German Author's

My friend has been learning German for a few years now and I would like to get him a book for Christmas. Does anyone have any good recommendations for books written in German? I know he's read a lot of Kafka's work but I'm not too sure what else he's read. I'm open to all suggestions.

If he can read Kafka he can for sure read Hesse, which is also typically modernist. Maybe try that? Likely he might have read some already though.

Yeah, I'm afraid to buy him something he's already read. Is there a particular book from Hesse that you recommend?

Brecht
Tucholsky
Heine

Avoiding the common things most people read like Der Steppenwolf, Siddhartha, and Demian, you might get him Das Glasperlenspiel.

Just going off the modernist thing, you could also try Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge by Rilke. But that might be a bit difficult to read with only a few years of German. If he likes drama then maybe Brecht's Mutter Courage or Das Leben des Galilei. These are all canonical works someone reading in German should encounter at some point.

I'll look into to these authors, thank you.
Thank you, I'll check each one of these out and see which one might interest him the most.

Throw him in at the deep end. Buy him Goethe.

Slightly similar to Kafka, pretty good and relatively unknown: „Die andere Seite“ by Alfred Kubin

Contemporary author Georg Klein is also somewhat Kafkaesque and good. As a bonus, there aren’t English translations of his work, so your friend gets something tangible out of knowing German here.
I’d recommend „Die Anrufung des blinden Fisches“ or „Barbar Rosa“ for maximum weirdness, or „Roman unserer Kindheit“ for a weird novel also containing a lot of 50’s West Germany childhood nostalgia.

Hanns Heinz Ewers

I'm considering getting him a Georg Klein book now. Those seem like good choices

Joachim Fernau might be interesting if your friend is interested in history and philosophy. And even if he's not, Fernau's satirical style, mixed with a good portion of postwar dissilusionment and cynicism, and his rather unique take on things will give your friend some good chuckles. Additionaly, I think his books were never translated into English which might make aquiring them a bit of a hassle (depending on where you live) but amazon has them listed, if you can't find them at an antiquarian shop.

Klosprüche

Some ideas:

Herbert Rosendorfer. He's an Austrian who writes very funny and strange books - perhaps Grosses Solo For Anton, a novel about a strange man who wakes up one day to discover that everybody else has stopped existing.

Walter Moers. He writes very unique fantasy novels that start out as YA but get more mature with each book. Very successful in the German speaking world, almost unknown outside.

Ferdinand von Schirach. He's also successful - he used to be (still is?) a lawyer and he wrote many short stories based on his cases. Often very dark.

Georg Buechner - one of the early democrats in Germany. He wrote a few plays before he died young. I'd get Woyzeck.

Theozoologie oder die Kunde von den Sodoms-Äfflingen und dem Götter-Elektron.- Lanz von Liebenfels,/Wien/Leipzig/Budapest 1905

Not OP, but I'm interested in Kubin. Is his writing similar to his artwork in terms of atmospere?

Dantons Death > Woyzeck; it's also pretty worth to check out "Lenz", pretty fun little novella

Canetti is worth a read. I think he was Romanian ethnically but he wrote in German.
Walter Benjamin
Susskind’s Perfume and the Pigeon were both entertaining.
Thomas Bernhard writes good cranky misanthropic stuff.

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Absolutely. He even did illustrations for The Other Side. It is very gloomy.

Lenz is one of the best German texts.

The Magic Mountain is a very good book, but I wouldn’t gift it to anyone really, unless I knew that person very well and was absolutely sure that person was going to like it.

>Absolutely.
I'll check it out then, thanks.

it's super weird how few german authors of note there are.

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Hesse - Unterm Rad
Christian Kracht - Imperium
Dürrenmatt - die Physiker
Daniel Kehlmann - die Vermessung der Welt
Ernst Jünger - In Stahlgewittern (this one is just absolutely brilliant)

If he's a non-native speaker I'd go with modernist authors, since it's prolly closest to what he learned, a few good ones:
-Mann (altho might be hard for non-natives sinces his language is so stylized)
-Hesse
-Musil
-Frisch
-Bernhard
-Döblin
-Böll
-Heinrich Mann / Klaus Mann
-Jünger
-Sebald
-Böll
-Broch
-Zweig
-Grass
-Koeppen
-Schmidt (altho I'd not recommend Zettels Traum)
-Roth

bump

Which of these is the easiest to read for a German learner that is at the beginning, think A2/B1 threshold.

tell him to buy Mein Kampf and start reading it in Berlin on loudspeaker and talking about how all the traitor Germans are gonna die. Mention that you’re gonna kill innocent families of whyte people for supporting the kikes like they do on /pol/ and then goose step over to the police station and sieg heil in front of his aryan brothers and wave the svastika flag in their face. I hear Germans love pageantry and showmanship like that and aren’t offended by open displays of chauvinistic psychopathy

Goethe is the greatest German author and perhaps the greatest of authors. Get him a copy of Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship.

Thomas Mann
Heinrich Boll (short stories might be good for him)
Robert Musil
Goethe
Nietzche
Friedrich Reck (nonfiction)

Underrated beitrag

Why Kehlmann?

Gottfried Keller -- Pankraz, der Schmoller. Great novella.

Most of them aren't PC

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Klappentext
?Ein glückliches Leben ist unmöglich: das höchste, was der Mensch erlangen kann, ist ein heroischer Lebenslauf.? (Schopenhauer)Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Ruskin, Marx, Stirner, Burckhardt, Nietzsche, Wagner, Chamberlain, Blavatsky, Weininger, Blüher, George, Ball, Spengler, Rosenberg, Sombart, Jünger, Benn, Foucault

Jünger