German language literature

I want to read some german books but i don't know where to start
What do you recommend?

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reading french books

>Austrian

This pic always makes me think

Kafka wrote all his works in German

fuck this gay earth

>Austrians are Germans

Nietzsche is a wonderful prose stylist. He makes German playful in a way that most people would have thought was impossible.

Goethe is also supposed to be pretty good but I haven't read enough of him to know. (Bows head in shame.)

Try GF Lichtenberg's aphorisms,or something by Egon Friedell (kinda the D.F.Wallace of his time).

Enter through the enlightenment (Lessing), then swing over to Sturm & Drang (early Schiller & Goethe), continue with the classicists (Schiller, Goethe, Wieland, Herder), catch up with Kleist and then rendez-vous with the romantics (Novalis, Tieck, Hölderlin -> Brentano, Arnim, Chamisso, Grimm Bros, Fouqé, Paul -> Eichendorff, Hoffmann -> Heine), race through the restauration (Mörike, Hülshof, Büchner, Stifter, Keller, Grillparzer, Storm, Fontane, Hauptmann), after visiting the viennese (Rilke, Trakl, George, Hofmannsthal)
move on to modernism (Kafka, R. Walser, Mann, Jünger, Zweig, Broch, Musil, Hesse, Döblin) and prepare for the post-war lit (Koeppen, Brecht, Frisch, Schmidt, Böll, Grass -> Bernhard -> Sebald)

Thomas Mann - his short stories and novellas might be easier to familarise yourself with at first than his novels.
Franz Kafka - hardly needs an introduction. entertaining. read a bit about the way his syntax and stuff works in german that doesn't always come across in translations. interesting.
Goethe - another who needs no introduction, not that I'd be able to give you one. I haven't read any of his works.
Nietzsche - amazing stylist, lightning.
Musil - start with Torless
some other fags

>>>Austrians are Germans
They're almost Slavs desu. Prussia was proto-Germany.

Austrians are german speaking italians

Brecht, Hegel, Tucholsky, Hesse, Kant, the list goes on...

Is there a story behind that pic?

How good is your German, OP? A lot of these are pretty hard to read if you're not a native speaker.

Books by Germans in English, or in the original German? Goethe's "Sorrows of Young Werther" and "Faust" are both great work of literature in English, but they're another level entirely in German. You tend to lose quite a bit in translation, but probably less for German (and maybe Russian) than for French or Spanish as a native English speaker.

Arno Schmidt

Henrich Von Kleist is great

The Duel
The Marquise of O
Michael Kohlhass

all are excellent short stories.

Seeing it all in colour makes me realize just how nihilistic and death cult-y nazism really is.

The aesthetic couldn’t be more different from the communists. More than anything, the room of every communist I’ve seen in more books than it is anything. Maybe a bust of Lenin, Marx, and Mao. A Soviet Flag, a Cuban Flag. Then posters of heroic workers building a better world.

Marcel Reich-Ranicki, the most influentual german critic (doesnt matter what you think of him, he was the most influental) created a canon of german literature. dieterwunderlich.de/Reich_Ranicki_kanon.htm If you scroll down youll find a list of novels.

The drinking milk=white supremacist thing

He was basically Germany's Harold Bloom.

>thinks Austrians speak a different language

the state of leftytards

fpbp

Nö Oida, is eh ned so foisch

Shit man i read faust in the original german
That shit was nigh impenetrable