From the 18th to the 20th century

In 1767, Auguste Schlegel was born in Hanover - as was his brother, Friedrich, a future literary critic, five years later - but it was in Bonn that he died at the age of 77, after a life of travel that included a notable stay in Coppet (Switzerland), where he lived in the château of his lover Madame de Staël. A friend of Goethe and Schiller, founder with his younger brother of the journal Athenäum, poet and essayist (in French!), Auguste Schlegel was above all one of the theoreticians of Romanticism. Also associated with this movement is Heinrich Heine, who was born in Düsseldorf, in 1797 according to the specialists, or in 1799 or 1800 according to his own account. Nicknamed "the last poet of Romanticism", he was Schlegel's attentive pupil... whom he soon subjected to the fire of his sarcasm. An early example, among others, of his willingly quibbling temperament, and of the biting irony that would eventually permeate his work. Beyond his mocking verses, his famous disputes and his eternal polemics, Heinrich Heine left his mark on history and literature thanks to the musicality of his language. The number of adaptations of his poems by composers is truly remarkable, a trend that continued successfully until anti-Semitism - which he had so firmly opposed - put an end to it in the inter-war years. La Loreley, one of his best-known texts, was republished by the lovely Editions La Pionnière in 2020.

At the beginning of the following century, in 1814, Bonn witnessed the birth of Nicolas Martin, the son of a German and a French man. This dual heritage was to be at the heart of his translation work, with French versions of German fairy tales (by Johann Peter Hebel and the Brothers Grimm). He also wrote a number of poems collected in several volumes by the BNF's precious heritage editions. As we enter the 20th century, we cross paths with Rose Ausländer in Düsseldorf. The poetess found refuge here after the war in the ghetto of her native Chernivtsi, Austria-Hungary (now Ukraine) - where she met Paul Celan - and a depressing decade in New York. The woman who died in 1988 left posterity some twenty books, some of which are available in bilingual editions such as Je compte les étoiles de mes mots (Héros-Limite), and Cercles and Été aveugle (Aencrages&Co). The poisonous atmosphere of the 20th century also influenced the work of Heinrich Böll (Cologne, 1917 - Kreuzau, 1985), who began publishing in the aftermath of the Second World War, a long-held desire that helped him overcome his years of forced conscription into the Wehrmacht. His first novel - Le Train était à l'heure (Folio) - a veritable anti-militarist indictment, was published in 1949 and heralded a highly politicized body of work. Heinrich Böll remained a critic throughout his life, in his battles as well as in his books, as confirmed by his involvement in the Pen Club. His commitments earned him enmities... and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1972, in recognition of his acumen and the revival of German literature he embodied with Portrait de groupe avec dame (Points), the destiny of a woman - and, more broadly, a country - between 1922 and 1970. Early in his career as a writer, Heinrich Böll joined the Groupe 47, where he met another future Nobel Prize winner, Günter Grass (1927-2015), who was awarded the prize in 1999. We can't fail to mention this author, as he spent several years in Düsseldorf, where he studied visual arts, long before publishing his essential novel The Drum.

From bestseller to bestseller

It's also impossible to overlook Marie Louise Fischer (Düsseldorf, 1922 - Prien am Chiemsee, 2005), whose bibliography is so impressive - over one hundred novels, translated into twenty-three languages, sold in millions of copies! - that she can't be snubbed, even if some have judged her style to be far too popular. Although she wrote both romance and detective stories, she went on to become a bestseller in many countries, and remains inseparable from the 1980s and 1990s. Bernhard Schlink - born in 1944 in Bielefeld and professor of law in Bonn from 1982 to 1991 - also entered the literary world by writing thrillers, although he is best known today for Le Liseur (Folio), his greatest success. The story of the love between a young man and an older woman draws its inspiration directly from the Second World War, a theme that is rich in meaning and decidedly inexhaustible, since it also permeates the flagship book by Ursula Hegi, who grew up near Düsseldorf and emigrated to the USA in 1964 at the age of 18. This book, Trudi la naine - translated in 2007 by the formidable Gaalade Editions and then reprinted in Livre de Poche - is a beautiful, several-hundred-page slab of a (fictional) German town's nasty little secrets. The story unfolds from 1915 to 1952 through the eyes of Trudi Montag, who witnesses, among other things, Hitler's rise to power and the rise of Nazism..

While literature has long served as a sounding board for history, and has certainly allowed us to digest it to some extent, new generations are allowing themselves to delve into new themes and explore new genres. Such is the case of Bonn-born Jörg Bong, whose detective novels have set a new sales record, and who leads this flamboyant career under the pseudonym Jean-Luc Bannalec. Far from Germany, it's under Breton skies that he has decided to set his recurring character, the famous commissaire Dupin. A veritable craze that generates tourism in the places described by the author (Guérande, Belle-Île, Concarneau...), and has been confirmed by the audience for TV adaptations broadcast on most major European channels. His series, which began in German in 2012, was discovered in France by Presses de la Cité: the first volume, Un été à Pont-Aven, was published in our language two years later. Finally, Jan Weiler and Rebekka Endler - both journalists, the former born in Düsseldorf in 1967, the latter in Cologne in 1984 - also take a step aside. Jan Weiler has published a "humorous treatise for overwhelmed parents" ( Mon ado, ce bipède plein de grâce, published by Piranha, 2017), while Rebekka Endler has been questioning social issues, particularly feminism, since 2022 in a radio podcast. Her essay Le Patriarcat des objets, which demonstrates that the world was designed by and for men, was republished in an expanded version by Dalva in 2025.