ERNST ANSCHÜTZ (1780–1861) is best known for his reworking of August Zarnack’s 1820 love poem, “O Tannenbaum,” into the Christmas carol known today. Anschütz was also a composer, music teacher, and choirmaster, who set to music, among many other poems, Wilhelm Hey’s classic Christmas carol “Alle Jahre wieder,” although his is not the most common melody.

HEINRICH BÖLL (1917–1985) was injured four times as a soldier in World War II, and taken prisoner in 1945. These early experiences shaped his long career as an antiwar novelist critical of authority and devoted to individual experience, usually writing in the first person. Several of Böll’s novels were adapted for film, and he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1972.

ILSE FRAPAN (1849–1908) was the pseudonym of Ilse Levien, beloved for her children’s literature and plays. She married Armenian author Iwan Akunian and took his name, but lived from 1883 with the artist Emma Mandelbaum, with whom she made a death pact after learning of a terminal illness in 1908.

JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE (1749–1832) is widely considered the greatest poet of the German language. Goethe was born to wealth in Frankfurt and raised to nobility in Weimar, where he settled. He became renowned in his lifetime both for his poetry and his first two novels, The Sorrows of Young Werther and Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship.

THE BROTHERS GRIMM, JACOB LUDWIG KARL GRIMM (1785–1863) and WILHELM CARL GRIMM (1786–1859) were the foremost among many German collectors and authors of folktales. The brothers spent their lives together, from their childhood in Hesse to their careers in civil parliament and at the University of Berlin. In their last years, the Grimms devoted their time to work on a dictionary of the German language, which was left unfinished.

HEINRICH HEINE (1797–1856) was born Harry Heine to a Jewish family in Düsseldorf. Heine failed in an early business venture as well as his legal education. Heine’s 1827 Book of Songs was well received and earned him some celebrity, but his great body of critical prose was largely ignored. After the July Revolution of 1830, Heine moved to Paris, where he stayed for the rest of his life.

HERMANN HESSE (1877–1962) grew up well educated by his family, which included missionaries to India and orientalists studying the same nation. Hesse began his career as a poet and novelist in the Romantic tradition, but after his own journey to India he too focused his creative output on an understanding of Indian life and religion. His most well-known works, the novels Siddhartha and Steppenwolf, evince this familial fascination. Hesse received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1946.

E.T.A. HOFFMANN (1776–1822) was born Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann, but changed his third name to Amadeus in homage to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, whom he greatly admired. Hoffmann drew, painted portraits, and composed music, but he found the most success in writing, first music criticism, and then, to great acclaim, short fiction and novels.

ERICH KÄSTNER (1899–1974) was a greatly successful children’s author, best known to this day for his book Emil and the Detectives. Several of his novels have been adapted for screen. Kästner was nominated four times for the Nobel Prize in Literature and was awarded the international Hans Andersen Prize for children’s literature in 1961.

THOMAS MANN (1875–1955) was among the most renowned novelists of the twentieth century and received the 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature. Buddenbrooks, his first novel, published in 1901, found great success in Germany. Mann, however, was deprived of German citizenship in 1936 by the Nazi regime and eventually sought refuge in the United States before living his final years in Switzerland.

RAINER MARIA RILKE (1875–1926) was the author of twelve volumes of poetry, including the world-renowned Book of Hours, Duino Elegies, and Sonnets to Orpheus, as well as the novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge and the book of correspondence Letters to a Young Poet. Rilke is one of the most influential poets of the twentieth century, having inspired W. H. Auden, W. S. Merwin, and John Ashbery, as well as novelists like Thomas Pynchon.

PETER ROSEGGER (1843–1918) was born in rural poverty and began to write while a tailor’s apprentice. Along with German novels including Manuscripts of a Forest-School Master and a collection of stories for “the young” (people between fifteen and seventy years old, by Rosegger’s definition), Rosegger also wrote poems and stories in his native Styrian dialect.

JOSEPH ROTH (1894–1939) was born in Brody in Eastern Ukraine, just west of Russia, but studied in and fought for Austria during World War I. The details of his biography are unclear due to Roth’s tendency to distort his experiences when describing them. He wrote his greatest work, seven novels including Job and Radetzky March, in the 1920s and early 1930s, and became a great expatriate writer in Paris from 1933 until his death in 1939.

ARTHUR SCHNITZLER (1862–1931) lived his whole life in Vienna, where he studied and practiced medicine, following in the footsteps of his father, a successful Jewish doctor, before making a career in writing. He was most successful as a playwright, although he was also acclaimed for his novellas, including Dying, Fräulein Else, and Dream Story.

WOLFDIETRICH SCHNURRE (1920–1989) grew up in Frankfurt and moved to Berlin in 1928. He was conscripted and fought for the Nazi Wehrmacht in World War II, ending in a penal battalion for attempted desertion. After his return to Berlin in 1946 Schnurre co-founded Gruppe 47, but left the literary group in 1951. A perennial outsider and bitter critic, Schnurre became best known for his aphoristic short stories.

PETER STAMM (1963– ) is the Swiss author of eleven novels, along with several short story collections, plays, and radio dramas. Several of his works have been translated into English. He has received several German language literary prizes, and was short-listed for the 2013 Man Booker International Prize for his full body of work.

HELENE STÖKL (1845–1929) was born Helene Boeckel and wrote under the pseudonym Constanze von Franken, Joconde. Stökl was a schoolteacher as well as a children’s writer known for her Backfischromane (novels for teenage girls) and her Handbook of Good Style and Breeding.

MARTIN SUTER (1948– ) is a novelist, screenwriter, and newspaper columnist born in Zurich, Switzerland. He has written a dozen novels, many of them bestsellers in Europe and translated into thirty-two languages, including The Last Weynfeldt, as well as Allmen and the Dragonflies and its sequel Allmen and the Pink Diamond. Suter lives with his family in Zurich.

KURT TUCHOLSKY (1890–1935) was a journalist best known in his time for his satirical poems and songs. As a Jewish left-wing writer, Tucholsky had his citizenship revoked in 1933, and his books burned by the Nazi party. He took his own life near Gothenburg, Sweden, in 1935.