I’d like to get some recommendations for historical fiction set in Germany or France during World War I, World War II and/or the period between, from any point of view. English language, preferably.
All The Light We Cannot See.
All Quiet On The Western Front - Erich Maria Remarque
The First Casualty - Ben Elton
A police procedural, set largely in France close to the trenches during WWI. A policeman investigates the murder of an officer.
Ben Elton was the writer of Blackadder. This is a serious book, but equally well-written.
Gravity’s Rainbow
I was going to say The Tin Drum but he may not have enough left in the tank after that one.
My first recommendation in this genre is always Derek Robinson’s Piece of Cake. It follows an RAF fighter squadron through the beginning of WWII and the Battle of Britain.
The Bernie Gunther series by (the recently deceased) Philip Kerr. The stories bounce around between just after WWI to about 1960. Except for some short sojourns in Argentina, Greece, and Cuba they mostly take place in Europe, particularly Germany and France.
Also, two series by David Downing:
The John Russell “Station” books about a British/American reporter living in Nazi Germany
The Jack McColl series about a British spy during and after WWI.
Oh wow. Those are good recommendations. I’ve read (and seen) All Quiet on the Western Front, but none of the others. I’ve been looking for something where there there is a personal or family struggle with Nationalism, like what the von Trapps went through in Austria, or life in Nazi-occupied territory. And these recommendations appear to have that well-covered.
Please keep them coming!
Definitely look into the Bernie Gunther novels, then. Bernie is a politically moderate Berlin cop trying to solve real crimes under the purview of a Nazi regime that has an entirely different idea of what role the police should play in society.
If you’re open to cinema in addition to literature, I suggest the German film Das schreckliche Mädchen which interrogates the relationship between common Germans and the ruling Nazis in WWII. It’s set after the war, though, not during, but this setting is important to its theme.
It’s inspired by a real life story from the 1970s. We meet and follow a teenage girl who becomes curious about her village’s tales of resisting the Nazis decades earlier; when she digs into the historical record, however, she discovers the facts behind the legend, with upsetting consequences. So the primary action of the film is postwar, but it clearly references the past wartime events (using a highly unusual theatrical style a la Brecht) and directly wrestles with the theme you describe, so it may be of interest to you.
It was made in 1990 and was released in the US under the title The Nasty Girl. It’s definitely one of my favorite German films of the period.
Len Deighton’s Winter follows two brothers and a cast of other characters through the first part of Germany’s 20th century, as they interact with all the major (and quite a few minor) developments of its history.
There is a trilogy of books by Frank Moorhouse centred on the fictional Edith Berry, a young Australian official of the League of Nations. It starts in the inter-war period and chugs along to the post-war nuclear age.
The books are: Grand Days, Dark Palace and Cold Light.
They are big, fat and literary. I started Grand Days but couldn’t get into it. I can’t vouch for the historical accuracy of the setting, but having just read a history of the Australian delegation to the League of Nations they said to leave aside anything you might have read from ‘more popular accounts’ [I’m sure this is used as a relative term - we’d be talking of small bunch of readers versus a a very small handful].
“The Winds of War” and “War and Remembrance” by Herman Wouk are excellent
Thank you for these suggestions, sure to keep me occupied for awhile.
Check out Joyce Faulkner on Amazon. She does mostly historical fiction. Including a a few from wwII. “Windshift”, and “In the Shadow of Suribachi” are related to WWII, though perhaps not necessarily France/Germany. “Vala’s Bed” deals with the German point of view of the war, but as seen from after the war.
She has also written/ghost written/collaberated on the stories of many WWII/Korean/Vietnam vets.
Her latest two books, Julie and Maude, and Garrison Avenue, are both based on real local scandals here in Ft Smith AR before WWI.
Full disclosure, she is my mother. I’m not directly linking because I don’t want to run afoul of the spam rules.
Some of the books listed are pretty heavy. If you want to have some palate cleansing fluff in between the heaviness check out some of the series that W.E.B Griffin wrote. He ghost wrote most of the M.A.S.H books but I was thinking more about some of the books written under the Griffin name (which also happened to not be his real name). The Brotherhood of War series is probably my favorite but WWII is only in the first book. It follows the characters from then until Vietnam. The Corps dealt mostly with WWII. Despite it being fluff, the author had a very interesting life much of it in relation to the military and he used his real life experience to bring focus on some lesser known aspects of military history. Plus the men are strong and brave, the women are beautiful and mostly virtuous and you can read each book in a day or two.
I know you said fiction. On the non-fiction memoir side I would recommend Soldat by Siegfried Knappe. He was in the German army just before the war started. He was lucky to be wounded several times bad enough to be removed from different fronts before things went horrible. He ended up on a general’s staff during the defense of Berlin and had to give briefings in the bunker. This book was used as one of the references for the movie Downfall. He spent 5 years as a prisoner in the Soviet Union before eventually moving to Ohio. It’s an insightful book from the perspective of a German professional soldier.
Every Man Dies Alone. Hans Fallada.
A fictionalized account of a true story of an ordinary, working class German couple who resist the nazis.
How about Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française, the start of a series that was tragically never completed, covering the experience of the occupation of France almost contemporaneously.
In the same area and timeframe is Le Silence de la Mer