeds in transmitting to the reader his passion for the beauties to be discovered in the world of the butterfly (one species of which is named after Jünger, who discovered it) and the cicada and other 6-footed denizens of this earth of ours. A wonderful book. |
| 143 | 1973 | Michael Ende | Momo | Momo | novel for young people | A modern-day classic for young people that is as well-known in Germany as Treasure Island. And rightly so – this is a terrific book with a great theme: the fight of a marginal young girl against the powerful but obscure forces that robotize adults by convincing them to constantly "save" time. A book that I would recommend to anyone of any age. |
| 144 | 1976 | Karl Popper | Ausgangspunkte | Exit Points | memoir | Extremely engrossing, surprisingly easy to follow too. |
| 145 | 1979 | Michael Ende | Die unendliche Geschichte | The Never-ending Story | novel for young people | I loved this extremely original, imaginative, well-paced and well-told story – now a modern classic. |
| 146 | 1981 | Heinz Konsalik | Bittersüßes siebtes Jahr | Bitter-sweet Seventh Year | novel | Gay, light and very funny. |
| 147 | 1981 | Heinz Konsalik | Der pfeifende Mörder | The Whistling Murderer | docu-fiction novel | Terrific atmosphere, nicely written, I am a fan of HK. |
| 148 | 1981 | Patrick Süskind | Der Kontrabass | The Double Bass | theatre | A brilliant, intense, often funny but overall pretty sad, introspective monologue by a bass player in a regional state orchestra musing in everyday-speech steam-of-consciousness mode about music, his instrument, the unattainable soprano singer whom he loves in a very frustrated way, life in general and so on – this is theatre and this is literature at its very very best. |
| 149 | 1985 | Patrick Süskind | Das Parfum | The Perfume | novel | A stunning historical novel with a touch of fantasy about the search for the perfect perfume in 18th-Century France that was on the German best-seller lists for 9 years (!) and almost as long elsewhere. |
| 150 | 1985 | Heinz Konsalik | Die Bank im Park | The Bench in the Park | novella | You’re not supposed to admit that you like Konsalik, as he was and probably still is an immensely popular writer with the general public in Germany and elsewhere, but I must confess that I just couldn’t help being impressed by this long and evocative story about literary success and failure set in the Latin Quarter of Paris in the 14th Century. I had had the idea that with a popular writer the vocabulary should be relatively basic and therefore quite essential for beginners like me, but this book turned out to be way above the literary standard you would get in an Anglo-Saxon equivalent for the mass public. |
| 151 | 1987 | Patrick Süskind | Die Taube | The Pigeon | novella | A very impressive long story about a very average bank employee with hermit-like tendencies in contemporary Paris, whose existence is seriously upset by the intrusion of a pigeon into his life. |
| 152 | 1988 | Bernhard Schlink | Die gordische Schleife | The Gordian Knot | spy-thriller novel | An espionage thriller by one of Germany’s outstanding contemporary writers. Set first in southern France and then in Manhattan in the late 1980s, it lacks the pace of Anglo-Saxon thrillers but to a certain degree compensates that by its interesting central characters and its general class. |
| 153 | 1990 | W.G. Sebald | Schwindel. Gefühle. | Vertigo | literary essay | This is a literary essay on memory and the tricks it plays on us by a modern master of evocative, erudite, clear-sighted prose. Sebald takes us in the superb opening chapter with Stendhal through the Alps during Napoleon’s Italian campaign to meditate on the contrast between Stendhal’s vivid memories of the events he lived through and their objective, photographic realities, and continues to wander around Verona, Venice and Vienna in company with Casanova, Kafka and his own memories of places seen and people met, to finally confront his snatches of childhood memories in his birthplace in the mountains of southern Germany.
– As in his other works the book is amply illustrated with photographs and images of the subjects under consideration to add an extra, visual layer of significance and poetry onto the penetrating power of the prose itself. A memorable reading experience! |
| 154 | 1991 | Heinz Konsalik | Die Bucht der schwarzen Perlen | The Black-Pearl Bay | novel | Konsalik (1921-1999) was a hugely successful writer who was quite despised by the German intelligentsia, but I had been most impressed by The Whistling Murderer so I decided to give this one a try. It is a sort of romantic adventure story set in the South Seas, with I suppose a certain amount of appeal to sun-worshipping Northerners of the more sentimental sort. I now see what the intelligentsia were talking about. |
| 155 | 1992 | W.G. Sebald | Die Ausgewanderten | The Emigrants | literary essay | In four separate, unrelated chapters Sebald explores the passage through time of four almost-average and almost-unassuming persons that had crossed his own life path at one time or another. In his uniquely penetrating way he digs ever further to explore the ever-widening implications of his findings to present us with a deeply moving, intense and profound portrait of the times through which these in fact exceptional people lived. Sebald can make you see into the heart of things like no one else, thanks to his superb mastery of language and to the innate integrity and honesty of the way he approaches his subjects, going from the topmost, surface impressions through to the deepest layers of significance. The growing interest one feels as each of the people-stories unfolds is, as always with the author of The Rings of Saturn, considerably enhanced by the ubiquitous photos and images, which combine with the pregnant prose to heighten the ever-present sense of the wider implications of the life-stories of his four people-subjects. – This was the first of Sebald’s works to be translated into English, and it quite understandably immediately established his international reputation as one of Germany’s leading contemporary writers. |
| 156 | 1995 | W.G. Sebald | Die Ringe des Saturn | The Rings of Saturn | literary essay | Sebald goes wandering around rural England visiting places of interest to him and thinking about writers and painters and thinkers and cities and landscapes that these places bring to his erudite and fertile mind. Since everything he looks at and writes about assumes near-cosmic significance thanks to the magic of his bewitching prose and penetrating internal vision, the reader is in for a big treat indeed, boosted by the neat way images of the subject under scrutiny are systematically inserted throughout the text. |
| 157 | 1995 | Bernhard Schlink | Der Vorleser | The Reader | novel | A modern classic, even though I found the author’s portrayal of the leading female figure, a former prison guard at Auschwitz(!) a good bit too empathetic for my taste. Note: as everyone knows, the story starts off when the lady next door asks the student-hero to read good stuff to her in lieu of foreplay: well in the Hollywood film he reads Mark Twain and other Yankee authors, no doubt because the authors cited in the original text are almost all unknown to audiences outside of the German cultural sphere... |
| 158 | 1996 | Patrick Süskind | Geschichten | Stories | short stories | What a golden touch this writer has! |
| 159 | 1998 | W.G. Sebald | Logis in einem Landhaus | A Place in the Country | literary essay | Penetrating analyses of various – mostly Swiss – authors of particular importance to Sebald (Johann Peter Hebel, J-J Rousseau, Eduard Mörike, Gottfried Keller, Robert Walser) and of the hyperrealist painter Jan Peter Tripp, written in Sebald’s own inimitably rich style so full of significance.
– Profound and moving. |
| 160 | 1999 | W.G. Sebald | Luftkrieg und Literatur | Air Warfare and Literature | essay | A series of lectures on the subject of the Allied terror bombings of German cities throughout the Second World War, avowedly aimed at destroying the morale of the German population by killing as many civilians as possible, that really began with the surprise levelling of the residential areas of Hamburg in the summer of 1942 and that was carried steadily onwards up to the apocalyptic 2000-bomber raid on Dresden and its masses of refugees in April 1945(!). Sebald wonders aloud, in his clear, straightforward, implacably logical way, why this painful subject has been with one or two exceptions almost entirely swept under the carpet in post-war Germany, with the subject being avoided by almost all writers and intellectuals, with the many eyewitness accounts by survivors being quite unobtainable, so that the very subject itself has become a non-subject in the modern German consciousness. A striking plea for intellectual and moral honesty. |
| 161 | 1999 | Felicitas Hoppe | Picknick der Friseure | The Hair-dressers’ Picnic | novel | A recent German novel about life in the DDR, which turns out to have been just about as drab and discouraging as one had always imagined it to be. Sort of OK, one suspects it has lost a certain twangy Saxon touch in the translation process. |
| 162 | 2000 | Bernhard Schlink | Liebesfluchten | Flights of Love | short stories | An absolutely first-rate collection of beautifully-written stories, all with considerable punch and emotional impact. |
| 163 | 2000 | Bernhard Schlink | Zuckererbsen | Sweet peas | novella | Another brilliant, very striking tale by one of Germany’s most renowned contemporary writers. |
| 164 | 2000 | Bernhard Schlink | Der Andere | The Other Man | novella | This is a terrific novella about a newly-widowed sixtyisher who finds in his letterbox a love letter to his late wife and undertakes a search through her past – and into his rival’s present – to understand just what kind of relationship he really had had with his wife and just what kind of person she really was. Told in a solid, straightforward way that even I could follow in the original text, with only a little help from the translation on each opposite page, the story becomes ever more gripping and ever more global in its questioning impact as our hero delves into his wife’s past and her lover’s present, until he eventually and almost unexpectedly ... you just must find out for yourself how this man’s quest for understanding evolves. |
| 165 | 2001 | W.G. Sebald | Austerlitz | Austerlitz | literary essay | Sebald does it again: he turns what starts out as a somewhat rambling series of personal reminiscences — centred not on the infamous death camp but on an extraordinarily erudite and engaging professor named Austerlitz, whose brilliant extempore exposé on architecture and time during a chance encounter in the Antwerp train station at the beginning of the book sets the tone for what we are in for – into a panoramic view of the state of contemporary culture and a literary work of art of the first order.
– Sebald’s startlingly clear, precise prose flows on in a harmonious, captivating way that reminds me somehow of the effect of the one and only Marcel P’s very own style. |
| 166 | 2008 | Volker Kutscher | Der nasse Fisch | The Wet Fish | crime fiction | Crime and detection during the Weimar Republic in the 20s, nicely done. |
| 167 | 2010 | Bernhard Schlink | Sommerlügen | Summer Lies | stories | A brilliant series of intense, almost disquieting stories about people trying to come to grips with what they and their lives are all about. The closing tale, Die Reise nach Süden (The Trip South), about an elderly woman who suddenly realizes that she no longer loves anyone in her large family, is even more of a masterpiece than the others. |