Book cover of We Germans

Book description

Winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize

Shortlisted for the Prix Femina 2022

Shortlisted for the Prix Medicis 2022

'An impressively realistic novel of German soldiers on the Eastern Front' Antony Beevor

'Starritt's daring work challenges us to lay bare our histories, to seek answers from the past, and to…

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Why read it?

1 author picked We Germans as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

An epistolary novel written as a letter from an elderly German man explaining his time as a soldier on the Eastern Front to his grandson. The novel has both the immediacy of a wartime narrative and the introspection of a memoir. “Eat now, sleep now, march now, follow your leader — that’s what they’d demanded of us; we’d followed, and they’d led us into disaster,” the narrator says as he describes his own predicament, but it serves to explain the horrors of the regime as a whole. It resonated for me personally, highlighting the silence and shame that surrounds the…

From L. Annette's list on German complicity and resistance in WW2.

If you love We Germans...

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These Blue Mountains by Sarah Loudin Thomas,

A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.

German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…

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