Mapped
Berlin Alexanderplatz
Alfred Döblin
Döblin's Berlin is the loud, crowded capital of the late Weimar years, mapped by its real squares, tram lines and back-street bars as an ex-convict tries to go straight and keeps being pulled under. The route runs from the Tegel prison gate in the north-west, through the Scheunenviertel and the great hub of Alexanderplatz, out to the northern asylum where the story ends.
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Buddenbrooks
Thomas Mann
A Hanseatic grain-merchant family declines over four generations in a Baltic city Mann never names but rebuilds street by street. It is unmistakably his native Lübeck: the family's grand house on Mengstraße, the Marienkirche where they worship, the Holstentor and the quays along the Trave, and Travemünde at the river mouth where Tony holidays. The map runs from the old-town islands north-east to the Baltic resort, and brings Germany into the atlas.
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The Reader
Bernhard Schlink
Schlink never names the city, but its river, old bridge and hillside castle are unmistakably his own Heidelberg, on the Neckar in the Rhine-Neckar region. A fifteen-year-old and an older woman meet here; a generation later the story reaches out to a war-crimes court near Frankfurt and a former camp in the Alsace hills.
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