“I, the Flounder, was there when it began. And I was there when it ended.” The Flounder by Günter Grass is a sprawling, mythic novel that intertwines history, […]
German literature
Dog Years
“Memory likes to play hide-and-seek, to crawl away. It tends to hold forth, to dress up, often needlessly. Memory contradicts itself; pedant that it is, it will have […]
German literature
Cat and Mouse
“And so it began, with the cat and the mouse, and with the boy who couldn’t keep his hands off his Adam’s apple.” Chapter 1: The Incident at […]
German literature
The Tin Drum
“Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there’s a peephole in the door, […]
German literature
The Aesthetics of Resistance
“We had to learn to see differently, to think differently, to resist differently.” Volume 1: The Underground Struggle The novel opens in 1937 Berlin, where a group of […]
German literature
Marat/Sade
“The important thing is to pull yourself up by your own hair. To turn yourself inside out and see the whole world with fresh eyes.” Marat/Sade (full title: […]
German literature
The Investigation
“We are the witnesses. We are the ones who must speak.” Prologue The book opens with a stark depiction of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials (1963–1965), where survivors, perpetrators, […]
German literature
Olga
“She had always been alone, and she had always been strong.” Part One: Olga’s Childhood and Youth The novel begins with Olga’s early life in late 19th-century Prussia. […]
German literature
Homecoming
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Chapter 1: Peter Debauer’s Childhood Peter Debauer grows up in post-war Germany, raised by his mother and grandparents. His […]
German literature
The Reader
“The pain I went through because of my love for Hanna was, in a way, the fate of my generation, a German fate.” Part One The novel opens […]