Translated from the German, this is a substantial book on the man who led Europe out of the Napoleonic chaos; the father of realpolitik, according to Kissinger.
Half a century before Owen Jones's 'Grammar of Ornament' (1856), Freiherr zu Racknitz produced this survey of twenty-four different styles, some historical, some contemporary, the predictabl... read more
Stunning monograph covering all 6 decades of Richter's career. AZ is a German art historian with books on Barnett Newman, Anselm Kiefer, Jackson Pollock et al.
The stupendous and vaulting 'Symphony of a Thousand', first performed in Munich in 1910 to huge acclaim, and its effect on those around the composer: Berg and Schoenberg, Korngold, Bruno Wal... read more
A companion volume to his Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician (pbk £25), tracing Bach's evolution as a composer and looking deeply into his creative process.
The author of 'East West Street' examines the life of Otto von Wachter, the SS Governor of Galicia, who was indicted for mass murder in 1945 and went to ground in the Austrian Alps.
When the author makes an impulsive trip to Koenigsberg, her grandmother - after sixty years' silence on the matter - begins to tell her own wartime story. Deeply moving.
NB Publication ... read more
A haunting and complex novel in which a British man discovers that his German grandfather fought on the Eastern Front, from a letter that he leaves on his death.
On a Greek island in 1977, Calista finds herself working for Billy Wilder on a film. His career is on the wane, and she's a young woman with a lot to learn...
As a war photographer and his driver travel through Germany in late 1945, it becomes apparent that they have different reasons for wanting to be there.
The tale of Cheeseman, a seedy small-time crooner who is bizarrely catapulted to fame by the media machine. First published in 1931, its success caused the author to leave Germany; she died ... read more
If you want to read one book about inequality and its ramifications for all societies, now and in the past, let it be this. By a former Pulitzer winner.
Focuses on the lives of six individuals and their families who were among the 20 million Germans who never voted for the Nazis. This is an important new assessment of those who had to manage... read more
Long anticipated voyage through the overlapping currents of nature, life and art. PH won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Leviathan, or The Whale; here he attempts to answer why Durer's art endu... read more
1940s rocket-science sci-fi: a Nazi politician is lured into collaborating with the American space programme... what follows is a clever, satirical exploration of morality and technological ... read more
The fascinating story of a language known as 'Rotwelsch', associated with vagabonds - linked to Yiddish and Romani - that the author learned from his father and uncle. His grandfather, a Naz... read more
SM's parents were German Jewish refugees; he was raised a Catholic and forbidden to identify as Jewish or German or British. His maternal aunts concealed their origins too and had very diffe... read more
As a young man in Germany, AW's grandfather published Kafka and several other depraved authors whose work the Nazis were keen to burn. He fled in 1933, eventually settling in New York where ... read more
Blaschka père et fils were from Bohemia but moved to Dresden, where they worked in glass from the mid-1800s to the 1930s, making intricate models of sea anemones, medusas, corals and starfi... read more
The choices made by five women, all of whom experienced the fall of the Berlin Wall in their teens, and now grapple with different kinds of freedom. This has been a huge success in Germany.
Set in 1943, and first published in German in 1968, this is the story of a young boy torn between loyalties for his father, a police officer, and his friend Max Ludwig Nansen, an Expressioni... read more
Explores the interaction of mass-market diamonds and German colonialism in Africa. Or how the new American fashion for diamond engagement rings funded Germany in two world wars.
It is 30 years since Hazel Holt's biography; many more since David Cecil and Philip Larkin championed her novels. The surprise, perhaps, is that she is read more now than when she first publ... read more
Marzahn is a suburb of prefab GDR housing on the outskirts of Berlin. This odd but brilliant book, about a chiropodist who talks to her clients, is both memoir and portrait of modern Germany... read more
A powerful novel set in the closing stages of WW2, in which a 12-year-old girl escapes to the German countryside with her mother and older sister. Translated from the German.
Incredible though it seems, in the closing years of the GDR the Stasi trained operatives to become poets in order to infiltrate literary circles. Years of sleuthing has yielded this remarkab... read more