The Best 21st-Century German Novels

You’ve chosen five of your favourite 21st-century German novels. What do you think distinguishes the most recent novels written in German?

There’s always been a fondness in the Anglophone world for historical novels translated from German, and traditionally they’ve tended to be about the Second World War. But I think that German novels are becoming much more diverse and interesting. As Germany has come to accept that it is a country that many people immigrate to, we’re getting a lot of exciting writing out of that.

Let’s start with Where You Come From, by Saša Stanišić. Could you tell me a little bit more about this book?

Saša Stanišić is originally from what is now Bosnia. In this very playful, contradictory novel, he explores a story about a grandmother who’s losing herself while her grandson is trying to work out how he feels about his childhood in what was Yugoslavia as well as Germany. When he goes back to present-day Bosnia, he’s working through how he feels about that place. It’s happy and sad, so it’s a little bit bittersweet, and the ending is a fantastic surprise.

Who would you recommend this book for?

This one is for people who like learning languages! Stanišić has a lot of fun with languages and pokes fun at nationalisms. There are even dragons. The translation by Damion Searls is so fun to read. You can tell that he enjoyed every minute of it, and he embraced the possibilities that English has for playing with language.

The next novel you’re recommending, Glorious People, is by Sasha Marianna Salzmann, who was born in Volgograd in the former Soviet Union.

This is very much a story about the effects of world history writ large on everyday lives. It’s about two generations of women from the Soviet Union, the area that is now occupied Donbas. Protagonists Lena and Tatiana both end up in a fairly conservative Russian-speaking community in Germany. Their daughters attempt to break away and live their own lives as they want. We get Lena and Tatiana’s stories in multiple voices, and they have these very messy lives. This is a book about socialism and the ideals connected to it, corruption, and various inherited traumas. It’s a TARDIS of a book, not at all long—just bigger on the inside than the outside. Imogen Taylor’s translation style really cuts through the language and is very precise.

The book has a glorious cover image of a girl at the beach in summer. Young Pioneer summer camps!

Yes. Sasha Salzmann immediately removes the temptation of a romanticised, nostalgic view of the Eastern Bloc. We’ve come far enough since 1989 and the breakdown of communism that people can see it for what it was—the positive sides, as well as the constraints on people’s freedom that made it far from a utopia.

Next, you’re recommending Ada’s Realm by Sharon Dodua Otoo, a British writer who now lives in Berlin.

This book really stretches how writing works. It’s got sentient objects that are both waiting and intervening in the action—as far as a door knocker can do so—to bring about justice over many, many hundreds of years.

The story encompasses four loops in history: from the very beginning of colonial Ghana, then we loop into Victorian London, and a Nazi concentration camp, and present-day Berlin. All the novel’s protagonists are reincarnations of one woman called Ada, they’re all dealing with pregnancy, and there’s one particular object that ties them all together. It’s beautifully written with multiple voices and languages, sensitively translated by Jon Cho-Polizzi.

What most surprised you about this book?

The notion that a room or a doorknocker can tell a story—I’d never read anything like it before. It’s absurd, but it also makes total sense in context.

The next book you’re recommending is In the Belly of the Queen by Karosh Taha.

The novel tells two versions of the same story, both set in the Kurdish diasporic community in present-day Germany. Shahira is a single mother who serves as sort of a blank canvas for all her neighbors. They project all sorts of things onto her. We have two teenage protagonists, and in each case, they’re Shahira’s son’s best friend. In one version of the story, the teenager is a boy, and then we flip the book on its head, and in the alternate reality of the other version, the best friend is a girl. The boy is in love with Shahira and the girl really wants to be her.

In each of these two versions, we have narrators with different voices and different mental worlds, different circumstances, different expectations, and yet they have the same setting with the same cast of characters around them.

It’s fun because you get to turn the book upside down and start again. There’s no beginning, no order in which you’re supposed to read it. You can just decide. I love that experimentation. I think it works really well.

The setting of the novel is almost claustrophobic—could you describe it a little more?

There’s a café, a minimart, and the post office, so it’s almost like the set of a soap opera on which all the characters can meet and have a dialogue. It’s slightly unrealistic in that all the characters who live there are Kurdish. And everyone is watching all the time: literally, they’re looking out of the windows of their tower blocks and watching a lot of the action, and figuratively, everybody’s got their eyes on each other.

Let’s talk about Monsters Like Us, by Ulrike Almut Sandig. What would you like to say about the book?

This is another novel set in the former Eastern Bloc, but this time in East Germany (the German Democratic Republic), where author Ulrike Almut Sandig is from. It’s a part of the country that was and still is dug up for open-cast coal mining. The novel is about state violence as well as private violence within the family, and what they do to Ruth and Victor, the girl and boy experiencing them. There’s a horror beneath the children’s otherwise idyllic childhood memories. Ruth immerses herself to an unhealthy extent in music while her friend Victor becomes a neo-Nazi. It’s very topical. This was quite a common thing after the end of communism in East Germany—there was a wave of neo-Nazi violence in the 90s, reflective of that fearful atmosphere at the time—and we’re seeing that rise again now.

Ulrike Almut Sandig is also a poet. I’m not the only translator who loves prose written by poets because of the precision and thoughtfulness behind their language and this is a beautiful example. Karen Leeder translates both Sandig’s poetry and her prose incredibly well because she really knows the writer.

Finally, I’ve got to ask: you very modestly didn’t choose a single novel you translated, but have you got a personal favourite that you translated recently?

Yes, and it’s another book about violence in East Germany. Clemens Meyer’s While We Were Dreaming is about a group of boys who are friends in Leipzig in the mid-to-late 80s under socialism. As the system collapses, many things go wrong for them. It’s about friendship, and violence, and techno, and being let loose on a city in which the structure has disappeared.

So a coming-of-age story of sorts. Could you say more about the Leipzig setting?

It couldn’t have been set anywhere else. We get scenes in junkyards and abandoned factories. There’s a whole part of town that feels like it’s ruled by squatters, and a lot of neo-Nazis.

It also has these little details of life in East Germany: when the protagonist lives with his mum, for instance, there’s a shower in the kitchen. They don’t have a separate bathroom, so someone has installed a shower next to the sink. That’s not surprising to anybody reading it in Germany who was alive in the 90s—I had a shower in my kitchen once, too—but it was hard to translate without making it sound completely bizarre.

I can certainly see some thematic resonances across all these books.

Yes. One thing many of these novelists do is to take a historical subject and follow its characters all the way up to the present day. There’s a wish to explore the recent past in living memory and to ask, ‘What on earth has it done to us? How are our lives shaped by what came before?’ I also notice a kind of joy in slightly chaotic patterns and a willingness to experiment that’s common to all these novelists. We’re starting to understand intergenerational trauma better: a terrible thing per se, but fruitful for fiction.