World travel guide Germany: BOOKS

Heinrich Heine Deutschland: A Winter's Tale (Angel; also included in the Complete Poems ). This magisterial verse travelogue describes Heine's journey from exile in Paris to his family home in Hamburg. It's full of insight into the places he passed through, and contains devastating exposés of mid-nineteenth-century German society. The Harz Journey ( Selected Prose , Penguin) is one of the author's Travel Pictures - much imitated travelogues featuring inserted poems within the narrative.

Patrick Leigh Fermor A Time of Gifts (Penguin). The author set out to walk from Rotterdam to Constantinople in 1933, travelling along the Rhine and Danube valleys en route. Written up forty years later in luscious, hyper-refined prose, it presents the fresh sense of youthful discovery distilled through considerable subsequent learning and reflection. Prewar Germany is shown suffering from all the schizophrenic influences of the era, yet the country's enduring beauty is also captured.

Claudio Magris Danube (Harvill). Absorbing, searching exploration of the great river and the places along it from the Black Forest to the Black Sea, mixing travelogue with all manner of scholarly diversions; not the easiest of reads, but rewards the effort.

Mark Twain A Tramp Abroad (Penguin). The early, German-based part of this book, particularly the descriptions of Heidelberg, show Twain on top form, by turns humorous and evocative. There's an over-the-top appendix entitled "The Awful German Language", which mercilessly pillories the over-complexity of "this fearsome tongue".

Roland Bainton Here I Stand (Lion/NAL). The best and liveliest biography of Martin Luther, one of the undisputed titans of European history.

Geoffrey Barraclough Origins of Modern Germany (Blackwell/Norton). The most easily digestible general introduction to the country's history, tackling the medieval period better than any more specialized book.

Volker Berghahn Germany and the Approach of War in 1914 (Macmillan/St Martin's Press). An instructive general picture of Germany before World War I. It chronicles the political, economic and social pressures, and succeeds in giving plausible explanations for the apparently inevitable.

Owen Chadwick The Reformation (Penguin). Traces the German origins of the biggest-ever rupture in the fabric of the Church, and follows their impact on the rest of Europe.

Einhard and Notker the Stammerer Two Lives of Charlemagne (Penguin). Einhard was a leading courtier in the service of the founder of the Holy Roman Empire, and provided a beautifully written, all-too-short biography of his master. Written a century later, Notker's book is a series of monkish anecdotes, many no doubt apocryphal, which help flesh out the overall portrait of Charlemagne.

Mary Fulbrook A Concise History of Germany (Cambridge UP). "Concise" is the key word for this post-unification history, whose brevity is simultaneously its strength and its weakness.

Sebastian Haffner The Rise and Fall of Prussia (Phoenix). A short study of the legend behind the remarkable state which forged German unity in 1871, yet vanished from the map in 1947.

Friedrich Heer The Holy Roman Empire (Phoenix). Comprehensive account of the thousand-year history of the First German Reich.

Golo Mann The History of Germany Since 1787 (Pimlico). Written by the son of Thomas Mann, this comprehensive study traces not only the politics but also the intellectual and cultural currents of the period.

Nancy Mitford Frederick the Great (Penguin). Lively biography of the man who brought Prussia to the forefront of German affairs, and to a place among the great powers of Europe.

Detlev Pleukert The Weimar Republic (Penguin). Trenchant dissection of the endlessly fascinating but fundamentally flawed state - until recently the only experiment at a united and democratic German nation - which survived for just fourteen years.

Alexandra Richie Faust's Metropolis (HarperCollins). The most detailed history of Berlin in English, with the emphasis placed firmly on the momentous events of the twentieth century.

Tacitus The Germania (Penguin). Brilliant series of concise analyses of each of the war-like Germanic tribes, which are often compared favourably with the author's native Rome. Some of the observations about German character are startlingly prophetic.

A.J.P. Taylor Bismarck: The Man and the Statesman (Penguin/Random House). Britain's most controversial historian here provides a typically stirring portrait of the ruthless schemer who forged (reluctantly, in the author's view) the nineteenth-century unification of Germany.

Veronica (C.V.) Wedgwood The Thirty Years War (Methuen/Routledge). Easily the most accomplished book on the series of conflicts which devastated the country and divided the continent in the first half of the seventeenth century.

Andrew Wheatcroft The Habsburgs (Penguin). Wide-ranging history of the extraordinary dynasty which not only dominated German affairs for several centuries, but controlled much of the rest of Europe as well.

Alan Bullock Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (Penguin). Ever since it was published, this scholarly yet highly readable tome has ranked as the classic single-volume biography of the failed Austrian artist and discharged army corporal whose evil genius fooled a nation and caused the deaths of millions.

Joachim Fest The Face of the Third Reich (Penguin). Mainly of interest for its biographies of the gallery of rogues surrounding the Führer - Göring, Goebbels, Hess, Himmler, Speer et al.

Klaus P. Fischer Nazi Germany (Constable/Continuum). Offers a well-balanced general history of the Third Reich and its origins.

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen Hitler's Willing Executioners (Abacus). One of the most important recent contributions to the history of the Third Reich, this controversial tome sets out to prove that guilt for the implementation of the Holocaust lies with a far broader constituency than the Nazi elite.

Adolf Hitler Table Talk (OUP/Knopf). Hitler in his own words: Martin Bormann, one of his inner circle, recorded the dictator's pronouncements at meetings between 1941 and 1944. The early Mein Kampf (Pimlico/Noontide), a series of rambling, irrational and hysterical outbursts on every subject under the sun, is also of interest, as it genuinely constituted Hitler's blueprint for power.

Ian Kershaw Hitler (Penguin). A well-nigh definitive new two-volume biography of Hitler, the first part covering the years up to 1936, the second the last nine years of his life.

Claudia Koonz Mothers in the Fatherland (Methuen/St Martin's Press). Perceptive study of the role of women in Nazi Germany. Includes a rare and revealing interview with the chief of Hitler's Women's Bureau, Gertrud Scholtz-Klink.

William Shirer The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (Mandarin/Simon & Schuster). This makes a perfect complement to Bullock's book: Shirer was an American journalist stationed in Germany during the Nazi period. Notwithstanding the inordinate length and excessive journalese, this book is full of insights and is ideal for dipping into, with the help of its exhaustive index.

James Taylor and Warren Shaw A Dictionary of the Third Reich (Penguin). The handiest reference book of the period.

Hugh Trevor-Roper The Last Days of Hitler (Macmillan/Chicago UP). A brilliant reconstruction of the closing chapter of the Third Reich, set in the Berlin bunker. Trevor-Roper subsequently marred his reputation as the doyen of British historians by authenticating the forged Hitler Diaries , which have themselves been the subject of several books.

John Ardagh Germany and the Germans (Penguin). The most comprehensive English-language characterization of the country and its people, taking into account its history, politics and psyche, and covering almost every aspect of national life, revised after unification. Its approach is always lively, yet remains scrupulously unbiased.

David Childs The GDR: Moscow's German Ally (Unwin Hyman/Routledge). The best book on the GDR period, fully revised the year before Die Wende , when the regime still seemed fully secure. Obviously now dated, but still of considerable interest for its detailed descriptions and explanations.

David Childs and Richard Popplewell The Stasi (Macmillan/New York UP). In-depth academic study of the huge parasitical ministry that was the East German secret police.

W.A. Coupe Germany Through the Looking-Glass (Berg). The author presents the period 1945-1986 via a collection of German political cartoons, adding his own analysis of the issues in each case. Opinionated and subjective, the book introduces German humour and a German view of the country's postwar development.

Ian Derbyshire Politics in Germany (Chambers). Survey of the German political scene, with Die Wende and the subsequent elections fully documented.

Timothy Garton Ash The File (Flamingo). Following the opening of the Stasi archives, the author traced all those who had spied on him, and lays bare the informer society that was the GDR.

Stuart Parkes Understanding Contemporary Germany (Routledge). Sympathetic examination - with a broadly optimistic conclusion - of the political, economic and social structures of post-unification Germany.

Peter Schneider The Germany Comedy (I.B. Tauris/Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Discussion of the myriad problems caused by unification, with many wry descriptions and observations of the bizarre contradictions and anomalies that ensued.

Günther Wallraff Lowest of the Low (Methuen/Freundlich). In 1983, Wallraff spent two years labouring among Turkish and other immigrant workers, finding out about the underside of German affluence. The book was a political bombshell when it came out, painting a picture of exploitation and malpractice rarely discussed in Germany. Unfortunately, it now seems that the author was guilty of fabricating some of the evidence, thus diminishing its long-term impact. The Undesirable Journalist (Pluto Press) is a collection of short but similarly shocking pieces exposing some of the nastier aspects of the country's postwar prosperity.

Alan Watson The Germans: Who are they now? (Mandarin/Edition Q). A guide to German identity and the way it is shaping for the future. Each of the eight chapters attempts to provide an answer to one strand of the question posed in the title.

Elizabeth von Arnim Elizabeth and her German Garden (Virago), Elizabeth in Rügen (Virago). Although billed as novels, these are effectively autobiographical works by Katherine Mansfield's cousin, an Australian who married a German aristocrat and went to live on his Pomeranian estates.

Sybille Bedford A Legacy (Penguin). Semi-autobiographical novel about two German families - one Berlin, Jewish and mercantile, the other rural, Catholic and aristocratic - improbably united by marriage. Full of sparkling dialogue and richly comic episodes.

Erskine Childers The Riddle of the Sands (Wordsworth). Set against the background of the Great Naval Race in the run-up to World War I, this is generally regarded as the first modern spy novel. The authentic descriptions of the Friesian islands give it a strong local colour.

Daniel Defoe Memoirs of a Cavalier (OUP). The first half of this novel is set in the Germany of the Thirty Years War, and offers vivid descriptions of some of the key battles: indeed the book is so lifelike that Defoe was able to pass it off as a true autobiography of a soldier of fortune.

Thomas de Quincey Klosterheim (Woodbridge Press). The only novel by the celebrated opium eater, this spooky Gothic fantasy again uses the backdrop of the Thirty Years War, but (in contrast to Defoe) is told from the point of view of the Catholic side.

Richard Hughes The Fox in the Attic, The Wooden Shepherdess (Harvill). The most tactiturn of writers, Hughes established an enormous literary reputation on a handful of works, including these first two parts of an unfinished trilogy about an Anglo-German family in the years following World War I. Focusing heavily on the fatal attraction of the Nazis, each mixes fictional episodes with vivid descriptions of real-life events, including Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch and the Night of the Long Knives.

Christopher Isherwood Mr Norris Changes Trains, Goodbye to Berlin (Methuen/Norton). Set in the decadent atmosphere of the Weimar Republic, these stories brilliantly evoke the period and bring to life some classic Berlin characters; they subsequently formed the basis of the films I Am a Camera and Cabaret . See also Christopher and his Kind (Methuen), a fairly dire autobiographical product of the author's declining years which is nonetheless of interest for describing the true-life events and people on which the stories were based.

Jerome K. Jerome Three Men on the Bummel (Penguin). Sequel to the (deservedly) more famous Three Men in a Boat , this features the same trio of feckless English travellers taking a cycling holiday through Germany at the turn of the twentieth century. The second half of the book features plenty of entertaining anecdotes, with opinions bandied about on every conceivable subject. Diary of a Pilgrimage (Alan Sutton) is an account of the same author's visit to see the Oberammergau Passion Play.

John Le Carré A Small Town in Germany (Coronet/Dell). Vintage spy novel set in 1960s Bonn. The then recently built Berlin Wall is the setting for both the beginning and ending of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (Coronet), Le Carré's best-known Cold War fiction.

Katherine Mansfield In a German Pension (Penguin). One of the author's earliest works, this is a collection of short stories set in early twentieth-century Bavaria. Funny but often acerbic too.

Robert Muller The World That Summer (Sceptre). A beautifully written novel based on the author's own experience as a half-Jewish boy growing up in Hamburg during the Third Reich, with all the inevitable conflicts that involved.

Rudolph Erich Raspe The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (Dedalus/Hippocrene). The outrageously exaggerated humorous exploits of the real-life Baron Münchhausen were embroidered yet further by Raspe and first published in English. Copies with the classic nineteenth-century engravings of Gustave Doré can often be found in remainder and secondhand shops.

Stephen Spender The Temple (Faber & Faber). Set in Hamburg and the Rhineland during the Weimar Republic years, this makes a fascinating comparison with the closely related works of Isherwood, who is actually one of the main characters. Because of its explicit homosexuality, it could not be published at the time, and remained in draft manuscript until a few years ago.

Anthony Trollope Linda Tressel (OUP). One of the Victorian master novelist's shorter full-length works, a powerful psychological study, set against the backdrop of Nürnberg, of the crushing of a young woman's spirit by her bigoted aunt.

Theodor Fontane Before the Storm (OUP). Set in Prussia during the period of the Napoleonic wars, this epic is the greatest German historical novel of the second half of the nineteenth century, dealing with the conflict between patriotism and liberty. The much shorter Effi Briest (Penguin) focuses on adultery in the context of the social mores of the age. Cécile (Angel) likewise deals with moral dilemmas and ends tragically, while Two Novellas (Penguin) demonstrate the author's mastery of the small-scale.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe The Sorrows of Young Werther (Penguin). An early epistolary novella, treating the theme of suicide for the first time ever. Wilhelm Meister: The Years of Apprenticeship and Wilhelm Meister: The Years of Travel (both John Calder/Riverrun Press) is a huge, episodic and partly autobiographical cycle of novels. Tales for Transformation (City Lights) is a series of short stories, showing Goethe's interest in the supernatural.

Johann Jacob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen Simplicius Simplicissimus (Dedalus). This massive, brilliantly witty semi-autobiographical novel, at long last available in a reliable translation, is one of the high points of seventeenth-century European literature. Set against the uncertainties of the Thirty Years War, it charts the story of its hero from boyhood to middle age.

Gerhart Hauptmann Lineman Thiel and Other Stories (Angel). These three remarkable stories, written towards the end of the nineteenth century, anticipate Freud in their psychological penetration, and the techniques of the cinema in their use of strong visual symbols.

Johann Peter Hebel The Treasure Chest (Penguin). A wonderful collection of moral tales, anecdotes, jokes, reports of murders, disasters and mysteries, all originally written for inclusion in a popular religious almanac.

Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann Tales of Hoffmann (Penguin), The Best Tales of Hoffmann (Dover). These selections of work by the schizophrenic master of fantasy and the macabre overlap slightly, but each features only one of his two greatest masterpieces; Penguin has Mademoiselle de Scudéry , the world's first detective story, while Dover includes the nightmarish allegory, The Golden Pot , in Thomas Carlyle's inspired translation. The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr (Penguin) is a full-scale novel on the author's favourite theme of two juxtaposed stories, in this case the supposed memoirs of a cat and and a musician clearly modelled on Hoffmann himself.

Heinrich von Kleist The Marquise of O and Other Stories (Penguin). Like Hoffmann, who was only one year older, Kleist was one of the all-time greats of short-story writing. His eight tales range in length from three to one hundred pages, but they're all equally compelling.

Frank G. Ryder (ed.) German Romantic Stories (Continuum). A marvellous anthology which includes three of the classic novellas of German Romanticism: Memoirs of a Good-for-Nothing by Joseph von Eichendorff, Undine by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué and The Strange Story of Peter Schlemihl by Adelbert von Chamisso.

Jeffrey L. Sammons (ed.) German Novellas of Realism (Continuum). Another fine collection, including two exquisite prose idylls by writers better known as poets: The Jew's Beech by Annette von Droste-Hülshoff and Mozart on the Way to Prague by Eduard Mörike.

Theodor Storm The Dykemaster (Angel). Powerful short novel, set against the bleak western coastline of Schleswig-Holstein, about the inventor of a new type of dyke who is demonized by the self-centred community which opposes him. Hans and Heinz Kirch (Angel), a novella about a father-son conflict in a family of Baltic merchants, is the lead title in an anthology which includes two of the author's finest short stories.

Heinrich Böll The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (Minerva/Penguin). Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1972, Heinrich Böll is the most popular postwar German novelist - at least with non-Germans. This is the harrowing story of a young woman whose life is ruined by the combined effects of a gutter-press campaign and her accidental involvement with a wanted terrorist. The Clown (Marion Boyars/Penguin) again uses the backdrop of Cologne for a more detailed critique of modern German society. And Where Were You, Adam? (Minerva/Northwestern UP) is set in 1944, chronicling the effect of war and Nazism on ordinary German people.

Bertolt Brecht Short Stories (Methuen/Routledge). A highly entertaining collection, proving that this side of Brecht's output has been unfairly neglected. In contrast, his single large-scale prose work, The Threepenny Novel (Penguin), a much-expanded version of the Opera , is stultifyingly verbose.

Alfred Döblin Berlin-Alexanderplatz (Ungar). A prominent socialist intellectual during the Weimar period, Döblin went into exile shortly after the banning of his books in 1933. Berlin-Alexanderplatz is his weightiest and most durable achievement, an unrelenting epic of the city's underclass.

Hans Fallada Little Man, What Now? (Libris/Academy Chicago Publishers). A once-famous but now unjustly neglected masterpiece, describing with style, humour and tenderness the story of a young couple struggling against the spiralling inflation of the final Weimar years. The German psyche on the eve of the Nazi takeover is captured and distilled far more effectively than in any history book.

Günter Grass From the Diary of a Snail, The Flounder, The Tin Drum (all Minerva/Random House). Grass, the Nobel Laureate of 1999, is one of Germany's best-known postwar personalities, concerned to analyse and come to terms with his country's awful recent heritage. His highly political novels are all studies of the German character, concentrating on how Nazism found a foothold among ordinary Germans and on postwar guilt, but also on postwar materialism and spiritual poverty.

Hermann Hesse Narziss and Goldmund (Penguin/Holt). A beautifully polished novel, set in medieval Germany and narrated in the picaresque vein, about two monks, one a dedicated scholar, the other a wanderer, artist and lover. Steppenwolf (Penguin/Holt) is a bizarre fantasy about schizophrenia, while The Glass Bead Game (Picador/Henry Holb) is a monumental utopian novel, set in a future where an elite group develops a game which resolves the world's conflicts.

Georg Heym The Thief and Other Stories (Libris). These seven Expressionist stories, notable for their rich imagery and relentlessly grim subject-matter, comprise the entire prose output of the author, who was already a well-established poet at the time of his death in a skating accident at the age of 25.

Stefan Heym The King David Report (Northwestern UP). Heym was one of the many Marxist writers who chose to settle in the GDR, but he quickly became disillusioned and for decades functioned as a one-man opposition to the regime. This is his best novel, a devastatingly witty send-up of modern totalitarianism by means of a biblical allegory.

Gert Hofmann The Parable of the Blind (Minerva/Fromm), Our Conquest (Minerva). Hofmann was a latecomer to fiction, but quickly established himself among the most original contemporary German writers. The Parable of the Blind is an imaginative rendering of the story behind Brueghel's enigmatic painting, while Our Conquest offers a child's-eye view of the aftermath of defeat in World War II.

Ernst Jünger The Glass Bees (Noonday Press), Eumeswill (Quartet), Aladdin's Problem (Quartet). Jünger is the most controversial German writer of the twentieth century, mainly because, although never a Nazi, he was an avowed right-winger who willingly served as a soldier in World War II. His novels belong to the genre of utopian fiction and are multi-layered in approach, offering critiques which can be taken to apply to Germany in particular or to modern society in general.

Wolfgang Koeppen Pigeons on the Grass (Holmes & Meier). A collage-like novel describing through a score of different characters the events in a single day in an occupied German city after World War II. It's part of an informal trilogy which also includes Death in Rome (Penguin), a ruthless dissection of the various component parts of the German soul as manifested through four members of the same family.

Siegfried Lenz The German Lesson (New Directions). A classic German novel about World War II, focusing on the clashes between a father and son, and between duty and personal loyalty. The Lightship (Methuen) examines similar themes in a very different setting.

Heinrich Mann Man of Straw (Penguin). The best novel by Thomas Mann's more politically committed elder brother, here analysing the corrupt nature of political and business life under the Second Reich.

Klaus Mann The Pious Dance (Gay Men's Press), Mephisto (Penguin). The erotic novels of Thomas Mann's son were long banned; he now appears as a remarkable individual voice in his own right. His vivid descriptions of the Berlin underworld in the former strongly influenced Isherwood, while Mephisto is a striking roman à clef about an actor who sells his soul to the Nazi party.

Thomas Mann The Magic Mountain (Minerva/Random House). Generally considered the author's masterpiece, this is a weighty novel of ideas discussing love, death, politics and war through a collection of characters in a Swiss sanatorium, whose sickness mirrors that of European society as a whole. Buddenbrooks (Minerva/Random House) is the story of a merchant dynasty in the author's native Lübeck; Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man (Minerva/Random House) is the great comic novel of German literature; Lotte in Weimar (Minerva/Random House) is a brilliant evocation of Weimar in the era of Goethe; while Doctor Faustus (Minerva/Random House) updates the Faust legend through the story of a twentieth-century German composer.

Erich Maria Remarque All Quiet on the Western Front (Picador/Fawcett). The classic German novel of World War I, focusing on the traumatic impact of the conflict on the life of an ordinary soldier. Three Comrades (Fawcett Columbine) explores the theme of friendship in the uncertain atmosphere of late 1920s Germany.

Herbert Rosendorfer The Architect of Ruins (Dedalus). This, the first and best novel of one of Germany's most admired contemporary writers, is an amusing, dreamlike work consisting of a series of stories within stories. The Night of the Amazons (Minerva) is a black comedy about Nazi Germany, while Stephanie (Dedalus) narrates a German housewife's trips back in time to her previous existence as an eighteenth-century Spanish duchess.

Bernhard Schlink The Reader (Phoenix/Pantheon). The most widely praised German-language novel of recent years, this is a Holocaust book with a difference, based around the postwar love story of the narrator and an older woman. Written in spare, taut prose, it deals with the great themes of guilt, atonement, redemption, forgiveness and conscience with extraordinary power and economy of means.

Peter Schneider The Wall Jumper (Allison & Busby/Pantheon). A series of vignettes about the Berlin Wall: about those who crossed it (in both directions), and about the two different states of mind it induced. Although billed as fiction, much of it is clearly autobiographical and factual, albeit larded with a few hoaxes.

W.G. Sebald The Emigrants (Harvill). Billed as a work of fiction - notwithstanding the inclusion of numerous old photographs as evidence of its factual basis - this is a haunting lament for the vanished Jewish culture of Germany, illustrated through the lives of four exiles.

Anna Seghers The Seventh Cross (Monthly Review Press). Now rather a neglected figure, Seghers was one of the literary stalwarts of the GDR. This, her best-known novel, is a stirring wartime adventure story about a Communist on the run from the Nazi prison camps.

Kurt Tucholsky Germany? Germany! (Carcanet). A reader drawn from the writings of the sharpest German satirist of the century. The outrageously witty monologues of the complacent Jewish businessman Herr Wendriner are chillingly prophetic.

Jakob Wassermann Caspar Hauser (Penguin). A masterly exposition of the theme of innocence betrayed, this novel is the finest of the many books inspired by the true story of the famous foundling. The Maurizius Case (Carroll & Graf) is a weighty novel about the pursuit of justice.

Christa Wolf A Model Childhood (Virago/Farrar, Straus & Giroux). The author gained a reputation for literary integrity, despite her loyalty to the GDR. This book is a fictionalized account of her own youth in Bavaria in the 1930s, providing an excellent portrait of a child's confrontation with Nazi ideas and the shattering disillusionment that came from facing the truth as an adult.

Anon Carmina Burana (Penguin). A wonderful collection of (originally) dog-Latin songs and poems from thirteenth-century Bavaria. In spite of their monastic origin, the texts are often bawdy and erotic. Many were used by Carl Orff in his choral showpiece named after the manuscript.

Bertolt Brecht Poems (Eyre Methuen/Time Warner). Brecht's poems have worn far better than his plays. They sound even more inspired when heard in the musical settings provided by Kurt Weill and the more ideologically inspired Paul Dessau and Hans Eisler. Many recordings are available of these - the best are by Lotte Lenya (CBS), Ute