From Nobel Prize winners to a book burned by the Nazis, this list takes a whistlestop tour through Germany's most influential books and authors. In Die Blechtrommel, Oskar Matzerath narrates his life story from a mental hospital in the early s. A photo posted by aboyscloset aboyscloset on May 26, at am PDT. Gustav von Aschenbach is a famous writer who takes a summer holiday in Venice. During one dinner, he notices an exceptionally beautiful adolescent boy.
He becomes obsessed from a distance, shutting out the ominous news of a danger spreading through the city. In the late s, year-old West German Michael Berg finds himself in a passionate but secret love affair with a woman who is over 20 years his senior, leaving him confused yet enthralled.
As a law student several years later, he is observing a trial when he realizes that the woman in the dock is his former lover. But the woman on trial is a very different person to the one he thought he knew. In , it became the first ever German book to top the New York Times bestseller list, and Kate Winslet won an Oscar for her performance in the film adaptation. The book has however come in for staunch criticism, as critics claim it encourages identification with the perpetrators of the Holocaust.
Remarque was himself a veteran of the war, and he wrote and published the book a decade after its conclusion. The novel zooms in to the daily life of a private soldier, detailing both the violence of battle and the mundaneness of life on the front. Published in , it quickly received international acclaim, being translated into 22 different languages and selling 2.
A photo posted by Nia. Whereas most good novels manage to conjure up images in your head, Das Parfum also conjures up scents and smells that waft up from the page.
