Mastery stories
Original German stories written for this level, with comprehension questions.
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