The life of 50-year-old engineer Walter Faber is suddenly disrupted by a series of odd but intertwining coincidences in the splendid novel Homo Faber by the Swiss author Max Frisch (1911–1991). The novel opens with the protagonist on a flight… Read More ›
The novel immediately following the publication of the epic work Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann (1875–1955), The Holy Sinner led Mann and his readers through an entirely different literary experience. Published four years before the author’s death, The Holy Sinner… Read More ›
The German author Heinrich Böll’s (1917–85) Group Portrait with Lady is widely considered one of his most important novels because it was likely the deciding work in his selection for the 1972 Nobel Prize in literature. Though the text reaches… Read More ›
The last novel by the Swiss German author Hermann Hesse (1877–1962), The Glass Bead Game is a serene bildungsroman conceived in the form of a “eutopia” (positive, happy utopia) set in the year 2200, somewhere in the German-speaking areas of… Read More ›
The Flounder is a 4,000-year-long history of the sexes, based loosely on the Grimms’ fairy tale “The Fisherman and His Wife.” The narrator of this novel by Germany’s highly revered writer Günter Grass (1927–2015) is a present-day man, Edek, who,… Read More ›
In Dog Years, the German novelist Günter Grass (1927–2015) gives his readers a panoramic view of German mentality before, during, and after World War II. The third book of the Danzig Trilogy, this work, following The Tin Drum and Cat and… Read More ›
The creative portrayal of Germany’s descent into evil comes to life in the pages of the acclaimed postwar novel by Thomas Mann (1875–1955), Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer, Adrian Leverkühn, as Told by a Friend. This complex novel… Read More ›
Divided Heaven, the second novel by German author Christa Wolf (1929–2011) became an immediate best seller and a critical success upon publication: The initial 160,000 copies and 10 editions sold out within a few months. Divided Heaven chronicles Rita Seidel’s… Read More ›
The intense psychoanalytical novel Demian was published by the German Swiss novelist Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) in 1919. It was translated into English in 1923 under an English pseudonym (Emil Sinclair), at first in a series hosted by the cultural review… Read More ›
The Nobel Prize–winning author Thomas Mann (1875–1955) stands out as one of the most important figures of early 20th-century literature. Influenced by German philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, Mann’s fiction serves as a model of subtle philosophical examination of… Read More ›
The Crowning of a King is the concluding novel in a sixwork magnum opus, The Great War of the White Man, by German author Arnold Zweig (1887–1968). Zweig called the series of novels about World War I “a literary document… Read More ›
The works of Thomas Mann (1875– 1955), a distinguished literary figure of the 20th century, epitomize the modern writer. The German author towered above the times in which he lived and has continued to be universally acclaimed, with readers today… Read More ›
Long before the 20th century, prison literature was an old and varied genre ranging from the Consolations of Philosophy by the late Roman Empire writer Boethius to Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot. Thus, while it is not new or unique to… Read More ›
Cassandra was the fifth and final lecture of a series Christa Wolf (1929–2011) presented in 1982. Shortly thereafter, the draft was reworked and published in 1983 with Jan Van Heurck’s English translation appearing in 1984. Cassandra is a retelling of… Read More ›
German author Arnold Zweig (1887–1968) wrote his most famous novel, The Case of Sergeant Grischa, as an account of World War I. Upon its publication in Germany in 1927, the novel’s readers acclaimed the story as the most moving account… Read More ›
Of the many works by the renowned German author Thomas Mann (1875–1955), including Death in Venice and The Magic Mountain, none match the epic proportion or literary legacy of the novel Buddenbrooks. Written early in his career, this story of… Read More ›
One of the most celebrated novels by Heinrich Böll (1917–85), Billiards at Half Past Nine appeared in 1959, the same year as The Tin Drum by Günter Grass and Speculations about Jacob by Uwe Johnson, two other seminal works of German… Read More ›
Berlin Alexanderplatz is considered by some to be the most significant urban novel in German literature. Franz Biberkopf, the protagonist of this novel by Alfred Döblin (1878–1957), is an ex-convict who gains his freedom after serving a four-year sentence in… Read More ›
The German author Arnold Zweig (1887–1968) started work in 1938 on one of his major novels, The Axe of Wandsbek, a psychological analysis of individual behavior in everyday life under the Third Reich. It depicts the evil in the structures… Read More ›
The fifth published novel by Germany’s Erich Maria Remarque (1898–1970), Arch of Triumph was first published in the United States in 1945; the German edition followed in 1946. The story takes place in Paris between November 11, 1938, and the… Read More ›
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