Roland Bainton   Here I Stand (Lion/NAL). The best and liveliest biography of Martin Luther, one of the undisputed titans of European history.

 

Geoffrey Barraclough   Origins of Modern Germany (Blackwell/Norton). The most easily digestible general introduction to the country's history, tackling the medieval period better than any more specialized book.

Volker Berghahn   Germany and the Approach of War in 1914 (Macmillan/St Martin's Press). An instructive general picture of Germany before World War I. It chronicles the political, economic and social pressures, and succeeds in giving plausible explanations for the apparently inevitable.

Owen Chadwick   The Reformation (Penguin). Traces the German origins of the biggest-ever rupture in the fabric of the Church, and follows their impact on the rest of Europe.

Einhard and Notker the Stammerer   Two Lives of Charlemagne (Penguin). Einhard was a leading courtier in the service of the founder of the Holy Roman Empire, and provided a beautifully written, all-too-short biography of his master. Written a century later, Notker's book is a series of monkish anecdotes, many no doubt apocryphal, which help flesh out the overall portrait of Charlemagne.

Mary Fulbrook   A Concise History of Germany (Cambridge UP). "Concise" is the key word for this post-unification history, whose brevity is simultaneously its strength and its weakness.

Sebastian Haffner   The Rise and Fall of Prussia (Phoenix). A short study of the legend behind the remarkable state which forged German unity in 1871, yet vanished from the map in 1947.

Friedrich Heer   The Holy Roman Empire (Phoenix). Comprehensive account of the thousand-year history of the First German Reich.

Golo Mann   The History of Germany Since 1787 (Pimlico). Written by the son of Thomas Mann, this comprehensive study traces not only the politics but also the intellectual and cultural currents of the period.

Nancy Mitford   Frederick the Great (Penguin). Lively biography of the man who brought Prussia to the forefront of German affairs, and to a place among the great powers of Europe.

Detlev Pleukert   The Weimar Republic (Penguin). Trenchant dissection of the endlessly fascinating but fundamentally flawed state - until recently the only experiment at a united and democratic German nation - which survived for just fourteen years.

Alexandra Richie   Faust's Metropolis (HarperCollins). The most detailed history of Berlin in English, with the emphasis placed firmly on the momentous events of the twentieth century.

Tacitus   The Germania (Penguin). Brilliant series of concise analyses of each of the war-like Germanic tribes, which are often compared favourably with the author's native Rome. Some of the observations about German character are startlingly prophetic.

A.J.P. Taylor   Bismarck: The Man and the Statesman (Penguin/Random House). Britain's most controversial historian here provides a typically stirring portrait of the ruthless schemer who forged (reluctantly, in the author's view) the nineteenth-century unification of Germany.

Veronica (C.V.) Wedgwood   The Thirty Years War (Methuen/Routledge). Easily the most accomplished book on the series of conflicts which devastated the country and divided the continent in the first half of the seventeenth century.

Andrew Wheatcroft   The Habsburgs (Penguin). Wide-ranging history of the extraordinary dynasty which not only dominated German affairs for several centuries, but controlled much of the rest of Europe as well.