Elizabeth von Arnim   Elizabeth and her German Garden (Virago), Elizabeth in Rügen (Virago). Although billed as novels, these are effectively autobiographical works by Katherine Mansfield's cousin, an Australian who married a German aristocrat and went to live on his Pomeranian estates.

 

Sybille Bedford   A Legacy (Penguin). Semi-autobiographical novel about two German families - one Berlin, Jewish and mercantile, the other rural, Catholic and aristocratic - improbably united by marriage. Full of sparkling dialogue and richly comic episodes.

Erskine Childers   The Riddle of the Sands (Wordsworth). Set against the background of the Great Naval Race in the run-up to World War I, this is generally regarded as the first modern spy novel. The authentic descriptions of the Friesian islands give it a strong local colour.

Daniel Defoe   Memoirs of a Cavalier (OUP). The first half of this novel is set in the Germany of the Thirty Years War, and offers vivid descriptions of some of the key battles: indeed the book is so lifelike that Defoe was able to pass it off as a true autobiography of a soldier of fortune.

Thomas de Quincey   Klosterheim (Woodbridge Press). The only novel by the celebrated opium eater, this spooky Gothic fantasy again uses the backdrop of the Thirty Years War, but (in contrast to Defoe) is told from the point of view of the Catholic side.

Richard Hughes   The Fox in the Attic, The Wooden Shepherdess (Harvill). The most tactiturn of writers, Hughes established an enormous literary reputation on a handful of works, including these first two parts of an unfinished trilogy about an Anglo-German family in the years following World War I. Focusing heavily on the fatal attraction of the Nazis, each mixes fictional episodes with vivid descriptions of real-life events, including Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch and the Night of the Long Knives.

Christopher Isherwood   Mr Norris Changes Trains, Goodbye to Berlin (Methuen/Norton). Set in the decadent atmosphere of the Weimar Republic, these stories brilliantly evoke the period and bring to life some classic Berlin characters; they subsequently formed the basis of the films I Am a Camera and Cabaret . See also Christopher and his Kind (Methuen), a fairly dire autobiographical product of the author's declining years which is nonetheless of interest for describing the true-life events and people on which the stories were based.

Jerome K. Jerome   Three Men on the Bummel (Penguin). Sequel to the (deservedly) more famous Three Men in a Boat , this features the same trio of feckless English travellers taking a cycling holiday through Germany at the turn of the twentieth century. The second half of the book features plenty of entertaining anecdotes, with opinions bandied about on every conceivable subject. Diary of a Pilgrimage (Alan Sutton) is an account of the same author's visit to see the Oberammergau Passion Play.

John Le Carré   A Small Town in Germany (Coronet/Dell). Vintage spy novel set in 1960s Bonn. The then recently built Berlin Wall is the setting for both the beginning and ending of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (Coronet), Le Carré's best-known Cold War fiction.

Katherine Mansfield   In a German Pension (Penguin). One of the author's earliest works, this is a collection of short stories set in early twentieth-century Bavaria. Funny but often acerbic too.

Robert Muller   The World That Summer (Sceptre). A beautifully written novel based on the author's own experience as a half-Jewish boy growing up in Hamburg during the Third Reich, with all the inevitable conflicts that involved.

Rudolph Erich Raspe   The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (Dedalus/Hippocrene). The outrageously exaggerated humorous exploits of the real-life Baron Münchhausen were embroidered yet further by Raspe and first published in English. Copies with the classic nineteenth-century engravings of Gustave Doré can often be found in remainder and secondhand shops.

Stephen Spender   The Temple (Faber & Faber). Set in Hamburg and the Rhineland during the Weimar Republic years, this makes a fascinating comparison with the closely related works of Isherwood, who is actually one of the main characters. Because of its explicit homosexuality, it could not be published at the time, and remained in draft manuscript until a few years ago.

Anthony Trollope   Linda Tressel (OUP). One of the Victorian master novelist's shorter full-length works, a powerful psychological study, set against the backdrop of Nürnberg, of the crushing of a young woman's spirit by her bigoted aunt.