Fictions of Germany

This book examines four pivotal works by leading twentieth-century German novelists to reveal the intimate connections between literary fiction and social reality. The moral and political disorientation of Alfred Doblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz, the cultural sterility and stifling bureaucracy of Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game, the paralysing effect of a nation's past in Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, and the latent violence underpinning Gunter Grass's controversial study of the sexes in The Flounder: each text contains a wealth of material on the social, intellectual and moral climate in Germany at the time of writing, and places uncomfortable home truths before the modern reader.