100 Books Like Martin Buber

This book, unique in its construction, gave me a deeper insight into this leading author of the 20th century. We all know and may use the term “Kafkaesque” we don’t necessarily know from whence the term and its experience comes. This biography, drawing from Kafka’s own writings, documents his life in his own words. Glatzer has masterfully edited excerpts from the writer’s diaries, letters, and published works to create an autobiography that Kafka “contemplated but never wrote.” Kafka’s world view, the Kafkaesque, is vividly evoked.

This remarkable biography has been hugely important to me in the understanding of the great German writer and critic Walter Benjamin. His essays, particularly on the 19th century Arcades, were the basis of my study, "A Human Comedy, Physiognomy and Caricature in 19th century Paris". Eiland and Jennings biography, based on enormous research, introduce us to this complex and enigmatic character and his brilliant criticism.

They provide a revealing portrait of his brief life in the shadow of European catastrophe. Their consummate understanding of Benjamin’s complex layered work gives new insight into this highly influential thinker. A scholarly work of the first order, written with wisdom and  compassion.

I met Svetlana in the last two years of her life and was deeply impressed by her brilliance in literature and the history of ideas and cultures. She died, tragically, in her mid 50s cutting short her extraordinary career, from childhood and youth in Soviet Russia to her stellar career as a Harvard professor of comparative literature. Of her seven books, this highly original study of nostalgia has been particularly important.

A ground breaking study about longing in its positive and negative forms, focusing on post-communist cities such as St. Petersburg, Moscow and Berlin, and writers Nabokov, Brodsky, and Kabakov. Erudite, brilliant, and witty, this is a great cross-genre study of our modern condition.

In this time of violence and rise of racism, authoritarianism, the Holocaust, the question of evil, its sources, its manifestations matter to me, and anyone of conscious. Glatzer lived through the rise of Nazism and Communism, and, as a person of religious faith, had to contend with the question of evil in our world today, and its challenges to religious belief. This book grew out of a course Prof. Glatzer taught over the years to thousands of students.

Job and the problem of evil was a central concern for Glatzer, as a scholar and as a humanist. In this book he compiles modern commentaries on the theme of Job, from Judaic, Christian and general philosophical tradition, including Kierkegaard and Martin Buber. In his lengthy introduction, Glatzer traces the interpretations from the Church Fathers, the medieval rabbis, and classical philosophers. 

Probably this is my favourite and by far the saddest.

The life of Friedich Nietzsche is absolutely essential to understanding his work – perhaps to a greater extent than in any other philosopher. Everything is told here, from the time of his friendship with Wagner, his personal and physical crises and his failed attempts at marriage.

Prideaux's book reads like a novel, although Nietzsche's life is itself a tragic novel. Although it is not a detailed analysis of Nietzsche's Philosophy, this book helps to better understand the work of an essential philosopher to understand the current era. 

Fiction can help parents and children put our situations into perspective. During lockdown, my 10-year-old and I treasured some rare moments of calm reading Judith Kerr’s book.

This classic children’s book tells the story of a Jewish family’s escape from Nazi Germany and subsequent exile in Switzerland and France. It surveys some of the most dramatic events of the 20th century with a convincing child’s-eye view and reassures us that a loving family can survive and even thrive in the very worst of times.

The coming of the Third Reich in 1933 left Klemperer, a cash-strapped Jewish scholar, without his teaching job in a German university, but somehow sheltered from the worst excesses of Nazism due to his marriage to an “Aryan” German woman. His diaries are a window to the daily life of a childless middle-aged couple that observes world-shaking events from close proximity, while worrying about debts and the high costs of keeping the family car, Klemperer's most cherished possession. 

Peter Gay was a child in Nazi Berlin in the 1930s. I read his book to see what life was like there while writing my third novel, much of which takes place in Nazi Berlin. Gay was an academic historian but this memoir is deeply personal, laced with self-deprecating humour. His assimilated life (he and his father were staunch atheists) was relatively unaffected by the regime until 1933 when he became a Jew overnight by law. The Nazis quickly stripped the Jews of all rights, culminating in the violent Kristallnacht in 1938. He and his parents managed to escape to the U.S. six months later. Many of his relatives were killed. The underlying question in the book: why didn’t his family—and by extension other Jewish families—leave right after 1933 when Nazi plans became clear?

Written in just four weeks, this book pulsates with fury and is all the more poignant when you know its young Jewish author died after his ship was sunk in the war.

Otto Silbermann is a Jewish businessman on the run as his world collapses around him, and he slowly realises his homeland is enemy territory. It’s chilling and devastatingly real.

This idiosyncratic biography of Rahel Levin Varnhagen, a 19th-century German-Jewish Berlin literary salon hostess may at first seem esoteric to the general reader. A prickly, contradictory character, Arendt’s portrayal of Rahel’s outsider status as a Jew in a largely hostile Christian society, her proto-feminist self-affirmation of her womanhood at a time when women were essentially groomed for marriage, and her paradoxical mix of intellectual self-assurance and crippling emotional insecurities make for a riveting read. You don’t have to be Jewish or a woman to appreciate the complexities of this prototypical Berliner.