Books from Germany

1
All Quiet on the Western Front
Thomas Mann
German soldier Paul Bäumer narrates his experiences in the trenches of World War I, watching his classmates die one by one. Mann's pacifist novel was banned and burned by the Nazis; it sold over 2.5 million copies in its first year.
1929
2
The Tin Drum
Günter Grass
Oskar Matzerath, who decides at age three to stop growing, narrates the history of Danzig and Germany through the Nazi era from his bed in a psychiatric hospital. The opening novel of Grass's Danzig Trilogy won the Nobel Prize.
1959
3
Siddhartha
Hermann Hesse
A young Brahmin in ancient India leaves home to seek spiritual enlightenment, passing through asceticism, worldly pleasure, and commerce before finding peace by a river. Hesse's lyrical distillation of Buddhist and Hindu thought.
1922
4
Steppenwolf
Hermann Hesse
Harry Haller, a middle-aged intellectual who sees himself as half-man and half-wolf, encounters the enigmatic Hermine in a city's bars and dance halls and is drawn into a magic theatre of the mind. Hesse's most controversial and celebrated novel.
1927
5
Buddenbrooks
Thomas Mann
The decline of a wealthy merchant family in Lübeck over four generations as bourgeois values give way to artistic temperament and physical decay. Mann's debut novel, written when he was 25, won him the Nobel Prize in 1929.
1901
6
Death in Venice
Thomas Mann
A celebrated German writer travels to Venice for rest and becomes obsessed with the beauty of a Polish boy, Tadzio, even as cholera sweeps through the city. One of the most formally perfect novellas in German literature.
1912
7
The Magic Mountain
Thomas Mann
Young Hans Castorp visits his cousin at a Swiss tuberculosis sanatorium for three weeks and stays for seven years, engaging in intellectual and philosophical debates with other patients as Europe drifts toward war. Mann's most ambitious novel.
1924