Short stories
Original stories in German for each level, with comprehension questions. Tap any word to hear it, tap a dotted word to see its meaning, and listen to the whole story read aloud.
Beginner
Short stories
20 original stories written for this level, each with a comprehension check.
Der Nachbar mit der Trompete
Jana loves her new flat in Leipzig, but someone in the building plays the trumpet late every night.
Ein Kuchen für Oma
Tim, who can only cook pasta, wants to bake a cake for his grandmother's 80th birthday.
Der Hund im Bus
Every morning in Vienna, a small brown dog rides the bus all alone, and Lena wants to know where he goes.
Der Einkaufszettel
At the Saturday market in Bern, Luca can't read one word on his wife's shopping list.
Das Vorstellungsgespräch
Can has a job interview in Cologne at ten, but the tram is late and a stranger needs help.
Ein Zimmer in Berlin
Sofia visits a shared flat in Berlin and has to answer a lot of questions from her possible flatmates.
Wer isst meinen Joghurt?
In a shared flat in Freiburg, someone keeps eating Jonas's strawberry yogurts, and he decides to find out who.
Postkarte von Rügen
Mia writes to her grandmother from a rainy holiday on the island of Rügen, where something unexpected happens.
Der Zug um 7:12
For thirty years, Herr Brunner has never missed his train to Zurich, until one Tuesday morning.
Ella fährt Fahrrad
In Münster everyone rides a bike except Ella, so her ten-year-old daughter decides to teach her.
Der falsche Schlüssel
Late one night in Graz, Max comes home from a party, but his key doesn't fit the door.
Kaffee oder Tee?
Every morning Herr Schulz drinks a quick espresso in a Dresden café, but today he orders something different.
Ein Geschenk für Katrin
Katrin says she wants nothing for her birthday, so her husband Paul has to get creative.
Wo ist die Brille?
Frau Wagner searches her whole flat in Mannheim for her glasses, and her grandson in Canada helps by video call.
Anna lernt Skifahren
Anna, from mountain-free Hamburg, tries skiing for the first time in Innsbruck, in a class full of small children.
Koch 3000
A busy family in Nuremberg buys a cooking robot, but it only wants to cook one thing.
Im Fundbüro
A wet man comes to the lost property office at Frankfurt station to collect his black umbrella.
Ein Brief von Lisa
While clearing out her cellar in Salzburg, Lisa finds a letter she wrote to herself ten years ago.
Die Katze von Nummer 7
On a street in Munich, a fat ginger cat has a different name in every house.
Noras erster Arbeitstag
On her first day as a zookeeper in Hanover, Nora has to feed the penguins, and they won't leave her alone.
Elementary
Short stories
20 original stories written for this level, each with a comprehension check.
Der falsche Koffer
Back from a trip, Lena opens her suitcase in Hamburg and finds a stranger's wedding dress inside.
Oma Gisela und das Handy
A grandmother in Leipzig gets her first smartphone and uses it in a way nobody expected.
Ein Brief aus Graz
Sophie writes to her sister about her new job in a café in Graz, where she speaks German but understands nothing.
Oma Ruth springt
On her eightieth birthday, Ruth from Bregenz climbs the ten-metre diving tower that she was too scared to jump from at seventeen.
Die Schneemänner von Lienz
Every morning for a week in February, a new snowman appears outside a care home in Lienz, and a 91-year-old resident wants to know who builds them.
Schnee in Zermatt
Anna has a ring in her bag and a romantic plan in the Swiss Alps, but the weather has other ideas.
Tagebuch einer Zimmerpflanze
An orchid in Münster keeps a diary while its owner is on holiday and the neighbour looks after it.
Der Kuchenwettbewerb
A young baker from Hamburg enters a village cake competition in the Allgäu that the same woman has won for twelve years.
Der langsamste Läufer
Office worker Paul, who has never been sporty, decides to run the Cologne Marathon.
Ein Tag als Weihnachtsmann
A student working as Father Christmas in a Nuremberg department store gets a wish he doesn't know how to grant.
Das Wunder im Schaufenster
In July 1954, a whole village in the Palatinate gathers outside the electrician's shop window to watch the World Cup final on the only television in town.
Der ehrliche Roboter
A supermarket in Dresden gets a helpful robot that has one big problem: it always tells the truth.
Eine Woche ohne Handy
Two brothers in Bremen bet on who can last a week without a phone, with their mother as referee.
Falsch verbunden
Katharina dials the wrong number when she orders a pizza in Munich and ends up talking to a stranger for half an hour.
Der älteste Hund im Tierheim
A lonely widower in Kassel goes to the animal shelter to find a small young dog.
Das Gespenst auf der Burg
During a night tour of a castle on the Rhine, a light comes on in the empty tower and strange music begins to play.
Zum Anker
After three weeks of messages, Leonie and Ben arrange to meet for dinner at the restaurant Zum Anker in Bremen, and each waits in vain for the other.
Der erste Auftritt
A young band from Rostock finally plays its first gig, but almost nobody comes.
Das Klavier im Hof
Sarah moves into a third-floor flat in Frankfurt with her late grandfather's old piano.
Eine Postkarte von 1989
A woman in Erfurt receives a postcard that was sent to her in November 1989.
Intermediate
Short stories
40 original stories written for this level, each with a comprehension check.
Der ordentliche Einbrecher
A detective in Bochum investigates a series of break-ins in which nothing is ever stolen, but every flat is left spotlessly clean.
Die verschwundene Hochzeitstorte
On the morning of an important wedding, the cake disappears from a Viennese pastry shop, and the apprentice Lena decides to find the thief.
Ein Sommer auf der Hütte
In her diary, Nadia from Zurich describes a hard summer job in a mountain hut in Graubünden and a stormy night that changes everything.
Zu spät zur Hochzeit
Tobias has to bring the rings to his sister's wedding in Freiburg, but his train stops in the middle of nowhere.
Der Igel, der nicht schlafen wollte
A fable from the Black Forest: a young hedgehog refuses to hibernate because he wants to be the first hedgehog ever to see snow.
Zettel im Treppenhaus
In an old building in Dresden, a complaint about a bicycle starts an exchange of notes on the noticeboard that the whole house follows.
Die Lehrerin von Hinterau
In 1952, a young teacher from the city arrives at a mountain school in Tyrol, where the children don't expect her to stay.
Der reisende Gartenzwerg
Herbert, who never travels, finds that his beloved garden gnome has disappeared, and then the postcards start arriving.
Der doppelt reservierte Platz
On the six-hour train from Hamburg to Munich, Jakob has to share his reserved seat with a stranger the day before he meets his new boss.
Die Stimme im Babyfon
Every night at eleven, the baby monitor of a young couple in Kiel picks up an old man's voice reading fairy tales, and then one night it falls silent.
Die Bienen auf dem Dach
When the caretaker of a Stuttgart insurance company retires, an accountant agrees to look after his secret beehives on the roof.
Unterstrichen
A librarian in Lübeck who hates people writing in books starts finding secret messages underlined in the novels one quiet old man brings back.
Der vergessene Lottoschein
For eleven years, the staff of a garage in Linz have played the same lottery numbers, and this week the apprentice forgets to hand in the ticket.
Regen auf dem Mars
In 2061, a biologist from Kiel working on a Mars station slowly realises what she misses most about Earth.
Schach im Hofgarten
A retired maths teacher who hasn't lost a game of chess in six years meets a silent teenage girl in a Munich park.
Bürgermeisterin wider Willen
In a small village in Upper Austria nobody wants to be mayor, except the one man everybody fears, until the villagers come up with a plan behind the baker's back.
Die Frau ohne Schlüssel
Late one evening, a Cologne locksmith with one strict rule is called to open a flat for a woman who doesn't seem to know her way around it.
Schuhe für Paul
Berlin, 1923: as money loses its value by the hour, a young seamstress saves for weeks to buy her little brother a pair of shoes before winter.
Der Papagei des Professors
A Zurich biology student looks after her strictest professor's parrot for two weeks, and the bird seems to know the questions for her next exam.
Die Zeichnerin auf der Fähre
Every morning a shy tax adviser crosses Lake Constance on the same ferry as a woman with a sketchbook, and one foggy day she leaves it behind.
Ausgesperrt auf dem Balkon
On a freezing Sunday morning in Magdeburg, Paul locks himself out on his balcony in his bathrobe, and the only person who hears him is a neighbour he has never spoken to.
Der kluge Kühlschrank
Worried that his widowed mother in Ulm isn't eating properly, Markus gives her a smart fridge he can check from his phone, and then it starts ordering very strange things.
Der Fund im Gletscher
A mountain guide in Saas-Fee finds an old leather rucksack in the melting glacier, and what is inside reopens a story the whole village thought it knew.
Der stumme Tenor
Malte, a dentist in Bremen who cannot sing a note, joins a church choir because of a woman's voice, and keeps his secret for seven weeks.
Das Tagebuch vom Leuchtturm
In February 1962, the keeper of a lighthouse on the North Sea island of Pellworm writes his diary through a terrible storm, just as his wife goes into labour.
Omas Schatzsuche
A brother and sister in Graz who haven't spoken for five years learn that their grandmother's house will go to whoever finds her hidden treasure.
Die Fahrprüfung
At fifty-six, Hatice from Duisburg decides to learn to drive so that she can visit her new grandchild, and her driving test does not go the way she expects.
Die Kuh, die fliegen wollte
A fable from the Bernese Oberland: a young cow on a mountain pasture above Grindelwald watches the paragliders every day and decides that she wants to fly too.
Wer liest meine Zeitung?
A retired postman in Kassel with very fixed habits notices that someone is secretly reading his newspaper every morning before he gets up.
Der falsche Mozart
Valentin plays the violin in a Mozart costume for tourists in Salzburg, and one elderly lady listens to him every day without ever giving him a cent.
Der falsche Dackel
Katrin picks up her dachshund from a dog groomer in Nuremberg, but at home the dog behaves in a very strange way.
Zimmer zwölf
A new night porter in an Innsbruck hotel is told to keep one room free on one particular night every year, and he wants to know why.
Die Eisschwimmerin
After failing his school-leaving exams, a nineteen-year-old is sent to his grandmother in Klagenfurt, who wakes him at half past six every morning for a very cold reason.
Die Donnerstagsdame
A clerk at the lost property office in Düsseldorf does something he has never done before so that a young woman will keep coming back.
Der Trabi von Tante Ilse
Two days after the Berlin Wall falls in 1989, a boy from Plauen sets off with his aunt in her brand-new Trabant for their first trip to the West.
Der Hahn von Birkach
A software developer from Berlin moves to a wine village in Franconia for some peace and quiet, but his neighbour's rooster has other plans.
Das letzte Spiel
In East Frisia, a goalkeeper who has not missed a match in forty-three years plays his final game against the rival village, whose star striker is his own son.
Der Kochkurs
After his wife's death, a seventy-two-year-old in Steyr who has never cooked in his life joins a cookery course to recreate her famous goulash.
Das Geräusch in der Wand
Every night at twelve minutes past eleven, a music teacher in Münster hears a tiny melody coming out of his bedroom wall.
Die Uhr, die nachging
A young watchmaker from Zurich takes over a shop in Schaffhausen and decides to fix the old town's tower clock, which has always been seven minutes slow.
Upper-intermediate
Short stories
38 original stories written for this level, each with a comprehension check.
Das Gutachten
An impatient dentist brings a romantic landscape painting to a Munich restorer and needs her to confirm by Friday that it is genuine.
Die letzte Fähre
On the last ferry to the island of Hiddensee on a stormy November evening, a young man without a ticket tells the captain why he is making the crossing.
Die Schnecke von Frauenfeld
A giant bronze snail on the market square of a Swiss town sparks a battle of letters to the editor between a retired teacher and an anonymous reader.
Die Katze des Dombaumeisters
A Regensburg tour guide who once made up a legend to wake up a tired tour group is invited for coffee by a retired historian with some awkward questions.
Die Steillage
A burnt-out Frankfurt management consultant spends two weeks picking grapes on the Moselle and can't resist calculating whether the old winemaker's steep vineyard makes sense.
Hundertachtzig Meter Taft
In the summer of 1979, a saleswoman in an East German department store sells a polite stranger far more fabric than any camping club could need, and has to decide whether to report him.
Die letzte Deutschlehrerin
In 2041, when earpieces translate every language instantly, a German teacher in Bochum has only one student left, and her course is about to be cancelled.
Die Zeugin im dritten Stock
An 84-year-old woman in Wiesbaden who watches her street all day sees her neighbour carry something heavy out of the house at night, and nobody believes her.
Das Wasser von Altona
Hamburg, 1892: in letters to her sister, a young hospital nurse describes the cholera epidemic and a strange pattern she notices among her patients.
Der Kollege, den es nicht gab
For four years the complaints department of a haulage firm has blamed every mistake on a colleague who doesn't exist, and now the new head of HR wants to promote him.
Ein Kreisel für Oberwinkel
A local newspaper reports on a Bavarian village council meeting where nobody can agree on what should stand in the middle of a new roundabout.
Die letzte Lotsenfahrt
On his very last night guiding ships through the Kiel Canal, an old pilot sails with the young woman he doubts can replace him.
Die Stimme im Navi
The woman in Linz whose voice gives directions in millions of satnavs gets a handwritten letter from a lorry driver about to make his last trip.
Der Löschantrag
In a future Lucerne where people can have memories erased, a woman asks an archivist to give back one she deleted years ago without knowing what it was.
Die letzte Kontrolle
On the night Poland joins the Schengen area, a German border officer in Görlitz waits on the bridge for the old woman who has offered him cake every Friday for three years.
Sehr geehrte Frau Petersen
After a job rejection from an Aachen gingerbread bakery, Jonas sends a reply that the HR department has never seen before.
Ein Stein vom Himmel
After a fireball lights up the sky over the Allgäu, a retired surveyor and his twelve-year-old granddaughter join hundreds of treasure hunters looking for meteorite fragments, using his old maps instead of their metal detectors.
Sieben senkrecht
The man who writes the crossword for a Regensburg newspaper starts receiving postcards that point out his mistakes, and then the postcards stop.
Warum ich nicht mehr mähe
A Bielefeld columnist explains why she stopped mowing her front lawn and what happened when the neighbours called the authorities.
Die erste Landsgemeinde
Appenzell, April 1991: a woman remembers the day her 78-year-old grandmother voted for the first time, carrying her late husband's sword.
Krampusnacht in Gastein
A young bank clerk in the Gastein valley thinks her colleague is the most boring man in Austria, until the Krampus comes to visit her frightened little daughter.
Podium in Davos
During the World Economic Forum in Davos, a waiter from the Engadin is mistaken for a missing speaker and ends up on stage in a panel on the future of work.
Dreißig Bahnen
A lifeguard at an outdoor pool in Bamberg wonders why a very slow old man swims exactly thirty lengths every morning, counting each one out loud.
Der Fuchs, der Bürgermeister werden wollte
A fable from the Lüneburg Heath: a smooth-talking fox runs for mayor of a farmyard and promises the hens he will guard them day and night.
Der Esel hat Dienst
After wolves kill eleven of his sheep in Upper Lusatia, a stubborn old shepherd wants nothing to do with the official wolf adviser or her suggestions.
Der Mann, der Sonnabend sagte
When a bakery chain in Hesse is blackmailed by an anonymous caller, the police turn to a Marburg dialect expert who listens not to what he says, but how.
Die Organistin von St. Jakobi
A young church organist in Lübeck, bored by endless weddings, starts hiding cheeky folk-song melodies in her music, until an elderly woman in the back row begins to name every one of them.
Rheinabwärts
In her diary, a young woman from Basel records her first trip as a deckhand on a Rhine cargo ship, and the silent captain who keeps asking her to read things aloud.
Der Ghostwriter
Jonas earns his living in Leipzig writing dating-app messages for other people, until he realises that two of his clients are writing to each other.
Die alte Bestzeit
A pharmacist from Chur who has never done any sport trains for four years to beat the cycling time her late father wrote in his notebook in 1989.
Die Kasse des Vertrauens
A report from a village in the Uckermark, where a self-service shop with no staff and no cameras has a strange problem: there is always too much money in the till.
Der grantige Fiaker
Vienna's grumpiest horse-carriage driver becomes an internet star after a German influencer films one of his tours, and he hates every minute of it.
Das Konto 4471-B
A Zurich bank clerk who searches for the heirs of forgotten accounts follows the trail of a young waitress from 1966, and it leads somewhere he never expected.
Zehn Euro für Dr. Bergmann
At an insurance company in Hanover, Leonie draws the name of her stern, humourless boss for the office Secret Santa and has three weeks to find out what he might like.
Die Heizung im vierten Stock
In a series of emails, a tenant in Cologne complains to her property manager that her heating goes cold every night, and nobody can find the fault.
Ostern eine Woche zu früh
In Mainz in 1473, a young printer's apprentice sets his first wall calendar, and a tiny mistake puts Easter on the wrong Sunday in four hundred households.
Die Nacht der Kröten
A reporter spends a rainy March night in the Sauerland with volunteers who carry migrating toads across a road, among them a teenager doing community service.
Linksherum
Three days before a Viennese ball, an IT technician from Linz who has never danced has to replace his sister's injured partner in the opening, and learn the left-turning waltz from a merciless eighty-two-year-old dance teacher.
Nonfiction
2 original articles: explainers, news-style pieces, columns and workplace texts, each with a comprehension check.
Ein Dorf kauft seine Kneipe
A report from a tiny village in the Altmark, where the residents tried to raise the money to buy back their only pub before an investor turned it into holiday flats.
Reportage
Unser Auto wohnt jetzt nebenan
A father in Essen takes stock of his family's first year without a car and finally admits why they really sold it.
Opinion column
Advanced
Short stories
40 original stories written for this level, each with a comprehension check.
Grüß Gott, Herr Krawczyk
A Berlin journalist who moves to a village in the Swabian Alb discovers that greeting people there is an exact science.
Die Stadt, die es nicht gibt
A woman at the Bielefeld tourist office invites a retired physics teacher who is convinced that her city doesn't exist to come and see for himself.
Die Brunnenfrage
A village in Appenzell is bitterly divided over whether to restore its cracked old fountain or replace it with a modern one, and the town clerk has to count the votes.
Beileid, automatisch
A copywriter in Düsseldorf teaches an AI to write convincing condolence cards, until her own father dies and the cards start arriving.
Zwei Tassen auf einmal
In Berlin during the hyperinflation of 1923, a waitress notices a piano teacher who always orders two cups of coffee at the same time.
Nachtprogramm
A late-night radio host in Saarbrücken has a favourite caller who only ever talks about birds, until one night he talks about the stars instead.
Das Ungeheuer vom Weissensee
The mayor of a quiet village on a lake in Carinthia invents a lake monster to bring the tourists back, and the plan works better than he expected.
Die Wand von Hassel
A local reporter in Gelsenkirchen describes, in epic style, the last match of an amateur football season, in which a 58-year-old kiosk owner has to go in goal.
Rezepte eines Toten
A young pharmacist who has just taken over an old pharmacy in Halle is handed a prescription signed by a doctor who died nineteen years ago.
Spiegelgasse, 1916
In her diary, a young waitress in Zurich's old town describes the noisy poets who have rented the back room of her inn, and the quiet Russian neighbour who keeps complaining about them.
Die Souffleuse
On the last night of her career, a prompter in a Graz theatre who has stayed invisible for forty-one years is suddenly the centre of attention.
Lob der Warteschlange
A Cologne columnist writes an ironic tribute to the hours he spent in the waiting room of the citizens' office, just as the city abolishes it.
Das Jahr ohne Sommer
A village schoolmaster in Württemberg keeps a chronicle of 1816, the year the summer never came, and of the hunger that followed.
Was der Hund sagt
A Hamburg family buys a collar that translates their dog's barking into speech, and the dog turns out to have a lot to say about them.
Chiffre 4417
A widowed farmer in the Emmental is furious when his daughter-in-law puts a lonely-hearts ad in the local paper, until fourteen replies arrive.
Die Kritikerin
Munich's most feared restaurant critic secretly loses her sense of taste, and a young cook in Giesing is the first to notice.
Die Kartenlegerin vom Naschmarkt
A former statistician who reads tarot cards at a Vienna market gets a nervous young client who wants to know whether he should propose.
Das Alibi von Bayreuth
A Nuremberg detective who can't stand opera has to check a burglary suspect's alibi: he says he spent the evening at a six-hour Wagner performance in Bayreuth.
Das Wandbild
One morning a huge mural appears on the old school of a Palatinate wine village that the mayor wants to sell, and nobody knows who painted it.
Der Fuchs und die Kamera
A modern fable from the Harz mountains: a young fox discovers a wildlife camera and decides that being seen is more important than anything else.
Nachruf auf Vorrat
A Viennese journalist who writes obituaries in advance gets a call from a famous old actress who wants to read her own.
Die letzte Telefonkabine
A local columnist in a Swiss village mocks the removal of its last phone box, until the technician mentions who still uses it.
Taxi ohne Ziel
At two in the morning in Hamburg, an old lady gets into Emre's taxi and refuses to say where she wants to go.
Die Feelgood-Managerin
A grumpy controller at a Frankfurt leasing company calculates what the new "feel-good manager" costs and wants nothing to do with her.
Das Fräulein vom Amt
In 1928, a young Berlin switchboard operator is asked every night by the same caller to connect him with impossible places.
Dr Spitzbueb
Every year during the Basel carnival, Lea's strict banker father disappears to the mountains, and an anonymous masked singer mocks the city's bankers.
Die Elster und die Wahrheit
A fable from the floodplain forest on the Elbe: a magpie discovers that nothing glitters quite like a piece of news.
Der Marillenbaum
In a Viennese allotment colony, a retired senior civil servant writes increasingly formal letters to his new neighbour about her apricot tree.
Der leere Raum
A retired car worker takes a summer job as a guard at the documenta art exhibition in Kassel and is put in charge of a completely empty room.
Die Pilzstelle
A retired judge in the Bavarian Forest finds that someone has been raiding his secret mushroom spot, and he investigates the case as if it were in court.
Die letzte Runde
At her uncle's funeral in a Carinthian valley, a Vienna consultant has to read out the speech he wrote for the occasion, and it is not the speech anyone expected.
Die Vierte am Tisch
For forty years, four men in Thun have played cards every Thursday, and when the best of them dies, the three others cannot find anyone to take his chair.
Antrag auf Muße
In 2041 Germany passes a law that gives every citizen four hours of official idleness a week, and a logistics planner from Bonn tries to apply for his.
Niedrigwasser
On one of his last tours across the mudflats from Cuxhaven to the island of Neuwerk, an old guide is lectured by an eleven-year-old with a tide app, until a sea fog rolls in.
Die Laufmaschine
Mannheim, June 1817: a sceptical landlady writes to her sister about the strange wooden machine her lodger, Baron von Drais, has been building in the courtyard.
Der Aushilfspfarrer
While the village priest is away for eight weeks, a stand-in fills a Bavarian church every Sunday, and the sacristan starts to suspect he is not what he seems.
Der Waschbär und der Wolf
A fable from the edge of the Kellerwald in Hesse: an unwanted raccoon discovers what humans fear most and uses a hunter's wildlife camera to give it to them.
Doppelt besetzt
A dull customs officer in Rostock discovers that the star of a new TV crime series has exactly his face, and the actor has an idea.
Die Krawatte
A serious actuary from Hanover, newly transferred to Cologne, refuses to believe the warnings about Weiberfastnacht and wears his late father's silk tie to work that day.
Friedland, Oktober 1955
Eleven years after her husband went missing in the war, a woman in Göttingen finds his name on the list of the last prisoners returning from the Soviet Union, and the man she now lives with drives her to meet him.
Mastery
Short stories
37 original stories written for this level, each with a comprehension check.
Das Komma
For thirty-one years an editor in Göttingen has argued with the same novelist about commas, and now his last novel ends with a sentence she is sure is wrong.
Blindgänger
A bomb disposal expert in Oranienburg has to blow up a wartime bomb in a field, but an old woman in the evacuation zone refuses to leave her house.
Die letzte Stimme
Leipzig, July 1750: on the night the great cantor dies, a young copyist is asked to make a clean copy of his unfinished last fugue.
Stimmt
An old piano tuner in Flensburg is asked to tune a dead woman's piano, and inside it he finds two words he pencilled there fifty-eight years ago.
Die Wörterbörse
In Berlin in 2087 every word has an owner and a price, and a young trader gets a tip that could make her rich on the eve of Valentine's Day.
Der letzte Sprecher
A dialect researcher from Marburg spends three summers recording the last speaker of a mountain dialect in Vorarlberg, until a comparison with an old questionnaire shows her something odd.
Palimpsest
In the abbey library of St. Gallen, an exhausted doctoral student uses special cameras to reveal the erased text beneath a medieval psalter, hoping for a lost masterpiece.
Glück auf
On 21 December 2018 a miner in Bottrop works the very last shift in Germany's last coal mine, still angry with the son who never went underground.
Die Blutbuche
An old woman in a Mecklenburg village tells the village chronicle about the manor house she has known all her life, and about the summer of 1992 when the former owners' great-grandson turned up on a bicycle.
Der weiße Wal
In May 1966 a white whale swims up the Rhine, and a boy on his father's cargo barge watches the hunt for it, and his strictly law-abiding father.
Süßstoff
An old woman from the island of Reichenau remembers the summer of 1947, when at sixteen she rowed across Lake Constance at night to smuggle saccharin from Switzerland, and the customs officer who kept catching her.
Bericht über den Kometen
In October 1811, a Thuringian village pastor writes a dutiful official report on how the great comet has affected his parishioners, and ends up confessing far more than he was asked.
Das Kraut von Echterdingen
In August 1908, when Count Zeppelin's airship burns on the Filder plain and all Germany rushes to donate, a thrifty Swabian farmer sends the count a bill for his trampled cabbages.
Nicht lohnend
In 1903, a Berlin publisher of travel guides writes to a widowed innkeeper in a remote Tyrolean valley to announce that he will make her inn famous, and she does everything in her power to stop him.
Die Brieftaube
A retired miner in the Ruhr whose wife left him over his pigeons waits on his roof for his best bird, which has not come back from a race.
Die Kaiserurkunde
While cataloguing the archive of a Bavarian abbey with its own brewery, an archivist finds evidence that the famous medieval charter on every beer label is not what it seems.
Heiterkeit im ganzen Hause
A shy parliamentary stenographer in the Bundestag, who records every word spoken in the chamber, has never managed to say more than two words to the colleague who relieves him.
IM Lerche
Thirty-five years after the fall of the Wall, a retired librarian in Rostock finally reads her Stasi file and finds forty-one reports by an informant with the code name "Lerche".
Der schwarze Stein
During the rebuilding of Dresden's Frauenkirche, an old woman asks a young stonemason to help her find one particular blackened stone among thousands taken from the ruins.
Die Vorleserin
A bored literature student takes a summer job reading classic novels aloud to a blind old gentleman in a Styrian manor house, and starts improving the books as she goes.
Die Wäscherin des Geheimrats
In Weimar in 1823, the washerwoman who does Goethe's laundry writes him a very respectful letter to confess what happened to some verses he had scribbled on a shirt cuff.
Der Solidaritätsbeitrag
An eighty-one-year-old woman in the Emmental who was farmed out as a child labourer is helped by her law-student granddaughter to apply for the compensation Switzerland now offers.
Daktylus über Tempelhof
During the Berlin Airlift of 1948, an elderly Latin teacher in a half-ruined school next to Tempelhof airfield turns the roar of the supply planes into a lesson in metre, much to the scorn of a hungry thirteen-year-old black marketeer.
Der Abonnent
During the interval of a modern production at the Vienna Burgtheater, an old season-ticket holder pours out his contempt for the staging to a young woman at the bar.
Achtundachtzig
For forty-six years a radio amateur on a tiny North Sea island has exchanged Morse code every evening with a woman in Vorarlberg he has never seen, until one evening she does not answer.
Der Preis eines Kaisers
In Augsburg in 1519, a young clerk in Jakob Fugger's counting house helps record the money that buys the election of an emperor, and cannot find three missing guilders.
Das letzte Eis
In 2140, a museum in the Carinthian Alps keeps the last piece of a vanished glacier in a freezer, until a storm cuts the power and the road to the valley.
Nu, Herr Professor
A young philosophy lecturer from Munich starts his first job in Dresden and finds an eighty-three-year-old guest student in the front row of his ethics seminar.
Sütterlin
A retired archivist in Stralsund who can still read old German handwriting is asked to transcribe a will from 1912 that decided who got the family villa.
Der Kaffeeriecher
In Prussia in 1781, when roasting your own coffee has become a crime, a one-handed war veteran paid to sniff out offenders follows his nose to the house of a widow.
Der Akt Pospischil
In Vienna in 1908, a young civil servant at a brand-new ministry decides to close a file about a Moravian bridge that has been wandering from desk to desk for forty-one years.
Scardanelli
A Tübingen literature student who earns her summer money punting tourists past Hölderlin's tower starts finding poems in her boat, signed with the name the mad poet used in his last years.
Ein Fingerhut Rüdesheimer
The cellar master of the Bremen Ratskeller discovers that every year, on the same night, someone drinks a few drops of the oldest cask wine in Germany, and sets out to catch the thief.
Morgestraich
Thirty-two years after leaving Basel in anger, a woman comes back for the four o'clock start of the carnival, a few months after the death of the father she never made up with.
Inklusion
On the island of Usedom, a retired mineralogist is asked to examine a piece of amber with a perfect mosquito inside that a boy found on the beach after a storm, and soon more perfect finds start turning up.
Fünf Tage im März
Every spring in the 1980s, at the Leipzig Book Fair, a West German publisher's representative watches the same East German woman read a whole novel standing at his stand, and pretends not to see her.
Das Gipfelbuch
A young man digitising old summit registers for an alpine club in Vorarlberg follows a couple who signed the book on the same mountain every fifteenth of August for half a century.
Nonfiction
3 original articles: explainers, news-style pieces, columns and workplace texts, each with a comprehension check.
Das Weißwurst-Urteil
A Bavarian district court rules, in impeccable legal prose, on a retired civil servant from Bielefeld who sued an innkeeper for refusing to serve him white sausages at four minutes past noon.
Satire
Die Akademie der Tiere
A satirical fable in the old style: the animals of a forest found an academy to settle once and for all what a forest actually is, while a woodpecker keeps trying to tell them something.
Fable
Rede zur Lage des Semikolons
The chairwoman of a small Kassel society for the protection of the semicolon gives her annual speech to its dwindling members, and has surprising news.
Speech