Top 10 German Writers

The fact that Frankfurt is the main book trade fair in the world is no coincidence. The German literary tradition leads us through great pens with a halo of transcendence in any genre that one looks at. From the realism closest to the land and its circumstances to the furthest fantasy of our world. A German narrator always appears in each genre standing out among the average. With a bomb-proof solvency that he ensures not only a magnetic framework for readers of each genre, but also a point of creativity that always goes beyond nationalities and emerges in people blessed by the muses.

Maybe it's just me, but whatever the genre of the German writer on duty, you can sense a hint of fascinating existentialism in precise doses required in each genre. And put to guess it could be due to a unique geographical effect. On one side the North Sea and on the other the Baltic reach in their friction to the innermost Germany, spreading inland narrative proposals like remote siren echoes. In fact, romanticism was born in Teutonic lands...

Ramblings aside, here we go with my selection of the best of German literature. As in my selections of writers from other countriesI focus on more recent times.

Top 10 Recommended German Writers

Thomas Mann

No one knows what kind of writer he would have been Thomas Mann in a war-free Europe. But in the circumstances in which he lived, from the First to the Second World War, with the interwar period and the final postwar period included, his political involvement as an intellectual bulwark never left him indifferent, whatever it cost him. The funny thing is that Thomas Mann became an idealist on both sides, turning progressively to the left as Nazism was gaining space and applying its force as any rule.

Exiled in several countries, a US citizen for many years until his declared leftist ideology ended up marking him also in that country whose new enemy was Russia.

A very successful author, first in his native Germany and later in the rest of the world, already when his books were banned in Germany. Father of sons as idealistic as him who did not hesitate to enlist in armies against Nazism. Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929.

Undoubtedly a hectic life for this author, probably the best chronicler of what was experienced in Europe during the turbulent first half of the XNUMXth century.

Being an author marked by his firm convictions (although antagonistic over time) and by his circumstances, his work ends up impregnated with that complex European reality. But a basic reading also brings an incomparable enjoyment of good literature.

Michael Ende

There are two fantastic readings absolutely necessary for every kid starting out in literature. One is The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and the other is The endless story, Michael Ende. In this order. Call me nostalgic, but I do not think it is a crazy idea to raise that reading foundation, unfading despite the progress of time. It is not about considering that one's childhood and youth is the best, Rather, it is about rescuing the best of each time so that it transcends more "accessory" creations..

As usually happens on so many other occasions, the masterpiece, the gigantic great creation of an author ends up overshadowing him. Michael Ende wrote more than twenty books, but in the end his Neverending Story (made into a movie and recently revised for today's kids), ended up being that unattainable creation even for the author himself sitting over and over again in front of his writing corner . There could be no replica or continuation for the perfect work. Resignation, friend Ende, consider that you achieved it, although this meant your own later limitation... Even so, due to the exceptional relevance of his great novel, I had to place it at the top of the Teutonic narrative.

Patrick Suskind

Curiously, I close the podium of German narrators with another one hit wonder. But it is that Suskind's is very similar to Ende's. They will surely be one of the most notable cases in the history of literature in recent centuries.

As I say, some writers, artists, musicians or any other creators have the fortune, fortune or predestination to create a masterpiece out of nothing. In the case of the noble art of writing, Patrick Süskind It is for me one of those touched by luck or by God. What's more, I'm sure that his novel El perfume was written in a rush. It can not be any other way. Absolute perfection (nothing to do with his shadows or vain attempts) does not conform to discipline but to chance, to the ephemeral. The complete beauty is a matter of imprint, of delirium, nothing to do with the rational.

Someone or something really possessed the author's hands to end up writing such a perfect work. In the famous novel Perfume, a sense: the smell, takes up its true sensory power, adored by modernity, by the visual and the auditory. Isn't it a more powerful memory than ever when associated with a smell?

The sad comes later. As a creator you know that you will never be able to do it again, because it has not been you, it has been your hands governed by others, possessed by others. Isn't that how it was, friend Patrick? That's why you remain a shadowy author. Without showing public life your frustration at having known the glory of the creation process.

Hermann Hesse

In the first half of the XNUMXth century there were two European writers who stood out greatly, one was the already exalted Thomas Mann and another was the one that I place here in fourth position: Hermann Hesse. They were both German and both traveled that bitter path towards the alienation of a homeland  whom they looked at strangely.

And from that alienation they were able to offer an existentialist, fatalistic, dramatic literature, but at the same time repairing from the idea that the survival of the worst can only lead to freedom and the most authentic glimpses of happiness. How could it be otherwise, they ended up being friends in their creative harmony. And who knows, maybe they ended up feeding each other to write some of their best works.

In fact, I was somewhat hesitant to separate them in this ranking. But Ende and Süskind seem more impressive to me because of their unique ability to compose masterpieces that ended up devouring them both. Hesse wrote great books between the metaphorical with a philosophical cut slipping between plots with that residue of the tragic and the resilience. Many of his books are visited today by readers looking for motivation. Made in Hesse allegories that transcend their time thanks to their vast knowledge of the human soul, emotions and horizons as goals towards the fullest possible survival.

Versatile author where they exist, capable of the most disturbing plot or the most passionate intimate story. Because until recently Charlotte Link he was one of the most authoritative voices in German and European crime fiction. And he continues to be a reference for that capacity for new plot twists in his bibliography. And it is that, after more than thirty years dedicated to the world of literature, Link masterfully handles all kinds of keys necessary to reach the level of bestseller in all kinds of works.

So much so that once that best-selling author's band was achieved in a genre as demanding as noir, Charlotte Link has joined a more period narrative aspect, with that intimacy that also captivates readers from half the world through authors such as Maria Dueñas, in the Spanish market, or Anne jacobs worldwide.

So you certainly never know where the next novel from an ingenious and variable narrator like Link will break. Dizzying pen at times and loaded with depth at others, with a scrupulous characterization of characters for the role they must play in the set. German reliability until the final twist or surprise. In particular, you will see that here we are left with his darker proposals, but without detracting from his great chameleon capacity.

In any other profession or dedication, those who arrive unexpectedly are labeled as upstarts or accused of trespassing. It is proven that literature always welcomes anyone who has something interesting to tell with open arms when he does it with that necessary delivery of any good writer.

Prototypical examples of this arrival to letters from very different places, which end up being common spaces, are, for example, doctors with types like Robin cook, or advocacy with the immeasurable John Grisham. In a space close to that of the legal profession, we find the judiciary. And among the judges, few have passed into fictional narrative with the significance of bernhard schlink.

Little could the connoisseurs of this author imagine, in his practice as a jurist, that he would be able to offer stories with such a humanistic background, with a captivating sensitivity and with approaches that are disturbing due to its natural counterweight between the existential and an action outlined with a kind of narrative efficiency.

Cars of lives and summary sentences on the nature of the soul that, in essence, only tries to occupy its days riding its own contradictions. Contradictions that, as expert evidence or testimonies, only seek to discover that ultimate truth that moves us.

Schlink always outlines highly detailed characters in its deepest part, where unspeakable secrets reside, not even under oath. The plot of each of his novels always pivots around that brilliance of the protagonists turned into a foundation, exposed in front of the jury of readers who listen attentively to issue a verdict as laymen in the matter of life who need to understand so many treasured enigmas that only on the last page do they find that ultimate motivation to give their whole life to their defense.

Günter Grass

Günter Grass He was a controversial author at times for his narrative proposal with large doses of social and political criticism. But at the same time, an illustrious writer capable of presenting us with very human stories that overflow from that scenography of the political as an almost always violent element of coexistence, at least in the historical period that he had to live and always through systems of totalitarian power politically or economically.

Narrator of the Germany resulting from the Second World War, and creator of a realistic style, with that fatalistic touch of the idealist on the verge of convincing himself that the social is almost always a lost battle, he will end up soaking his literary work with that idea of ​​the eternal losers: the people, families, individuals subjected to the capricious ups and downs of great interests and the deformity of patriotic ideals.

Putting yourself to read Günter Grass is an exercise in approaching European intrahistory, one that the officers do not take care of transferring to official documentation and that only writers like him present us with their most absolute crudeness.

Peter stamm

Restlessness, in the broadest and most favorable sense of the term, is the essence of a writer like Peter stamm. A guy hardened in the letters from that most authentic self-taught, the one that does not have godparents or letters of recommendation.

And of course, stumbling around is something inherent to the condition of the creator of every field who discovers his creative vein without having prior family roots or relevant contacts in the world of the day. Only in the end there are also opportunities for the true genius, despite everything.

His novel Agnes was the key, that work of undeniable quality that ended up breaking down the usual walls erected against the disinherited and the profane in a world like the literary in this case.

Stamm's is a intimacy existentialist, surprised, dreamlike, alienated and at the same time sublimated by its concise and brilliant form towards that very personal imprint. An unmistakable stamp always necessary to detect narrators different from the mediocrity and thus be able to observe the world and the characters that we are all with new prisms.

Sebastian Fitzek

It will be that every lawyer has within a potential defender of the crime, according to the client who chooses him. Or simply that the approach to the legal world excites some muses who end up submitting to the black genre, tired of inspiring higher passions of other times. The point is that Sebastian Fitzek es one more of the lawyers passed into fiction literature, like our Lorenzo Silva, without going further.

Una literature from the legal profession on which its authors overturn judicial thriller approaches; they tackle the underworld world (which ends up being accountable to the judge less than we would like); or they plunge into a black genre that connects with the subterfuges of a justice that is too blind at times.

At specific case of lawyer Fitzek What can be highlighted the most is its intensity in a set of frenetic works of psychological suspense that, rather than guiding us through bright courthouses, takes us into the dark corridors of the mind.

Novels in which at times you feel like a doll at the mercy of the unsuspected destinies of a wonderfully developed plot, in which you enter without possible reading remission. Any Fitzek reader shares this idea of ​​the magnetism of characters cradled in a spider's web, barely trying to escape to the extreme where it seems that the liberation from the labyrinthine trap may be.

Cornelia funke

The fantasy genre found in Cornelia funke a cornerstone that balances the narrative of the great authors of the most epic narrative (let's put Patrick Rothfuss), with a more traditional fantasy (let's put the also German Michael Ende). All in a childish and youthful side that greens that much-needed literature as a counterweight to fast-paced novels, tasty for young readers but devoid of background.

Because we will agree that there is a gulf between "The endless story" and a book that could be called "The day that Francisca discovered that green and red do not combine" (any resemblance to reality is mere coincidence). Funker lavishes, whether in his sagas or in individual installments, in those works of classic reminiscences, that is, with a moral. Always developing the knots with exquisite ingenuity.

So with Funke our children's imaginations are in good hands. And even our own imagination can also take a good rejuvenating bath among the plots of this great German author capable of empathizing, as only the great storytellers know, with that world between childhood and early youth, where we can settle essences about the good and evil that are projected from distant worlds towards the more mundane behavior of the young.

5/5 - (24 votes)

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