Books like Brandung by Martin Walser

Hermann Hesse’s Der Steppenwolf follows an alienated intellectual who, after confronting despair, discovers a path toward self‑transcendence and renewed appreciation of life.

A young German boy meets an older woman, and years later he finds her in a courtroom as a convicted war criminal, forcing him to confront personal love and the nation's haunting past.

Max Frisch’s *Homo Faber* follows engineer Walter Faber as his rational worldview is challenged by a love affair and revelations about his past, forcing him to confront identity and the limits of reason.

The Confusions of Young Törless (German: Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß), or Young Törless, is the literary debut of the Austrian philosophical novelist and essayist Robert Musil, first published in 1906. Musil's novel is ostensibly a Bildungsroman, a story of a young disoriented man searching for moral values in society and their meaning for him. The expressionistic novel, based on Musil's personal experiences at a boarding school in Hranice (in Austria-Hungary, now in the Czech Republic) was written according to Musil "because of boredom". In later life, however, Musil denied that the novel was about youthful experiences of his own. Due to its explicit sexual content, the novel at first caused a scandal among the reading public and the authorities of Austria-Hungary. Later, various prefigurings of Fascism were identified in the text, including the characters of Beineberg and Reiting, who seem to be orderly pupils by day but shamelessly abuse their classmate psychologically, physically and sexually by night.