Germany is a book country: With around 95,000 titles published or re-published annually, it is one of the world’s leading book nations. The licenses for almost 9,000 German books are sold to foreign companies annually. In the fall of each year, the publishing world gathers in Germany at the world’s largest meeting of the trade, the International Frankfurt Book Fair. Held each spring, the Leipzig Book Fair is a smaller event that has now become well established.

Despite the Internet and TV, Germans still love to read. A lot of water has recently passed under the literary bridge. Although the generation of leading post-war German authors such as Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Siegfried Lenz, Christa Wolf and Literature Nobel Prize winner Günter Grass is still revered, nonetheless, at the beginning of the 21st century their work no longer stands for aesthetic innovation.

Whereas after the Second World War there was a quest for moral answers and, following on from 1968, a preponderance of social analyses, the years following the fall of the Wall were defined by mass culture, whereby even minor events became major, and authors turned into pop stars you could actually meet. And today? What is the dominant force in the German Book market? Writers such as Sten Nadolny, Uwe Timm, F. C. Delius, Brigitte Kronauer and Ralf Rothmann, who emerged before the 1990s, honor the continuation of high-quality narrative traditions. The anguish of present- day life, art as a last refuge for self-assertion: Botho Strauss is moving in this direction.

While the literature of the younger generation was less intensively read in the 1980s and 1990s, with the exception of Patrick Süskind’s international bestseller “Perfume” and Bernhard Schlink’s “The Reader”, since the beginning of the new millennium things have changed noticeably. Today, there is a new thirst to tell stories, with authors such as Daniel Kehlmann, Thomas Brussig, Katharina Hacker, Julia Franck and Ilja Trojanow also captivating German readers, who are now dedicated to German literature almost more than ever before. Clear proof of this are the number of copies published of Kehlmann’s “Measuring the World”, a novel which in 2006 was one of the world’s best-selling books, and Trojanow’s “Der Weltensammler”. As regards books for children and young people, one of the most successful authors is Cornelia Funke (“Inkheart”). The German Book Prize ensures the winners greater national and international exposure.

What is striking is that the former lines dividing highbrow literature and entertaining works are becoming blurred. The in-label in the review pages is “new legibility. Gone are the days of a close link between politics and literature. Dreams of revolt and obstinacy still abound. What counts, however, is authenticity. The functions have shifted and perceptions changed because there is a lack not only of Authors producing ambitious literature for society, but also of readers that wish to read it.