100 Books Like The Decline of the German Mandarins

I first became acquainted with this 20th-century classic when it was turned into a popular miniseries, and I felt compelled to read the novel for myself.

Although the narrative traverses settings from London and a great English country house to Europe and even the Americas, the inception of the story is grounded in post-WWI Oxford, where the narrator introduces us to Waugh’s memorably charming but doomed character, Lord Sebastian Flyte.

Waugh’s portrayal of the exuberance of youthful college high-jinx juxtaposed against the perils of dissipation powerfully depicts the inner struggle of his narrator’s search for love, meaning, and ultimately faith.

I greatly admire Waugh’s hauntingly lyrical prose, which vividly captures the aching beauty and mystique of Oxford.

Academic institutions are competitive environments governed not only by the zest to enrich and transmit knowledge, but also by politics, vanity, and caprices. In many respects, they resemble life at a royal court as described by the seventeenth-century Spanish Jesuit philosopher Baltasar Gracián. His Pocket Oracle is chock-full of advice, in the form of maximally compact yet hauntingly beautifully written maxims, on how to penetrate through the appearance of things. Imbued in the art of discernment of St. Ignatius of Loyola, he repeatedly singles out the essential qualities that make possible successful choices in academic life as well, such as taste, judgment, and an eye for talent. One of his aphorisms (no. 4) is particularly dear to me: scholarship and courage make immortal, because that is what they themselves are.

Scholarship, regardless of the particular field, is always a creative process. Craft and method, the fruits of a rigorous education and hard work, are essential prerequisites, but genuine breakthroughs often seem to result from some mysterious incubation: a wild dance of ideas that emerge from the subconscious, stirred up by the keen will to understand something. Only a few of them eventually make it, by way of sensual representations, to the surface of consciousness, where they are formed and articulated by logic and language. In this book, the great French mathematician Jacques Hadamard captivatingly describes his investigation into the psychological underpinnings of creativity. He stresses the role of images and emotions in thought processes. I have always liked his conclusion that every significant invention requires at least some poetic feel.

For half a century, this classic has introduced students to the ways and circumstances in which Greek and Latin texts, often seen as the pillars of any literate education, were transmitted from Antiquity throughout the Middle Ages into the Renaissance. While it is, despite its crisp and lucid presentation, a highly technical manual, it singles out, based on robust empirical evidence, the importance of tradition and unassuming daily labor in the formation and preservation of knowledge. The effects of unconscious or intentional changes in the manual transmission of ancient texts also constitute the core matter of my own field, philology. On a more personal note, I cherish fond memories of a class on Greek textual criticism by Nigel Wilson when I was an undergraduate at Oxford some thirty years ago.

Giles Milton is an extraordinary historian whose history books read like novels. Wolfram tells the story of a young German soldier who was only nine years old when Hitler came to power, raised by free-thinking parents who were not Nazi supporters, his formative years living under the most brutal regimes in history. This book explores a subject this is often ignored, ordinary German people trying to live normal, decent lives and who suffered the consequences of Hitler’s war. "I’d rather be anywhere else in the world," Wolfram writes to his parents from the fighting in Ukraine in 1942. This is a story of a decent young man caught up in the German war machine, and it is a reminder that people on all sides of the war suffered. 

This book horrified me.

As I devoured the pages, I saw a normal young German Catholic boy who loved camping and the outdoors turn into a fanatical Nazi fighter pilot revelling in the slaughter of Russian ‘sub-humans.’

Because it’s based on Knoke’s diary, I could chart his war day by day, week by week, and see his innermost thoughts and feelings. He holds nothing back, and reading his words gave me a fascinating–if terrible–insight into what makes an unrepentant Nazi.   

This book is an excellent summary of the WWII Eastern Front battles from July to November 1944 near Warsaw, Poland, through the lens of the Germans defending the front there, specifically the IV. SS-Panzerkorps, an armored (tank) corps consisting of two Waffen-SS Panzer Divisions (The Waffen-SS being the military arm of the Nazi Party in wartime Germany).

Author Douglas E. Nash’s analysis is excellent, and his experience as a retired US Army armored officer allows him to provides insights few others can regarding Eastern Front combat in 1944.

On top of this, his German language skills allowed him to carry out a higher degree of historical research than other books on the Eastern Front, utilizing primary German wartime documents to delve into events.

This book provides the reader with a clear understanding of how the June 1944 Russian Operation Bagration offensive was stopped by desperately fighting German units attempting to… show more.

Compiled from personal diaries and letters, wartime arts and entertainment, court records, military correspondence, secret police reports and Nazi propaganda ministry assessments, an Oxford professor of modern European history has written this engrossing account of the German military and civilian experience during World War II. Initial enthusiasm for the war effort during the early years of WWII, gradually gives way under the intense bombing of German cities, awareness of the regime’s genocidal activities and military losses on both fronts. In the final year of the war ordinary Germans, realizing the war could not be won, were simply determined to hold on until a just peace can be attained.

In Rachel Seiffert’s stunning 2001 novella set at the end of World War Two, a teenage girl leads her younger siblings through the ruins of a burning, defeated Germany, after the arrest of their Nazi parents.

This modern classic unearths something new from a tumultuous and much-dissected past. It redefines and gives new gravity to the term “coming-of-age.”

Don’t read it before bed, though—you might be too upset to sleep.

There are dozens of excellent books about Germany and Germans in the wake of defeat – I could mention Giles MacDonogh’s After the Reich, or R.M. Douglas’s Orderly and Humane – but Douglas Botting’s book is by far the most engaging history of the subject that I’ve ever read. It was written in the 1980s, so it is not quite as up-to-date as the more recent histories, but what it lacks in cutting-edge research it more than makes up for in narrative immediacy. It is impossible not to be moved by Botting’s descriptions of postwar chaos, of orphans hiding in the ruins, of lawlessness, starvation, desperation and retribution. An absolute classic.