German Fiction

Four masters of German prose fiction across a century, each with a critical introduction: Goethe's Sorrows of Werther, the book that made a generation weep; Keller's comic Banner of the Upright Seven, about Swiss craftsmen and their politics; Storm's Rider on the White Horse, a dike-reeve's legend of the North Sea coast; and Fontane's Trials and Tribulations, a Berlin love affair across the class line that both lovers know cannot last. Fontane came to the novel at sixty and wrote the best German prose of his century. Fifty-six plates by painters including Munch and Menzel follow the century's streets, promenades and cloisters, the same northern world these four novelists set their stories in.