German Classics

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Goethe's tragedy about the scholar Faust, who makes a pact with the devil Mephisto. It is regarded as the greatest work of German literature.

💡 Did you know? Goethe worked on the material for over 60 years: almost his entire life.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

An epistolary novel about a young man who despairs over unrequited love. It made Goethe famous across Europe overnight.

💡 Did you know? The book set off a fashion craze and allegedly even a wave of copycat suicides.

Friedrich Schiller

Schiller's drama about the Swiss freedom hero who defies a tyrant and shoots an apple off his son's head.

💡 Did you know? The famous German line ‘Durch diese hohle Gasse muss er kommen’ comes from this play.

Friedrich Schiller

Schiller's first drama about two rival brothers: an outcry against injustice and tyranny.

💡 Did you know? At the 1782 premiere, spectators are said to have fainted from emotion.

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

A drama of ideas about religious tolerance at the time of the Crusades, famous for its ‘ring parable’.

💡 Did you know? The ring parable argues that no single religion has an exclusive claim to the truth.

E. T. A. Hoffmann

An eerie tale of dark Romanticism about madness, automatons and the fear of the eye-stealing Sandman.

💡 Did you know? Sigmund Freud later used the story as a prime example of ‘the uncanny’.

Franz Kafka

Gregor Samsa wakes one morning transformed into a giant insect: one of the most famous stories of modernism.

💡 Did you know? Its opening sentence is one of the best-known first lines in world literature.

Franz Kafka

Josef K. is arrested without ever learning why: a nightmare of impenetrable bureaucracy.

💡 Did you know? The novel was left unfinished and published only after Kafka's death: against his wishes.

Theodor Fontane

A social novel about a young woman who is broken by the rigid conventions of the Prussian aristocracy.

💡 Did you know? ‘That is too vast a subject’ is her father's famous evasive line.

Thomas Mann

The decline of a wealthy merchant family from Lübeck over four generations.

💡 Did you know? Thomas Mann received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929 largely for this novel.

Thomas Mann

Hans Castorp visits a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Alps and stays for seven years.

💡 Did you know? Time passes so strangely in the sanatorium that the novel itself becomes a meditation on time.

Erich Maria Remarque

A harrowing anti-war novel from the perspective of a young soldier in the First World War.

💡 Did you know? The Nazis publicly burned the book in 1933.

Günter Grass

At the age of three, Oskar Matzerath decides to stop growing and drums his way through German history.

💡 Did you know? Günter Grass later received the Nobel Prize in Literature, in part for this work.

Hermann Hesse

The inner conflict of the loner Harry Haller, torn between bourgeois life and wildness.

💡 Did you know? A famous rock band named itself after this novel.

Bernhard Schlink

A teenager begins an affair with an older woman whose past catches up with him years later.

💡 Did you know? The novel became known worldwide and was filmed in 2008 with Kate Winslet.

Friedrich Dürrenmatt

A tragicomedy set in a psychiatric clinic about the responsibility of science in the atomic age.

💡 Did you know? Three physicists pretend to be mad: but nothing is as it seems.

Friedrich Dürrenmatt

An immensely rich old lady returns to her impoverished home town and offers a fortune, for a murder.

💡 Did you know? The play is a bitter parable about how people can be bought.

Michael Ende

A girl takes on the grey ‘time thieves’ who steal people's lifetime.

💡 Did you know? The book remains a popular critique of haste and the pressure of time.

Michael Ende

The boy Bastian becomes part of the fantasy realm of Fantastica while reading.

💡 Did you know? In the original, the text is printed in two colours: one for the real world, one for the fantasy world.

Max Frisch

A rational engineer is drawn by a chain of coincidences into a tragic entanglement with fate.

💡 Did you know? The engineer believes only in technology and statistics: until life teaches him otherwise.

Alfred Döblin

The journey of ex-convict Franz Biberkopf through the seething Berlin of the 1920s.

💡 Did you know? The novel captures the noise of the metropolis in a collage-like, modernist style.

Patrick Süskind

A man with a superhuman sense of smell in 18th-century Paris becomes a murderer in search of the perfect scent.

💡 Did you know? The novel has been translated into over 40 languages and sold millions of copies worldwide.