For me it’s gotta be “Morte e Vida Severina”/ “Severino Death and Life”. It’s an epic poem narrating the journey of a poor man from Northeastern Brazil, a famously poor and segregated region that’s frequently affected by severe droughts, fleeing from his home and walking to the big city to survive the season. On the way he describes all the misery he experiences and sees.
One stanza that has stuck with me for years goes something like this "And all of us Severinos/With the same lives/Will die of the same/Severe Severino death,/The death died of/Old age before thirty/Of an ambush before twenty/And of hunger day by day/(Of weakness and plague/The Severino death/attacks at all ages/even those not born)
Heinrich von Kleist. Anything by him. There are English translations of his work (my husband loves the short stories) but he has not been well known.
His stories and stage plays are cruel and bloody and very German.
Wym "very German“?
Germany as a nation state was only founded in 1871 (after a long lead-up), sixty years after Kleist’s death, but he lived in a time that is considered formative for the idea of a German identity.
Kleist and many of his contemporaries (Schiller, Goethe, the Grimms, Eichendorff, Hölderlin, etc.) make up the foundation of the German literary canon (for better and worse) - and have been used as sources for what that German identity is supposed to be ever since. People still call Germany the “Land der Dichter und Denker” (land of poets and thinkers) which is a phrase going back to Kleist’s time.
So, he’s “very German” in the sense that the idea of “German” didn’t really exist before the 19th century and he was part of the gestation of that identity. Kleist himself was very much a nationalist in a time when much of what would become Germany was under Napoleonic rule and wrote several patriotic poems, dramas and novellas. Unfortunately, the Nazis found it very easy to misuse them for their own purposes while downplaying their liberal and republican (both not in the modern/American sense) contents.
I recommend “Michael Kohlhaas” which was also one of Kafka’s favorites.
One of his plays was also the Birthday Play of Kaiser Wilhelm II - Prinz Friedrich von Homburg. This can be seen as a seed piece for German Nationalism in the early 19th century.