the next week or so I’ll be writing up my reflections on my 2020 reading year. In the meantime, I’ve solicited guest posts from friends and fellow book lovers about their own literary highlights. I’m always looking for new contributors; let me know here or on Twitter (@ds228) if you have something you want to share.

The seventh post is by Magda Birkmann (@Magdarine). Magda is a full-time bookseller in Berlin and spends all of her free time talking about books on Twitter.

Books have kept me sane during this pandemic (so far), so even by my personal standards as a professional reader (I’m a full-time bookseller) I really read A LOT in 2020—in fact, with 171 books finished, I’ve reached my absolute personal best. Most of those books I enjoyed very much, so it’s hard to come up with a general Best-Of list. But here are ten very good German books (5 new, 5 old) I read during the past year that haven’t been translated to English yet (or if they were, they’re out of print), but definitely should be. Who knows, if enough of you people pester the right indie publishers about it, maybe some of them eventually will be.

Anne Weber, Annette, ein Heldinnenepos (Annette, a Heroine’s Epic, 2020)

This book won one of the most important German literary prizes in 2020, and justly so. In it, Anne Weber—in the form of an epic poem—tells the real-life story of Annette Beaumanoir, a neurophysiologist and heroine of the French communist resistance during WW2 who later received a ten-year prison sentence for her support of the FLN in the Algerian War. It took around 30 pages for me to get used to the unusual form (unlike in English-language YA fiction, novels-in-verse aren’t really “a thing” in Germany), but once I got it, I was completely hooked and often moved to tears by this factual story that Weber (who based her book on several interviews she conducted with Beaumanoir) has transformed into a beautiful piece of literature.

Olivia Wenzel, 1000 serpentinen angst (1000 Coils of Fear, 2020)

The debut novel by Olivia Wenzel, a Black Eastern German writer who has worked in theater for years, should have won all the important German literary prizes but didn’t, which just goes to show how rotten this whole prize business is. The novel, inspired by Wenzel’s own background, switches between a first-person narrative (the protagonist is a young mixed-race German woman who was raised in the GDR alongside her twin brother by a white single mother) and interview-style passages in which the protagonist seems to be both asking and answering the questions, tackling topics like race, sexuality, feminism, motherhood, nationality, and grief. For those familiar with mainstream contemporary German fiction, the book’s innovative style (which clearly betrays Wenzel’s theatrical background) is a much-needed breath of fresh air.

[As far as I can tell, English translation rights to this novel have actually been sold, but I don’t have any information on where and when an English version will be published.]

Deniz Ohde, Streulicht (Scattered Light, 2020)

Deniz Ohde’s debut follows a young woman who, after having moved far away to attend university, returns to her industrial hometown for the wedding of two childhood friends. During her short weekend stay she reflects on her working-class childhood and the rocky road towards a formal education she was forced to follow, all the while struggling to (re)connect with her father, an alcoholic and compulsive hoarder. Ohde’s novel is reminiscent of the work of Annie Ernaux (but in an industrial Western German 90s setting) and since the latter is one of my favorite writers of all time, it’s no wonder that I absolutely loved Streulicht too.

Simone Hirth, Das Loch (The Hole, 2020)

Simone Hirth’s Das Loch is an epistolary novel about a writer trying to confront the mental and physical isolation she’s been suffering from ever since becoming a mother. The protagonist feels like she’s fallen into the eponymous hole because all the reproductive work she has had to do since the birth of her son (her husband rarely being home) leaves her no time or energy for her literary endeavours. In lieu of those, she begins, in what little spare time she has, to write letters to Jesus, Buddha, the Chancellor, Madonna, Snow White, a frog, Ulrike Meinhoff (of Baader-Meinhof Gang fame) and a handful of other addressees. Those little missives are by turns angry, sarcastic, desperate, optimistic and incredibly funny while also offering a sharp analysis of the unfair double load that working mothers, in particular, have to carry in our society. As someone who doesn’t have (or want) children, I found the book eye-opening.

Samira El-Maawi, In der Heimat meines Vaters riecht die Erde wie der Himmel (In My Father’s Homeland The Earth Smells Like The Sky, 2020)

“I know more about the history of Nelson Mandela than I know about my father’s history.” This sentence runs like a chorus through this beautiful debut novel by the Black Swiss author Samira El-Maawi. The book is told from the point of view of a ten-year-old girl who grows up in Switzerland in the 80s as the child of a white Swiss Christian mother and a Black Muslim father from Zanzibar and who tries to assert her own identity amidst everyday racism, family crises, and conflicts of loyalty. El-Maawi, who has used both her own experiences (she herself is bi-racial) and the experiences and life stories of other Black Swiss people in her book, writes very clear and befittingly simple (considering that the narrator is a child) prose that is spiced up by occasional lyrical passages that read like little poems. I hadn’t really read very many Swiss authors before, but this novel definitely made me want to explore that literature further.

Gisela Elsner, Das Berührungsverbot (Prohibition of Contact, 1970)

Contemporary critics called Gisela Elsner’s 1970 novel an “anti-porno,” a Swiss journal that had been printing excerpts was seized by the authorities, and Austrian media attacked it as harmful to children. In truth, though, this caustic satire by an outspokenly communist writer is a ruthless, oftentimes screamingly funny reckoning with both the uptight sexual mores of the 50s and the compulsive promiscuity of the 60s. Admittedly, it’s also a book about several German heterosexual couples engaging in group sex orgies. Most importantly, it lays bare the enduring patriarchal and authoritarian structures of post-war German society. This was my first novel by Elsner, but after I finished it, I immediately went and bought her complete backlist, the devouring of which is going to be one of several big reading projects I have lined up for 2021.

[Although this particular book has yet to appear in English, two of Elsner’s other novels, Die Riesenzwerge (The Giant Dwarfs, 1964) and Abseits (Offside, 1982) were translated into English by Joel Carmichael in 1965 and Anthea Bell in 1985, respectively (although both translations appear to be long out of print).]

Helen Wolff, Hintergrund für Liebe (Background for Love, written 1932, first published 2020)

Helen Wolff, who together with her husband Kurt Wolff had to flee Nazi Germany and in 1942 founded Pantheon Books during their American exile, is mostly known for her work in publishing, bringing some of the most well-known European writers to American readers. Only after her death in 1994 did her descendants find out that she had been quite an accomplished writer in her own right.

Her little autobiographical novel Hintergrund für Liebe, which was written in 1932/1933, was posthumously published for the first time in 2020. Inspired by her own travels to France with her husband, the book tells a slow, gentle (although a sense of foreboding of the sinister things to come runs through the tale), summerly story about the emancipation of a young woman who finally starts standing up for her own wants and needs and finds love along the way. The novel is accompanied by a long and fascinating biographical essay by Wolff’s great-niece, and if this book doesn’t sound like perfect NYRB Classics fare, I don’t know what does. They should really get to it! [Ed.—Amen!]

Lida Winiewicz, Späte Gegend (Late Region, 1986)

Lida Winiewicz was an Austrian writer and translator of Jewish heritage who wrote prose, plays and film scripts and translated works by writers like Graham Greene, Colette, and Georgette Heyer from English, French, Italian, and Spanish into German. Späte Gegend, her first prose work, originally appeared in 1986 and was republished in German only weeks before Winiewicz’s death at the age of 92 in October 2020. The book purports to be a transcript of the oral recollections of an 80-year-old farmer’s wife who describes the arduous life on a farmstead in the Mühlviertel (a region of Austria that lies north of the river Danube) during the 20th century. While it is never made clear which are the actual words of the narrator and which are literary embellishments by Winiewicz, this look at a long-forgotten way of life is gloriously curt and trenchant, but with an underlying melancholy that I found deeply moving.

Margaret Goldsmith, Patience geht vorüber (Patience Passes, 1931)

When Margaret Goldsmith’s novel first came out in 1931, it barely received any critical attention and before its “rediscovery” in 2020 it had never been reprinted. Its protagonist Patience von Zimmern, daughter of a Prussian doctor and an English aristocrat and a thoroughly “modern” woman, fits right in with the heroines of other recently “rediscovered” 1920s/1930s writers like Vicki Baum, Gabriele Tergit, and Irmgard Keun. The book follows its heroine through the great and small woes of everyday life: it tells of her first love and relationship with her (female) best friend, her rash marriage to a young soldier who, against all odds, survives his time at the front during WW1, her challenging work in journalism and later, her second career in medicine, and, most importantly, the conflict in loyalty that she feels as the daughter of two enemy nations. None of Goldsmith’s other books (she wrote both in English and in German) remain in print and even second-hand copies are pretty hard to come by, which is a great shame, because after reading this very entertaining novel I am very much intrigued by her work and life. (Virginia Woolf apparently could not stand her because Goldsmith once had an affair with Vita Sackville-West.) [Ed.—More prime NYRB material!]

Marlene Streeruwitz, Verführungen (Seductions, 1996)

When the debut novel by Austrian writer and playwright Marlene Streeruwitz first came out in 1996, the thing a famous German literary critic found most worth mentioning was how much the book talked about menstruation (too much, in his not very humble opinion). In fact, the question of the book’s literary merit was at the center of a heated argument during one episode of the long-running literary talk show Das literarische Quartett (which was broadcast monthly on German TV from 1988 to 2001), with the male critic refusing to accord it any. Knowledge of that fact alone was enough to make me want to read it, and I was not disappointed. Verführungen is told from the point of view of a woman in her 30s, mother of two, who has recently been left by her husband and now strains to make ends meet with a part-time job in a PR agency while pursuing an affair with a flaky musician. There’s no real plot, the book sort of meanders along following the protagonist’s everyday struggles, but through its close look at what some might deem banalities and through Streeruwitz’s staccato style, a horrifying picture of female lives in a modern patriarchal society slowly emerges. For me, at least, this book was a true punch in the gut and I’m afraid that not all that much has changed in the 24 years since its initial publication.

[An English translation by Katharina Rout was apparently published by Oolichan Books in 1998, but it appears to be out of print.]