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This article is part of our Summer reads series. Visit our collection to discover “The Economist reads” guides, guest essays and more seasonal distractions.
As war rages again in eastern Europe, Germans are reminded of the ravages of the world wars and the horrors of the Nazi and communist regimes that governed their country. Olaf Scholz, the chancellor, says the post-war order, the longest period of uninterrupted peace the heart of Europe has ever known, is under threat. Opinion polls suggest that many Germans are fearful Europe could be on the brink of an even broader war. This selection of novels and films, all available in English, helps to explain how Germans saw the troubled 20th century. The works of fiction span the two world wars and two dictatorships that shaped Germany.
Rheinsberg: A Storybook for Lovers. By Kurt Tucholsky. Translated by Cindy Opitz. Berlinica; 96 pages; $12.95 and £12
“Tucho”, or Kurt Tucholsky, is an author much loved in Germany for his wit and sparkling writing, but he is known to few readers outside the country. “Rheinsberg”, a novella, was the journalist’s breakout success in 1912. It recounts the journey of an unmarried couple from Berlin to Rheinsberg, a palace in Brandenburg that was once the home of Frederick the Great. The light-hearted story seemingly relates little of significance, as the pair stroll, chat and make love. Yet it captures the spirit of what seemed to have been an innocent period, predating the tragedies of the decades that would soon follow. The simple plot draws heavily on Tucholsky’s own experience of a similar outing with Else Weil, his girlfriend. “A satirist,” Tucholsky wrote in 1919, “is an offended idealist.” At the time that he wrote, the author was still an idealist, although he was far from being a settled soul and was in the process of abandoning his Jewish faith and becoming a Protestant Christian. In 1935, in exile in Sweden, he committed suicide.
Mephisto. By Klaus Mann. Translated by Robin Smyth. Penguin; 272 pages; $16 and £9.99
The novel, published in 1936 by one of the six children of Thomas Mann, drew from the real-life biography of Gustaf Gründgens, Klaus Mann’s brother-in-law. In the book Gründgens becomes Hendrik Höfgen, an actor who sheds his principles and chooses to promote his career under the Nazi regime, akin to Mephisto selling his soul to the devil in Goethe’s opus. The Nazis banned it. An award-winning film by Istvan Szabo with Klaus Maria Brandauer playing Höfgen was released in 1981. Klaus Mann denied that “Mephisto” was aimed at anyone in particular, but Gründgens’s family blocked its publication in West Germany until 1981.
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Babylon Berlin. Available on Netflix in America and NowTV in Britain
A lavish German television series, Babylon Berlin is set in the Weimar Germany of the 1920s. It is a detective story that follows Gereon Rath, a police detective who moves from Cologne to Berlin, and Charlotte Ritter, an occasional prostitute and aspiring detective. The two of them wade through the Berlin underworld in pursuit of criminals, in the shadow of darkening politics. In the background are right-wing conspirators, combative communists and the Jewish bourgeoisie. It is both a thrilling whodunnit and a shocking portrait of Weimar Germany. We reviewed the series in 2017 and took a broader look at Weimer as a point of cultural reference with an article in 2018.
Never Look Away. Available on Amazon and iTunes
This film, a three-hour work, follows the life of a fictional artist, Kurt Barnert, from his Dresden childhood in the 1930s to his success in western Germany in the 1960s. The film is based loosely on the biography of Gerhard Richter, a painter and photographer. German critics found the film kitschy and its representation of women reactionary; they also questioned its depiction, on grounds of taste, of the suffering of Germans under Allied bombing. But international critics loved how it showed the budding artist’s increasing awareness that appearances are ambiguous. He is told to “never look away”. He keeps watching even when his beloved artistic aunt is carted off to a psychiatric hospital by the Nazis. We interviewed the director, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, in 2019.
Visitation. By Jenny Erpenbeck. New Directions; 192 pages; $15.95. Granta Books; £8.99
Jenny Erpenbeck was born in East Berlin in 1967. Her novel is written with the house of her grandparents in mind: theirs was a home on the banks of a lake in Brandenburg, near Berlin. The story spans much of Germany’s recent history, from the 19th century through the Weimar Republic, Nazi and communist regimes and, finally, reunification, it recounts the lives of 12 people who occupy the house for varying periods. They come and go. Only the house, and its taciturn gardener, remain constant. In 2017 we reviewed a different book by the same author.
The Collini Case. By Ferdinand von Schirach. Penguin; 208 pages; $17 and £8.99
Baldur von Schirach was the head of the Hitler Youth. His grandson, Ferdinand von Schirach, wrote this bestselling novel in 2011, which was subsequently made into a successful film. The book is a striking combination of Germany’s dark history and a courtroom drama that recounts the story of Fabrizio Collini, a retiree who murders a prominent industrialist in a hotel in Berlin. Caspar Leinen, a rookie lawyer who works on the case, is taken aback when Collini admits to the killing but refuses to speak about horrors of the past that could explain his motive. ■
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Our correspondent has written various articles about Germany’s tycoons and their difficult relationships with the past.
