German Authors/playwrights And Works

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De-Johann_Wolfgang_von_Goethe.ogg Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 28 August 1749 – 22 March 1832)

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a German writer and according to George Eliot, "Germany's greatest man of letters… and the last true polymath to walk the earth."[2] Goethe's works span the fields of poetry, drama, literature, theology, humanism and science. Goethe's magnum opus, lauded as one of the peaks of world literature, is the two-part drama Faust.[3] Goethe's other well-known literary works include his numerous poems, the Bildungsroman Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and the epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther.

Goethe is the originator of the concept of Weltliteratur ("world literature"), having taken great interest in the literatures of England, France, Italy, classical Greece, Persia, Arabic literature, amongst others. His influence on German philosophy is virtually immeasurable, having major effect especially on the generation of Hegel and Schelling, although Goethe himself expressly and decidedly refrained from practicing philosophy in the rarefied sense.

Goethe's influence spread across Europe, and for the next century his works were a major source of inspiration in music, drama, poetry and philosophy. Goethe is considered by many to be the most important writer in the German language and one of the most important thinkers in Western culture as well. Early in his career, however, he wondered whether painting might not be his true vocation; late in his life, he expressed the expectation that he would ultimately be remembered above all for his work in colour.

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The Sorrows of Young Werther (Die Leiden des jungen Werthers) is an epistolary and loosely autobiographical novel by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, first published in 1774; a revised edition of the novel was published in 1787. Werther was an important novel of the Sturm und Drang period in German literature, and it also influenced the later Romantic literary movement.

The book made Goethe one of the first true international literary celebrities. Toward the end of his life, a personal visit to Weimar became crucial to any young man's tour of Europe.

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The majority of The Sorrows of Young Werther is presented as a collection of letters written by Werther, a young artist of highly sensitive and passionate temperament, and sent to his friend Wilhelm.

In these letters, Werther gives a very intimate account of his stay in the fictional village of Wahlheim (based on the town of Garbenheim, near Wetzlar). He is enchanted by the simple ways of the peasants there. He meets and falls instantly in love with Charlotte, a beautiful young girl who is taking care of her siblings following the death of their mother. Charlotte is, however, already engaged to a man named Albert, who is in fact 11 years her senior.

Despite the pain this causes Werther, he spends the next few months cultivating a close friendship with both of them. His pain eventually becomes so great that he is forced to leave and go to Weimar. While he is away, he makes the acquaintance of Fräulein von B. He suffers a great embarrassment when he forgetfully visits a friend on the day when the entire aristocratic set normally meets there. He returns to Wahlheim after this, where he suffers more than he did before, partially because Charlotte and Albert are now married. Every day serves as a torturous reminder that Charlotte will never be able to requite his love. Out of pity for her friend and respect for her husband, Lotte comes to the decision that Werther must not visit her so frequently. He visits her one final time, and they are both overcome with emotion after Werther's recitation of a portion of "Ossian".

Werther had realized even before this incident that one of them—Charlotte, Albert, or Werther himself—had to die. Unable to hurt anyone else or seriously consider committing murder, Werther sees no other choice but to take his own life. After composing a farewell letter (to be found after he commits suicide), he writes to Albert asking for his two pistols, under a pretense that he is going "on a journey." Lotte receives the request with great emotion and sends the pistols. Werther then shoots himself in the head, but doesn't expire until 12 hours after he has shot himself. He is buried under a linden tree, a tree he talks about frequently in his letters, and the funeral was not attended by clergymen, Albert or his beloved Charlotte.

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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust is a tragic play. It was published in two parts: Faust: der Tragödie erster Teil (translated as: Faust: The Tragedy Part One) and Faust: der Tragödie zweiter Teil (Faust: The Tragedy Part Two). The play is a closet drama, meaning that it is meant to be read rather than performed. It is Goethe's most famous work and considered by many to be one of the greatest works of German literature.

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The principal characters of Faust Part One include:

* Heinrich Faust, a scholar, sometimes said to be based on the real life of Johann Georg Faust, or on Jacob Bidermann's dramatized account of the Legend of the Doctor of Paris, Cenodoxus
* Mephistopheles, a Devil
* Gretchen, Faust's love (short for Margaret; Goethe uses both forms)
* Marthe, Gretchen's neighbor
* Valentin, Gretchen's brother
* Wagner, Faust's famulus

Faust Part One is a complex story. It takes place in multiple settings, the first of which is heaven. Mephistopheles makes a bet with God: he says that he can deflect God's favorite human being (Faust), who is striving to learn everything that can be known, away from righteous pursuits. The next scene takes place in Faust's study where Faust, despairing at the vanity of scientific, humanitarian and religious learning, turns to magic for the showering of infinite knowledge. He suspects, however, that his attempts are failing. Frustrated, he ponders suicide, but rejects it as he hears the echo of nearby Easter celebrations begin. He goes for a walk with his assistant Wagner and is followed home by a stray poodle.

In Faust's study, the poodle transforms into the devil (Mephistopheles). Faust makes an arrangement with the devil: the devil will do everything that Faust wants while he is here on earth, and in exchange Faust will serve the devil in Hell. Faust's arrangement is that if during the time while Mephistopheles is serving Faust, Faust is so pleased with anything the devil gives him that he wants to stay in that moment forever, he will die in that instant.

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Faust: Part Two
Goethe finished writing Faust Part Two in 1832, the year of his death. In contrast to Faust Part One, the focus here is no longer on the soul of Faust, which has been sold to the devil, but rather on social phenomena such as psychology, history and politics. The second part formed the principal occupation of Goethe's last years and appeared only posthumously in 1832.

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Rich in classical allusion, in Faust Part Two, the romantic story of the first Faust is forgotten, and Faust wakes in a field of fairies to initiate a new cycle of adventures and purpose. The piece consists of five acts (relatively isolated episodes) each representing a different theme. Ultimately, Faust goes to heaven, for he loses only half of the bet. Angels, who arrive as messengers of divine mercy, declare at the end of Act V: "He who strives on and lives to strive/ Can earn redemption still" (V, 11936-7).

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Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (German: Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre) is the second novel by Johann Wolfgang Goethe, published in 1795-96.

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While his first novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, featured a hero driven to suicide by despair, the eponymous hero of this novel undergoes a journey of self-realization. The story centers upon Wilhelm's attempt to escape what he views as the empty life of a bourgeois businessman. After a failed romance with the theater, Wilhelm commits himself to the mysterious Tower Society comprised of enlightened aristocrats who will guide him towards his true calling.

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Wilhelm Meister's Journeyman Years, or the Renunciants,[1] is the fourth novel by German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and the sequel to the Bildungsroman Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre) (1795-96). Though initially conceived during the 1790s, the first edition did not appear until 1821, and the second edition—differing substantially from the first—in 1829.

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The novel was greeted by mixed reviews in the 1820s, and did not gain full critical attention until the mid-20th century. Consisting largely of discrete short stories and novellas woven together with elements of the epistolary novel, lengthy sections of aphorisms, and several interspersed poems, the structure of this novel challenged the novel form as commonly practiced at the time of its publication.

A major theme running through the various parts of the novel is that of "Entsagung," translatable as "renunciation." The most famous section of the novel is probably the episode in which the protagonist and his son Felix visit the "Pedagogical Province."

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Bertolt Brecht
10 February 1898–14 August 1956)

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a German poet, playwright, and theatre director. An influential theatre practitioner of the twentieth century, Brecht made equally significant contributions to dramaturgy and theatrical production, the latter particularly through the seismic impact of the tours undertaken by the Berliner Ensemble—the post-war theatre company operated by Brecht and his wife and long-time collaborator, the actress Helene Weigel—with its internationally acclaimed productions.[1]

From his late twenties Brecht remained a life-long committed Marxist who, in developing the combined theory and practice of his 'epic theatre', synthesized and extended the experiments of Erwin Piscator and Vsevolod Meyerhold to explore the theatre as a forum for political ideas and the creation of a critical aesthetics of dialectical materialism. Brecht's modernist concern with drama-as-a-medium led to his refinement of the 'epic form' of the drama. This dramatic form is related to similar modernist innovations in other arts, including the strategy of divergent chapters in James Joyce's novel Ulysses, Sergei Eisenstein's evolution of a constructivist 'montage' in the cinema, and Picasso's introduction of cubist 'collage' in the visual arts.

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The Threepenny Opera (German: Die Dreigroschenoper) is a musical by German dramatist Bertolt Brecht and composer Kurt Weill, in collaboration with translator Elisabeth Hauptmann and set designer Caspar Neher.[1] It was adapted from an 18th-century English ballad opera, John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, and offers a Marxist critique of the capitalist world.[2] It opened on 31 August 1928 at Berlin's Theater am Schiffbauerdamm.

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Set in a marginally-anachronistic Victorian London, the play focuses on Macheath, an amoral, anti-heroic criminal.

Macheath (Mackie Messer, or Mack the Knife) marries Polly Peachum. This displeases her father, who controls the beggars of London, and he endeavours to have Macheath hanged. His attempts are hindered by the fact that the Chief of Police, Tiger Brown, is Macheath's childhood friend. Still, Peachum exerts his influence and eventually gets Macheath arrested and sentenced to hang. Macheath escapes this fate via a deus ex machina moments before the execution when, in an unrestrained parody of a happy ending, a messenger from the Queen to pardon Macheath and grant him the title of Baron.

The Threepenny Opera is a work of epic theatre—slogans are projected on the back wall and the characters sometimes carry picket-signs. It challenges conventional notions of property as well as those of theatre. It dramatises the question: "Who is the greater criminal: he who robs a bank or he who founds one?" The Threepenny Opera is also an early example of the modern musical comedy genre.

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Life of Galileo (Leben des Galilei), also known as Galileo, is a play by the twentieth-century German dramatist Bertolt Brecht. The first version of the play was written between 1937 and 1939

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Galileo is short of money. A prospective student tells Galileo about a novel invention, the telescope ("a queer tube thing"), being sold in Amsterdam. Galileo replicates it, but then sells it to the Venetian Republic as his own creation.

Galileo uses the telescope to substantiate Copernicus' heliocentric model of our solar system, which is highly incompatible with both popular belief and church doctrine. His daughter's marriage to a well-off young man (with whom she is genuinely in love) fails because of Galileo's reluctance to distance himself from his unorthodox teachings.

Galileo is brought to the Vatican for interrogation. Upon being threatened with torture, he recants his teachings. His students are shocked by his surrender in the face of pressure from the church authorities.

Galileo, old and broken, living under house arrest, is visited by one of his former pupils, Andrea. Galileo gives him a book containing all his scientific discoveries, asking him to smuggle it out of Italy for dissemination abroad. Andrea now believes Galileo's actions were heroic and that he just recanted to fool the ecclesiastical authorities. However, Galileo insists his actions had nothing to do with heroism but were merely the result of self-interest.

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Mother Courage and Her Children (German: Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder) is a play written in 1939 by the German dramatist and poet Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) with significant contributions from Margarete Steffin

Mother Courage is considered by some to be the greatest play of the 20th century, and perhaps also the greatest anti-war play of all time.

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Following Brecht's own principles for political drama, the play is not set in modern times but during the Thirty Years' War of 1618–1648. It follows the fortunes of Anna Fierling, nicknamed "Mother Courage", a wily canteen woman with the Swedish Army who is determined to make her living from the war. Over the course of the play, she loses all three of her children, Swiss Cheese, Eilif, and Kattrin, to the same war from which she sought to profit.

Mother Courage is an example of Brecht's concepts of Epic Theatre and Verfremdungseffekt

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The Good Person of Szechwan
by Bertolt Brecht
first performed in 1943

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The play opens with Wong, a water carrier, explaining to the audience that he is on the city outskirts awaiting the foretold appearance of several important gods. Soon the gods arrive and ask Wong to find them shelter for the night. They are tired, having traveled far and wide in search of good people who still live according to the principles that they, the gods, have handed down. Instead they have found only greed, evil, dishonesty, and selfishness. The same turns out to be true in Szechwan: no one will take them in, no one has the time or means to care for others - no one except the poor young Shen Te, whose pure inherent charity cannot allow her to turn away anyone in need.

Shen Te is rewarded for her hospitality, as the gods take it as a sure sign of goodness. They give her money and she buys a humble tobacco shop which they intend as both gift and test: will Shen Te be able to maintain her goodness with these newfound means, however slight they may be? If she succeeds, the gods' confidence in humanity would be restored. Though at first Shen Te seems to live up the gods' expectations, her generosity quickly turns her small shop into a messy, overcrowded poorhouse which attracts crime and police supervision. In a sense, Shen Te quickly fails the test, as she is forced to introduce the invented cousin Shui Ta as overseer and protector of her interests. Shen Te dons a costume of male clothing, a mask, and a forceful voice to take on the role of Shui Ta. Shui Ta arrives at the shop, coldly explains that his cousin has gone out of town on a short trip, curtly turns out the hangers-on, and quickly restores order to the shop.

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The Caucasian Chalk Circle (German: Der Kaukasische Kreidekreis) is a play by the German modernist playwright Bertolt Brecht. An example of Brecht's epic theatre, the play is a parable about a girl who steals a baby but becomes a better mother than its natural parents.

The play was written in 1944 while Brecht was living in the United States.

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Brecht, in his typical anti-realist style, uses the device of a "play within a play". The "frame" play begins with peasants finally resolving a dispute over who is to own and manage an area of farm land after the Nazis have retreated from a village in Soviet Russia and left it abandoned. It is agreed by all (including the previous owners) that the land should go to those who will use it most productively and not those who had previous ownership. A parable has been organised by the group that gains the land, supposedly an old folk-tale from the Caucasus, to be played out before the villagers to celebrate their agreement. The Singer, Arkadi, who arrives with his/her band of musicians, then tells the peasants the fable, which forms the main narrative, and intertwines throughout much of the play.

The Singer's story begins with Governor Georgi Abashvili and his wife Natella blatantly ignoring the citizens on the way to Easter Mass. The Singer shows us the show's antagonist, Arsen Kabezki, the Fat Prince. He sucks up to the pair and remarks how their new child Michael is "a governor from head to toe." They enter the church, leaving the peasants behind. Next to be introduced is the heroine Grusha Vachnadze, a maid to the governor's wife. Grusha, while carrying a goose for the Easter meal, meets a soldier, Simon Chachava, who reveals he has watched her bathe in the rivers. She storms off enraged. The Singer continues the story as the soldier contacts two architects for the Governor's new mansion, the Ironshirts, gestapo-esque guards, turn on him. The Fat Prince has orchestrated a coup and is now in control. The Governor is quickly beheaded. Simon finds Grusha and proposes, giving her his silver cross. Grusha accepts. Simon runs off to fulfill his duty to the Governor's wife, who has been foolishly packing clothing for the "trip", caring nothing for the loss of her husband. She is carried off, away from the flaming city of Nuhka and inadvertently leaves her son, Michael, behind. Grusha is left with the boy and, after seeing the Governor's head nailed to the church door, takes him with her to the mountains.

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Paul Thomas Mann
(6 June 1875 – 12 August 1955)

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a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate, known for his series of highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas, noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual. His analysis and critique of the European and German soul used modernized German and Biblical stories, as well as the ideas of Goethe, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer.

During World War I Mann supported Kaiser Wilhelm II's conservatism and attacked liberalism. Yet in Von Deutscher Republik (1923), as a semi-official spokesman for parliamentary democracy, Mann called upon German intellectuals to support the new Weimar Republic. He also gave a lecture at the Beethovensaal in Berlin on 13 October 1922, which appeared in Die neue Rundschau in November 1922, in which he developed his eccentric defence of the Republic, based on extensive close readings of Novalis and Walt Whitman. [2] Hereafter his political views gradually shifted toward liberal left and democratic principles.

In 1930 Mann gave a public address in Berlin titled "An Appeal to Reason," in which he strongly denounced National Socialism and encouraged resistance by the working class.

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Buddenbrooks was Thomas Mann's first novel, published in 1901 when he was twenty-six years old.

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It portrays the downfall (already announced in the subtitle, Decline of a family) of a wealthy mercantile family of Lübeck over four generations. The book is generally understood as a portrait of the German bourgeois society throughout several decades of the 19th century. The book displays Mann's characteristic ironic and detailed style, and it was this novel which won Mann the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929

Many aspects of Thomas Mann's personality are represented in the two main male representatives of the third and the fourth generations of the fictional family: Thomas Buddenbrook and his son Hanno Buddenbrook. It should not be considered a coincidence that Mann shared the same first name with one of them. Thomas Buddenbrook reads a chapter of Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Idea, and the character of Hanno Buddenbrook escapes from real-life worries into the realm of music, Wagner's Tristan and Iseult in particular. (Wagner himself was of bourgeois descent and decided to dedicate himself to art.) In this sense both Buddenbrook persons symbolise the conflict lived by the author: the evasion of a productive bourgeois life to pursue an artistic one, though never turning his back on bourgeois ethics.

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The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg) is a novel by Thomas Mann, first published in November 1924. It is widely considered to be one of the most influential works of 20th century German literature.

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The narrative opens in the decade before World War I. We are introduced to the central protagonist of the story, Hans Castorp, the only child of a Hamburg mercantile family who, following the early death of his parents, has been brought up by his grandfather and subsequently by an uncle named James Tienappel. We encounter him when he is in his early 20s, about to take up a shipbuilding career in Hamburg, his home town. Just before beginning this professional career Castorp undertakes a journey to visit his tubercular cousin, Joachim Ziemssen, who is seeking a cure in a sanatorium in Davos, high up in the Swiss Alps. In the opening chapter, Hans is symbolically transported away from the familiar life and mundane obligations he has known, in what he later learns to call "the flatlands", to the rarefied mountain air and introspective little world of the sanatorium.

Castorp's departure from the sanatorium is repeatedly delayed by his failing health. What at first appears to be a minor bronchial infection with slight fever is diagnosed by the sanatorium's chief doctor and director, Hofrat Behrens, as symptoms of tuberculosis. Hans is persuaded by Behrens to stay until his health improves.

During his extended stay, Castorp meets and learns from a variety of characters, who together represent a microcosm of pre-war Europe. These include the secular humanist and encyclopedist Lodovico Settembrini (a student of Giosuè Carducci), the totalitarianist Jesuit Leo Naphta, the dionysian Mynheer Peeperkorn, and his romantic interest Madame Clavdia Chauchat.

In the end, Castorp remains in the morbid atmosphere of the sanatorium for seven years. At the conclusion of the novel, the war begins, Castorp is conscripted into the military, and his imminent death on the battlefield is suggested.

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The novella Death in Venice was written by the German author Thomas Mann, and was first published in 1912 as Der Tod in Venedig

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The main character is Gustav von Aschenbach, a famous author in his early fifties who has recently added the aristocratic "von" to his name. He is a man dedicated to his art, disciplined and ascetic to the point of severity, and was widowed at a young age.

Aschenbach checks into his hotel, where at dinner he sees an aristocratic Polish family at a nearby table. Among them is an adolescent boy in a sailor suit; Aschenbach, startled, realizes that the boy is beautiful. His sisters, however, are so severely dressed that they look like nuns. Aschenbach overhears the lad's name, Tadzio, and conceives what he tells himself is an abstract, artistic interest.

Aschenbach next takes a trip into the city of Venice, where he sees a few discreetly-worded notices from the Health Department warning of an unspecified contagion and advising people to avoid eating shellfish. He smells an unfamiliar strong odour everywhere, and later realises it is disinfectant. However, the tourists continue to wander round the city, apparently oblivious. Aschenbach at first ignores the danger because it somehow pleases him to think that the city's disease is akin to his own hidden, corrupting passion for the boy.

Aschenbach dies on the beach later of a heart attack or some such thing.

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Hermann Hesse
(2 July 1877—9 August 1962)

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a German-Swiss poet, novelist, and painter. In 1946, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. His best-known works include Steppenwolf, Siddhartha, and The Glass Bead Game (also known as Magister Ludi) which explore an individual's search for spirituality outside society.

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Steppenwolf (orig. German Der Steppenwolf) is the tenth novel by German-Swiss author Hermann Hesse. Originally published in Germany in 1927, it was first translated into English in 1929. Combining autobiographical and fantastic elements, the novel was named after the lonesome wolf of the steppes. The story in large part reflects a profound crisis in Hesse's spiritual world in the 1920s while memorably portraying the protagonist's split between his humanity, and his wolf-like aggression and homelessness.

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The book is presented as a manuscript by its protagonist, a middle-aged man named Harry Haller, who leaves it to a chance acquaintance, the nephew of his landlady. The acquaintance adds a short preface of his own and then has the manuscript published. The title of this "real" book-in-the-book is Harry Haller's Records (For Madmen Only).

As it begins, the hero is beset with reflections on his being ill-suited for the world of everybody; regular people. Stuff happens.

Trying to postpone returning home, (where he has plans to commit suicide), Harry chances upon a young woman in a dance hall, Hermine, who quickly recognizes his desperation. They talk at length, with Hermine alternately mocking his self-pity and indulging him in his view of life, all to his astonished relief. By promising another meeting, Hermine provides Harry with a reason to learn to live, and he eagerly embraces her instruction. Over the next few weeks Hermine introduces Harry to the indulgences of what he calls the "bourgeois": she teaches Harry to dance, introduces him to the casual use of drugs, finds him a lover (Maria), and more importantly, forces him to accept these as legitimate and worthy aspects of a full life.

She also introduces Harry to a mysterious saxophonist named Pablo, who appears to be the very opposite of what Harry considers a serious, thoughtful man. After attending a lavish masquerade ball, Pablo leads Harry to his metaphorical "magic theater", where his previous concerns and higher notions about his soul disintegrate as he participates in several ethereal and phantasmal episodes and indulges his deep and simplistic lower, animalistic nature, culminating with him killing Hermine with a knife, apparently fulfilling her own earlier request but actually showing his continuing ignorance. Harry is consequently judged by Mozart, who condemns him to see life and show the proper reverence to it, thus marking a return to the focus on his higher, spiritual self.

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Siddhartha is an allegorical novel by Hermann Hesse
First published in 1922

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The novel takes place in ancient India around the time of the Buddha 6th century(BCE). It starts as Siddhartha, a Brahmin's son, leaves his home to join the ascetics with his companion Govinda. The two set out in the search of enlightenment. Siddhartha goes through a series of changes and realizations as he attempts to achieve this goal.

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The Glass Bead Game (German: Das Glasperlenspiel) is the last work and magnum opus of the German author Hermann Hesse. Begun in 1931 and published in Switzerland in 1943, the book was mentioned in Hesse's citation for the 1946 Nobel Prize for Literature.

"Glass Bead Game" is a literal translation of the German title. The title has also been rendered as Magister Ludi. "Magister Ludi", Latin for "master of the game," is the name of an honorific title awarded to the book's central character.

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The Glass Bead Game takes place at an unspecified date, centuries into the future. The setting is a fictional province of central Europe called Castalia, reserved by political decision for the life of the mind; technology and economic life are kept to a strict minimum. Castalia is home to an austere order of intellectuals with a twofold mission: to run boarding schools for boys (the novel is thus a detailed exploration of education and the life of the mind), and to nurture and play the Glass Bead Game. The novel follows the life of a distinguished member of the order, Joseph Knecht.

Knecht does the unthinkable: he resigns as Magister Ludi and asks to leave the order, ostensibly to become of value and service, in some way, to the larger culture. The heads of the order deny his request to leave, but Knecht departs Castalia anyway, initially taking a job as a tutor to his childhood friend's son. Only a few days later, he drowns in a mountain lake while attempting a swim for which he was not fit. The story ends abruptly.

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Günter Wilhelm Grass (born 16 October 1927) is a Nobel Prize-winning German author and playwright.

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He was born in the Free City of Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland). Since 1945, he has lived in West Germany, before it annexed East Germany in 1990, but in his fiction he frequently returns to the Danzig of his childhood.

He is best known for his first novel, The Tin Drum, a key text in European magic realism. His works frequently have a strong left wing, socialist political dimension, and Grass has been an active supporter of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. In 2006, Grass caused a controversy with his disclosure of Waffen-SS service during the final months of World War II.

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Cat and Mouse, published in Germany in 1961 as Katz und Maus,
A novella by Günter Grass,

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he second book of the Danzig Trilogy. It is about Joachim Mahlke, an alienated only child without a father. The narrator Pilenz "alone could be termed his friend, if it were possible to be friends with Mahlke" (p. 78); much of Pilenz's narration addresses Mahlke directly by means of second-person narration. The story is set in Danzig (Gdańsk) around the time of the Second World War and Nazi rule.

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The Tin Drum (German: Die Blechtrommel) is a 1959 novel by Günter Grass. The novel is part of Grass' Danziger Trilogie (Danzig Trilogy).

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The story is about the life of Oskar Matzerath, who writes his autobiography from memory while in a sanitorium during the years 1952-1954. However, Oskar's memories begin before those of ordinary people. The story starts with his own birth, when Oskar sees the light of "two sixty-watt bulbs" in the Free City of Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland). Gifted with a piercing shriek that can shatter glass or be used as a weapon, Oskar declares himself to be one of those "auditory clairvoyant babies", whose "spiritual development is complete at birth and only needs to affirm itself". At age three he receives a tin drum for his birthday and decides, after observing the obtuseness and duplicity of the adult world, to will himself not to grow up. As a result, he retains the stature of a child while living through the beginning of World War II, the Holocaust, several love affairs, and the world of postwar Europe. Through all this the tin drum remains his treasured possession, and he is willing to kill to retain it.

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Dog Years, published in Germany in 1963 as Hundejahre, is a novel by Günter Grass. It is the third and last volume of his Danzig Trilogy, the other two being The Tin Drum and Cat and Mouse.

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Grass's style frequently parodies Martin Heidegger's arcane philosophical diction in Being and Time, which one of the teenage protagonists likes to poke fun at.

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Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
(10 November 1759 – 9 May 1805)

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a German poet, philosopher, historian, and dramatist. During the last few years of his life (1788–1805), Schiller struck up a productive, if complicated, friendship with already famous and influential Johann Wolfgang Goethe, with whom he greatly discussed issues concerning aesthetics, encouraging Goethe to finish works he left merely as sketches; this thereby gave way to a period now referred to as Weimar Classicism.

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William Tell (German: Wilhelm Tell) is a drama written by Friedrich Schiller in 1804.

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The story focuses on the legendary Swiss marksman William Tell as well as on the Swiss struggle for independence from the Habsburg Empire in the early 14th century.

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The Robbers (German: Die Räuber) was the first drama by German playwright Friedrich Schiller. The play was published in 1781

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It was written towards the end of the German Romanticist Sturm und Drang ("Storm and Stress") movement. The play astounded its Mannheim audience and made Schiller an overnight sensation.

The plot revolves around the conflict between two aristocratic brothers, Karl and Franz Moor. The charismatic but rebellious student Karl is deeply loved by his father. The younger brother, Franz, who appears as a cold, calculating villain, plots to wrest away Karl's inheritance. As the play unfolds, both Franz's motives and Karl's innocence and heroism are revealed to be complex.

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Christian Johann Heinrich Heine (13 December 1797 in Düsseldorf – 17 February 1856 in Paris) was a journalist, essayist, and one of the most significant German romantic poets. He is remembered chiefly for selections of his lyric poetry, many of which were set to music in the form of lieder (art songs) by German composers.

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Jews were subject to severe restrictions in many of the German states at that time. They were forbidden to enter certain professions, including an academic career in the universities, a particular ambition for Heine. As Heine said in self-justification, his conversion was "the ticket of admission into European culture". He wrote, "As Henry IV said, 'Paris is worth a mass'; I say, 'Berlin is worth the sermon.'" For much of the rest of his life Heine wrestled over the incompatible elements of his German and his Jewish identities

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Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (22 January 1729 – 15 February 1781)

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a German writer, philosopher, dramatist, publicist, and art critic, and one of the most outstanding representatives of the Enlightenment era. His plays and theoretical writings substantially influenced the development of German literature.

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Nathan the Wise (original German title Nathan der Weise) is a play by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, published in 1779. It is a fervent plea for religious tolerance.

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Set in Jerusalem during the Third Crusade, it describes how the wise Jewish merchant Nathan, the enlightened sultan Saladin and the (initially anonymous) Templar bridge their gaps between Judaism, Islam and Christianity. Its major themes are friendship, tolerance, relativism of God, a rejection of miracles and a need for communication.

The centerpiece of the work is the Ring Parable, narrated by Nathan when asked by Saladin which religion is true: An heirloom ring with the magical ability to render its owner pleasant in the eyes of God and mankind had been passed from father to the son he loved most. When it came to a father of three sons whom he loved equally, he promised it (in "pious weakness") to each of them. Looking for a way to keep his promise, he had two replicas made, which were indistinguishable from the original, and gave on his deathbed a ring to each of them. The brothers quarreled over who owned the real ring. A wise judge admonished them that it was up to them to live such that their ring's powers proved true. Nathan compares this to religion, saying that each of us lives by the religion we have learned from those we respect.

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Emilia Galotti is a play in five acts by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729 - 1781), which premiered on 8 March 1772 in Braunschweig. The work provides a classic example of German bürgerliches Trauerspiel (bourgeois tragedy).

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Set in Italy, Emilia Galotti tells the story of a virtuous young woman of the upper middle class. The absolutist prince of Guastalla, Hettore Gonzaga, becomes obsessed with the idea of making Emilia his lover after their first meeting.

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Heinrich Theodor Böll (December 21, 1917—July 16, 1985) was one of Germany's foremost post-World War II writers. Böll was awarded the Georg Büchner Prize in 1967 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1972.

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Böll was born in Cologne, Germany, to a Catholic, pacifist family that, later, opposed the rise of Nazism.
His best-known works are Billiards at Half-past Nine, The Clown, Group Portrait with Lady, The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, and The Safety Net.

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Hannah Arendt (October 14, 1906 – December 4, 1975) was an influential German-Jewish political theorist. She has often been described as a philosopher, although she always refused that label on the grounds that philosophy is concerned with "man in the singular." She described herself instead as a political theorist because her work centers on the fact that "men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world."

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Her first major book was The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), which traced the roots of Stalinist Communism and Nazism in both anti-Semitism and imperialism. The book was controversial because it suggested an essential identity between the two phenomena, which can be considered as completely separated in both origins and nature.

Arguably her most influential work, The Human Condition (1958) distinguishes between labour, work, and action, and explores the implications of these distinctions. Her theory of political action is extensively developed in this work.

Another of her important books is the collection of essays Men in Dark Times. These intellectual biographies provide insight into the lives of some of the creative and moral figures of the 20th century, among them Walter Benjamin, Karl Jaspers, Rosa Luxemburg, Hermann Broch, Pope John XXIII, and Isak Dinesen.

In her reporting of the Eichmann trial for The New Yorker, which evolved into Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), she coined the phrase "the banality of evil" to describe Eichmann.

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Anna Seghers (November 19, 1900, Mainz – June 1, 1983, Berlin) was a German writer famous for depicting the moral experience of the Second World War.

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During this time, she wrote The Seventh Cross, for which she received the Büchner-Prize in 1947. The novel is set in 1936 and describes the escape of seven prisoners from a concentration camp.