German-language Book Recommendations

Winter is the perfect time to curl up on the couch with a good book. Deutschland Magazine has put together a list of “recommended reading,” featuring German-language books with summaries in English.

Alina Bronsky’s Scherbenpark

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Author Alina Bronsky presents her book "Scherbenpark."

(© picture-alliance / dpa)

Alina Bronsky sent her manuscript to the editor by e-mail and had a contract on her desk only a week later. That is not the normal case. The 30-year-old convinced her publisher, Kiepenheuer & Witsch, in a flash with Scherbenpark, her first novel. It is the rapidly and dryly told story of the highly gifted 17-year-old Sascha, who moved from Moscow to Germany where he lives in a high-rise ghetto, the “Scherbenpark.” Like her novel’s protagonist, Alina Bronsky also spent her childhood in Russia and came to Germany as an adolescent. Today, she lives in Frankfurt am Main. In 2008, she was invited to contend for the Bachmann Prize, one of the most important literary prizes in the German-speaking region.

Feridun Zaimoglu’s Liebesbrand

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Author Feridun Zaimoglu

(© picture-alliance/ ZB)

The fact that Feridun Zaimoglu, 44, was born in Turkey is of no consequence in Liebesbrand (Suhr­kamp), except perhaps at the beginning, when the first-person narrator, a share trader in his mid-thirties, survives a serious bus accident in Turkey (as Zaimoglu did a few years ago). After that, the story is simply about love, a mad, romantic, anarchic love. For the narrator falls in love with the woman who rescued him, and goes in pursuit of her across half of Europe, to the heart of Lower Saxony. Zaimoglu, who came to Germany with his parents when he was one year old, writes with brilliance, wit, and a touch of malice. “If you didn’t already know that Feridun Zaimoglu is one of the best German writers there is, this novel would prove it,” wrote Die Zeit.

Dietmar Dath’s Die Abschaffung der Arten

Anyone who dares to read Dietmar Dath’s Die Abschaffung der Arten (Suhrkamp) should not have anything against the fantasy genre. The novel is set in the distant, apocalyptic future, where the world belongs to the animals, and the hero is Wolf Dimitri. Where Europe once was, there are now just three labyrinthine cities. And in the course of the novel Dimitri realizes, “Why what happened to people actually happened.” The literary sections are divided in their responses, which range from “rubbish” to “fun” to “great speculative literature.” Dath, 38, writes profusely and polarizes readers. He is an advocate of a “true socialism” and likes to create unease in our minds. “What literature can achieve is to limber up tense thought-muscles,” he is quoted as saying by the FAZ, a newspaper he worked for as an editor for several years.

Karen Duve’s Taxi

It has been almost ten years since Karen Duve published her brilliant literary debut novel Regenroman. Before that, she worked for 13 years as a taxi driver. So the 46-year-old knows exactly what she is writing about in her fourth novel Taxi (Eichborn): Every night, woman taxi-driver Alex cruises around Hamburg on a 12-hour shift. The young woman became a taxi-driver by chance, and somehow got stuck in the job, like a few of the men. This is not doing her any good. Duve narrates in episodes and with a mixture of melancholy and dry  humor. Tragic, funny, muted anecdotes are interwoven to present the story of a woman who has lost control over her life. In the end, however, something altogether unexpected happens: a monkey gets into Alex’s taxi...

Sherko Fatah’s Das dunkle Schiff

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Author Sherko Fatah

(© picture-alliance/ dpa)

The third novel by Sherko Fatah, who was born in East Berlin in 1964, begins in Iraq. His main protagonist, Kerim, a cook by profession, grows up there and even undergoes training to be a terrorist. Later he turns against terrorism, flees as a stowaway on a ship to Europe, more precisely, to Germany, to Berlin. His reservations about the western world are so strong, however, that he just cannot feel at home here. Das dunkle Schiff (Jung und Jung) is a clever and exciting adventure novel that shows how an individual life can become caught up in great turmoil. Fatah, son of an Iraqi-Kurdish father and a German mother, is also interested in extremism, its seductive powers and its consequences. The novel’s language is sensitive, non-pathetic, and precise.

Uwe Timm’s Halbschatten

A remarkable woman and a true story: Marga von Etzdorf, a young and daring pilot, and first co-pilot for Lufthansa, shoots herself in Aleppo, Syria, in May 1933 after a crash landing. She is 25 years old. Uwe Timm, born 1940, translates history into literature with great mastery. In Halbschatten (Kiepenheuer & Witsch) he sends his narrator and a strange guide around the Invalidenfriedhof in Berlin, to Etzdorf’s grave. The dead around her – including some notorious Nazis – begin to talk with the result that slowly the pilot’s turbulent story emerges from the narrative fragments. An unusually composed and fascinating novel.

Uwe Tellkamp’s Der Turm

The sub-title of the book Der Turm (Suhrkamp) is “Story from a lost land.” It is the story of the last seven years of the GDR before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and it is told over more than a 1000 pages. In intertwined strands of narrative Uwe Tellkamp accompanies three generations of family members along the path to the revolution of 1989. “Just as we today see the world of the bourgeoisie through the eyes of Thomas Mann, so later generations will be able to see the petrifaction and implosion of the GDR in Tellkamp’s novel,” wrote the Süddeutsche Zeitung. The author, born in Dresden in 1968, spent his youth in the GDR. He later studied medicine, which he had been prohibited from doing in the GDR, but then decided to be a writer.

Ingo Schulze’s Adam und Evelyn

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Author Ingo Schulze presents his book "Adam and Evelyn."

(© picture-alliance/ dpa)

One year before its 20th anniversary, Ingo Schulze turns once again to 1989, the year of the Fall of the Berlin Wall. His novel Adam und Evelyn (Berlin Verlag) has two main protagonists whose names anything but coincidentally recall the protagonists of the first great Fall. “A very readable and also highly complex literary work,” writes Die Welt about the story of Adam, who loves his wife Evelyn, but other women as well. When his wife catches him in the act and subsequently sets out alone for Hungary, Adam follows her. It is the summer of 1989, when Hungary opened its borders to the West. In the stuff of this novel Ingo Schulze discovers the primal human story of prohibition and temptation, love and knowledge, and the longing for paradise.

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