A Broken Republik Germany Reading List

by Will Wilkes and Chris Reiter

There's a vast range of books on Germany, which reflects the country's importance but also how misunderstood and contradictory it is.

For an optimistic view of the country, John Kampfner wrote Why the Germans Do it Better. While it feels tendentious to us, it was written toward the end of the Angela Merkel era, before the many problems that Germany's Mutti had swept under the rug for 16 years were glaringly obvious (though we would argue that the outlines were clearly visible). That said, the book is written more as a morality tale for Britain, and the divisions and self-deceptions exposed by Brexit. And to be sure, there are doses of Germany's post-nationalism that other countries could learn from, not least the U.S.