cannon's failed to determine its outcome. in negotiations last year's meeting users succeeded in future and. it was the birth of modern diplomacy. sixteen forty eight. years starts october twenty fourth and d.-w. . welcome to an arts twenty one special. one hundred german must reads we present the definitive list of german must read novels translated into english our ambitious multimedia project includes web videos interviews and links. to. our literature experts read through stacks and stacks of books thousands of pages a complete century was explored from beginning to end. this is their perspective on major works from klaus man and cost of life to you up follows up. clean sounds like men in leather jackets a cliche which is true and not true. most folks don't require a mouthguard but most folks are about beautiful orange is. our list for worldly readers and amateurs one hundred books that have and will profoundly shaped how readers view germany and europe german novels that capture the brutality of the nazis and the holocaust stories about the divided city of berlin and the roaring golden twenty. and we'll show you our hall of fame the nobel laureates on our last. anted for the first time at the frankfurt book fair twenty eight. hundred one hundred german muster reads with karen helm stet. has been having him start my name is karen helms ted and it's a great pleasure to introduce our multimedia project to the show one hundred german must reads in english here at the frankfurt book fair and yes one of them and now would like to know more about this project. please allow me to introduce my guests first off the project leaders here to my left are g.w. literature experts sabina keyes about and david eleven. point zero and we're particularly thrilled to welcome jenny aplin back award winning author and director and one of the authors on our list so congratulations are in order and a warm welcome and. you know it starts of you know i'll start with you tell us what were the biggest challenges you encountered with this project and how long did it take you know what as it is. we spent two years doing the research reading and selecting works. with some authors it was easier almost all the books of thomas mann. has been translated in winds with others only one. we had to find the english title so the research was the first challenge in that once we had decided which books to include on our list the next challenge was to compress say a one thousand page novel into two minutes might suffice i mean you. actually have a few humans a basis just because there is so much we wanted to tell about each book but we couldn't squeeze it all into two minute videos we did argue about how to deal with that fortunately we're still friends. we're pleased to hear that here and now jenny backus. one of the most versatile and most successful authors in germany. or visitation by its english title is your book on the list a very slim volume that belies the enormous backstory as german history play such a huge role and it illuminated through the story of a house and a property. as a german writer is that a given. is there any way to get around dealing with germany's historical legacy that home for me in my case is that it certainly looks like there isn't for others maybe it wasn't my original intention to tell stories about the twentieth century. i only started out with private stories and ended up with history in the. journey back was born to be a writer her father and grandfather were famous authors but at university she study theatre and directing before publishing your first novel in one thousand nine hundred nine. the old child describes a young girl's a scrape from the world of responsibility an allegory of life east germany. blends politics into the lives of our characters her latest novel nominated for the german book prize tells a story of migration and everyday life in germany. and i'm dynastic and on a thursday at the end of august a group of ten black men gathered outside the berlin city hall building. i thought this very day i decided to stage a hunger strike three days later they stopped taking liquids. up and bert fields her work with contemporary history and searches for personal solutions to the major political issues over time. if you find them and how did people react when they suddenly have to redefine. in their identity because their lies have changed drastically. the writer explores similar themes of contemporary german society in her twenty ten novel visitation which is on her list this is a it's also a very private story being told as with your own family history woven in isn't that right. yeah. we're going to be well yes we also lost a property to its former owner after the berlin wall came down more fire. that happened to many people who do this by including my own family from you know so i was familiar with that one example. but i tried to get away from my own story somebody who is a bit like me does appear but only in the last chapter there are eleven other stories about people who wanted to stay in their homes but couldn't stand each under very different circumstances at various points throughout the century for me it was good to find my place among these different stories some of which seemed much more serious than my own a few. new milf will come it's my night. and. it's so quiet here in the german countryside now. every corner of this country even cute little lake houses have seen some of the darkest chapters of history especially in the last century. visitation is inspired by her grandmother's lighthouse and its many different owners who displaced each other. a jewish family forced to flee before the nazis murdered their relatives and architect his wife as a raped by a red army soldier in a cause that he's built for her your waiter runs away from the east german communists a pair of writers returning from soviet exile. you've heard the expression there's no place like home but what happens when there's no where you belong. when you've arrived can you still be said to be fleeing and when you're fleeing can you ever arrive. in visitation the character's fates are all tied together by the brutality of the twentieth century whether or not they realize it it's a quiet little place and germany is not so very quiet history. before you surprised that this book was chosen for the list. needed me because it does not necessarily i was pleased to be on the list much but which book i like in particular i think my favorite is visitation sometimes art it's close to my heart but what should i say it's like with parents they love all their children. it's only if you're asleep its definitely close to your heart that's clear you once said it's very important for you to make the forgotten and the foreign audible visible and readable what does that mean exactly please read my stuff going to. be physically what i try to do is see what is beyond my own horizon and think my way into the stories in the minds of other people just as we can be as i said this book has twelve chapters and only one of them takes place in my own head. so. in the other eleven i try to see things through the eyes of people who are very far away. and even very alien to me at least at the start with regard to this one house all of these are. questions what belongs to you what is my property. and what does it mean to leave a place you love. very different ways to love a place and to think about the idea of home. i'm always interested in viewing the world through other people's eyes only have two of my own but this is. certainly deftly done in visitation thanks. to in the holocaust the two events in the last century that in some way affected nearly every family history here in germany and also in most of europe. do they cast their shadows in the other books on the list or even through all of modern german literature. does begin to. invade started well before the second world war with the nazis seizing power. published the opera months as early as one nine hundred thirty three the very year they took over a guy from there he was a visionary he saw what was going to happen including the concentration camps and the war. there is a number of such question novels. and then there are the great works from after the war that deal with. and then came the next generation each with news stories as in your. out of the children followed by the grandchildren all writing about the second world war and the holocaust. as a recent example as. a writer from ukraine who lives in berlin she wrote about the fate of her family. i don't think it will ever end. can writers accurately reflect the horrific events of the holocaust some writers have been able to describe the mass murder of european jews and at the same time create outstanding literature. maybe esther by a touchup a trial begins with a family secret that is too awful to talk about. it involves a journey through eastern europe and a search for clues to the fate of a jewish family. the first time i no longer understood how i ever could have imagined that i had been spared somehow i knew my polish relatives had all perished siblings his mother's zygmunt haleigh their family how else could this event did what i had never thought about them. there was an athlete those recipes for delicious sweet sausages died with her. and grandmother or publish them rosa who had great legs and love to dance to charleston and the great grandmother who was executed by german troops in one nine hundred forty one her name was esther maybe. writes in german although her native language is ukrainian this linguistic diversity allows her to describe her characters with a certain detachment from life maybe esther is a very sad story but it's not melancholy it's an unusual account of the holocaust the family of cutoffs and the people who come alive again in this novel with a new band this one. novel austell it says also filled with uncertainty travel and a search for clues but this is not an autobiography it is a semi fictional account of the jewish historian jacques austerlitz who is trying to recall memories that he has long since lost. one day at a train station also to. sees a young boy who he realizes is his four year old self being sent by kindertransport to england this vision finally inspires him to go searching for his original family . his life was saved by a train later his mother was deported to auschwitz by train train stations play a key role in this novel ouster let's as a man who has a child lost his homeland language and even his name. chances are you've seen heard and read lots of stories about world war two and the holocaust but you haven't read one like alstom let's. hear it becker was one of the first authors to inject a bit of humor into an otherwise tragic holocaust novel called the liar it was published in one nine hundred sixty nine the work is set in a polish ghetto similar to the one that the author himself grew up in most of the novel is fictional. noir to the. bones a cafe and distributes to his customers fake radio news reports to to getto will soon be liberated. on veni and when i try to make use of the very last possibility that keeps them from just lying down and dying with words do you understand what i try to do that with words because that's all i have and then you come and tell me it's prohibited you know exactly is this full bore. the novel is realistic in its portrayal of life in the ghetto but it also expresses a sense of human warmth and hope. and no wonderful book that will stay with you. and if you visit sites so a certain time in a certain distance to the events was needed to actually grappled with these chapters of history david you brought something of an outsider perspective to this project tell us your thoughts you know. the outside perspective because i'm from the us and the english language videos for this project. basically we decided to focus on the twentieth and twenty first centuries and a lot of people were quite horrified that we left out of the list. fortunately no one is b.m.'s out yet or sense any threats but i expect a vital system that i don't have anyway we decided to concentrate on more modern literature because we want people who read these books to come away with a different view of germany and europe our list starts in one thousand or one with the boarding books by thomas mann and ends with philip think less twenty sixteen novel. the second how could reading these books change the reader's view of germany or even of europe. and yemen that. these books provide a deep insights into history. but first and foremost they give us insights into humanity or. readers will better understand who the people of central europe are what's their mentality what was their mentality in the past to get to particularly people who shaped history because we've in how. you were born and he's berlin then the former east germany is a big topic in your novels do you think we'll see a similar phenomenon they are not that is the years go by writers will be able to take a more differentiated view on the country's communist past. good saves some friends of mine say all my books are really about the old east germany i didn't go for a very long time i never wanted to write about it. and i find it hard to do and also very hard to talk about. this of this but i'm just now starting to publish texts i have written about that period. i might even write something new about it all the city of india. doesn't fit on the home of us i'm better there were it's very odd to experience emotions that are hard to explain in rational terms is a lot. the money. sometimes twenty or thirty years to understand or depict certain things this is. there are so many preconceptions about east germany this is there isn't a style just for the good old days there but also blanket condemnation of the lawless dictatorship minds are made up of i should try to tell a different story you'll encounter a lot of resistance. also if you don't stand down too soon thanks for that david you come from the us as we've said which german authors on the list are people in the states familiar with. them and listening afternoons are the first of all in the english speaking world there's just not that much for militarily with literature written in other languages there's some room for improvement there. people will know some titles for instance all quiet on the western front amok. even people who don't know the book will know the title because it's become an expression in english meaning everything's calm nothing new to report. to scoot then there are books on the list that have been turned into movies for months like jacob the liar by you like becker or potential costs. people may know the movie is better than the books. and there's another category of the authors that people have read schoolies you have him on how much has a franz kafka but people may have forgotten that those authors actually wrote their books in german as this even though has is a nobel prize winner yeah right but things aren't even that different here in germany ok maybe a little bit different but i bet if we asked people on the street here they wouldn't necessarily know even all the nobel prize winners on our list you feel you know how many nobel prize winners are actually on the list sabina for him and why not get so we just checked there are seven on the list who are for. german speaking country has been home i'm given credit we didn't use that as a criterion for selecting a book. having a nobel prize was not relevant. to really since you know of course books by prize winners do tend to be better known and therefore they're more likely to get translated as it is of you know the same with other prizes. clearly the giants of german literature cannot simply be ignored and many are included on our list our compilation features seven authors who have won the nobel prize for literature their works are set against some of the great historical events of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. in one such novel we have a prosperous german port city. a society in turmoil and a prominent family of merchants. these are the cornerstones in thomas months family saga britain brooks in fact it reflects munns own upbringing he was born into a middle class family in lubec in eight hundred seventy five his father was a grain merchant monday wrote about the life and times that he knew well. society was in the grip of a recession the lives of the middle class were being turned upside down months good and broke charts the rise and fall of the merchant family between decadence and rash consumerism. months novel was published in one thousand one and is considered one of the earliest examples of modern fiction it was awarded the nobel prize for literature in one thousand nine hundred nine. almost none who also wrote many other novels is one of our most important writers his publisher wanted to cut that novel in half luckily month didn't let him go. another example is his famous novel the tin drum told from a child's point of view ryan mack. national socialism and world war two class portrays the german people as a nation of nazi sympathizers who refuse to grow up. the film version of this work drives home this point with vivid images and. this book from one nine hundred fifty nine was the first major novel to deal with germany's nazi past. but people used to think that evil spirits suddenly appeared somehow suggest the german people were not how it was it all took place in broad daylight on his part. was just six when the nazis came to power near the end of the war he served briefly in the vatican s.s. finally admitted this in two thousand and six. writing has always been a way to deal with the past when goss published the term drum it caused a scandal no one had written about world war two with such serious such brutality i'm such. a towering figure in german literature and an eloquent spokesman on the darker chapters of recent german history gus was awarded the nobel prize for literature in one thousand nine hundred nine. the life of another nobel laureate how to milla was also shaped by totalitarian regimes she grew up in romania her father served in the buff in s.s. after the war crime other was deported to the soviet gulag milla emigrated to west germany in one thousand nine hundred seven and was finally able to write without government imposed censorship. i write about the broad spectrum of individuals who live in dictatorships. everyone from the true believers all the way to the dissidents. in the hunger angela tells the story of her mother and other ethnic germans in romania at the end of world war two thousands of ethnic germans were deported to soviet labor camps. or was awarded the nobel prize in two thousand and nine. some newspapers in the us. who had to who no one says that anymore. what's it like for you to figure on this list next to such literary greats like thomas mann and going to a gas you know it's a nice minute it's a good feeling of course i certainly won't complain about making the list. right after i saw it i asked myself oh my goodness how many of these books have i actually read actually have certainly not all one hundred it's more like about thirty. you do have to write after all exactly now i have to do is read the other seventy actually sixty nine since i wrote one of them i mean i guess we all have quite a bit of reading to do i really should read them. there are a lot of other books on the list that i've been meaning to read so there are some really good writers on that list but there are also some others that are missing. with those me as far as new literature is concerned i would definitely say english . and fighter camp. i would put kemp ascii right up there with c. boy and your own son in the combination of those three you're able to interpret their work differently so in that context is definitely worth another look as a reader ask which books you'd have thrown off the list maybe we better not. and that was our it's twenty one from the frankfurt book fair our talk on one hundred german must reads will continue next week with part too. and we ask you can german writers also do light and funny. of course we'll show you great literature which was adapted for film edition you are. still. on the silver screen. the comments on the ruble. and we visit. the best selling german author who lives in california. her book cart is also on our list what do americans love about her. i mean one dead shot one hundred german must reads definitive multimedia project. more next week and keep on reading. odd. todd. thanks goodness me go. around trying to translate. the magic mystery. movie young age makes history grabbing foreign fast frank trash. the be. told. female candidates then it's a day for. women all striving for power in the u.s. military. carried out her hour. lots of these women want. clueless on this place. and meet some of the candidates on the c.w. . cause cervical also lists clinton germany streets on the double. lives like. live. listening carefully. to listen to this list to get a good. election listen discover the. eleven. lives subscribe to documentary to live. in the new magazine on w o. rofl high tech innovation. big ecological challenges live india a country that's always changing lives with people working to create a sustainable future eleven to projects from europe illogical to india