North German Novels

I started discovering these a year or so ago (in translation). The New York Review of Books praised Theodor Storm’s “Rider on a White Horse”, a novella concluding a book of his shorter stories - it’s set on the North German coast and is about a dykemaster whose job it is to prevent the seawalls breaking down and allowing the sea in to flood the low-lying villages.

Theodor Storm is very good at landscape, and nature, and weather, and how history is experienced in lives, and I found all the stories satisfying and involving and can re-read them to have the North German countryside and old towns come alive around me.

Then I tried Thomas Mann’s “Buddenbrooks” set in Lubeck. I’d not got on well with his “Magic Mountain” but this one drew me in immediately; I felt rather as if I was watching a particularly well done TV family saga, so good is he at rooms and clothes and furniture and people’s expressions and mannerisms. The characters are flawed and believable, there’s lots of humour and above all, you end up knowing exactly what it was like to live in North Germany then in a well-off merchant family. I was surprised at the main female character’s divorces - Germany must have been a lot more liberal than England as regards women.  Unfortunately Vintage have saddled the paperback with an inappropriate and offputting cover.

I'd read Theodor Fontane’s “Effi Briest” a long while back, and the only thing that I remembered was a journey through pinewoods by the sea, which appealed to me. I’m now reading his “No Way Back”, set in Schleswig Holstein, again with lots of gorgeous North German and Danish scenery, and tension between the more or less proper and principled Germans and the pleasure-seeking Danes.

At least two non-fiction books have come out recently - “German Genius” a big book by Peter Watson, and Simon Winder’s enjoyable paperback “Germania” - drawing attention to German history and achievements prior to the terrible events of the twentieth century. Maybe the British obsession with WWII and the compulsive stereotyping of Germans is finally on the way out.

I’m enjoying finding out about the people and landscape from which some of our ancestors came after the Romans left - it’s sometimes said that north Germans have more in common with the English than with south Germans. With some foreign novels, I have to squint a bit to try and understand where they're coming from: I was surprised to find how at home I feel in these novels - I recognise the wildlife and landscape, which remind me of where I used to live in Hampshire and Dorset - and even some of the preoccupations.