This fascinates me, both the substance of the work and the writer herself.
For Historical Fiction of WWI I can recommend Sailor of Austria, which I think I first heard about on the SDMB. A novel about a submarine captain in Austria’s navy.
Another WWI book I recommend is Horses Don’t Fly. It is the memoir of a young cowboy, footloose and fancy free, who signs up with the Canadian army when the war breaks out, and winds up as a flying ace in the Royal British Flying Corp. The author was a pure-dee Western storyteller, and it is well worth reading.
I found the book of short stories “Tales of War” by Lord Dunsany to be very interesting. It was written in 1918, so it has a lot of bitterness and pathos about the recent war (and some of the stories are quite funny).
Fabulous, with some bits of humor. 4 books in the series.
I’m surprised that no one has mentioned Goodbye to Berlin, written in 1939. It’s the novel that the musical Caberet is based on. Unless that’s not the type of historical fiction the OP wants (or wanted in 2010).
Evelyn Waugh: Sword of Honour trilogy for WW2 (albeit from his particularly idiosyncratic point of view) and maybe Scoop for a satirical look at the way journalists handle a war.
CJ Sansom: Winter in Madrid set in the bleak aftermath of the Spanish Civil War.
Olivia Manning: Balkan Trilogy and Levant Trilogy - tracing a marriage through the fall of Romania and Greece, and the development of WW2 in the Middle East.
A film I saw in college is Hitlerjunge Quex, about a young lad who’s drawn into the Hitler Youth and runs afoul of the Communists in his district.
In German, with subtitles.
Quex, BTW, is German for mercury, in the sense of quicksilver (i.e., the element, not the god). Stoppel is razor stubble, which the Communist organizer has in abundance.
A link to the film:
1933 Hitlerjunge Quex : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
Sorry, here is the film with subtitles:
A couple more:
Sarah Gainham: Night Falls On The City - a star of Viennese theatre hides her Jewish Social Democrat husband as the Nazis take over, and how they survive until Liberation.
Vasily Grossman: Life And Fate and Stalingrad/For A Just Cause - life for Soviet civilians (originally censored), based on Grossman’s own experiences as a war correspondent
A good tv series for this period is Babylon Berlin. It’s set in 1929 and follows a German vice cop with PTSD from WWI trying to track down embarrassing material about his father and getting caught up in much larger conspiracies. I like that it gives an interesting view of Germany before the Nazis take over.
The TV series was, I think, an adaptation of or inspired a series of detective stories by Volker Kutscher (English translations available).
A similar series are Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther novels.
If we’re including TV series, there are World On Fire (BBC) and the German series Generation War (Our Mothers, Our Fathers) (ZDF), and of course many more from different countries over the years.
Fritz Lang’s M (1931). The Kripo (Criminal Police) hunt a child murderer in Berlin:
With subtitles.
Some more:
Robert Harris - Munich, Fatherland, Archangel, An Officer And A Spy
Thomas Keneally - Gossip From The Forest, Daughters of Mars, A Season In Purgatory, The Cut-Rate Kingdom, and of course Schindler’s Ark
Harris also wrote Enigma, which (like Fatherland and Archangel) was made into a less-than-faithful TV miniseries.
Is Sailor of Austria based on the exploits of Captain von Trapp in The Sound of Music by any chance?
Set in Britain, not Germany or France, is Danger: UXB, a miniseries about a Royal Engineers bomb disposal squad in WWII. Moments of sheer terror punctuated by butt-clenching tension.
Based? no, maybe suggested by.
Yes, Captain von Trapp was of course a real person, and as I recall does appear as a character in Sailor of Austria, but I think the main character bears no relation to any person living or dead.
A couple more novels dealing with WW1:
Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy
Sébastien Japrisot - A Very Long Engagement
Sebastian Faulks - The Girl at the Lion d’Or , Birdsong
and his WW2 novel Charlotte Gray, about an SOE agent. On a similar theme are Simon Mawer’s Trapeze and Tightrope