Every couple of months a friend in London asks me the same thing: is there anything funny and German about dating that she could actually read? And every time I go through my shelf and come back with the same answer. Yes, plenty, but you would need to learn German first. So here is the list I keep sending her, in the hope that a translator or a publisher stumbles over it one day. These are five books about dating, written in German, and as far as I can tell not one of them has an English edition yet. I have checked, and I will check again before this goes live.
1. Isobel Markus: Dating-Roman
Two women in their mid-forties, one flat in Berlin, seven dates in one week. One of them is looking for someone who simply fits, the other one wants the opposite of commitment, and both of them learn more about themselves than about the men across the table. Markus writes in short, quick scenes that feel like being told the story over a glass of wine, and the book was picked as WDR 5’s book of the week in the summer of 2024. It was published by mikrotext, a small Berlin press, which is probably one reason nobody abroad has noticed it yet.
2. Anika Decker: Zwei vernünftige Erwachsene, die sich mal nackt gesehen haben
The title translates roughly as “Two sensible adults who once saw each other naked”, and that already tells you the tone. Decker wrote the screenplays for some of the biggest German romantic comedies of the last twenty years, and this is her first novel: Nina, forty-nine, divorced with two children, falls for David, who is twenty-nine, and has to work out whether that is a midlife crisis or simply her life. It is sharper than the cover suggests, with a side plot about power in the film business that hits harder than the jokes.
3. Julia Karnick: Man sieht sich
If you liked One Day, this is your book. Robert falls for Frie in 1988 when he joins her class at a school in Hamburg, and for the next thirty-five years the timing is always wrong, right up to the class reunion in 2022. It was a Spiegel bestseller in Germany, it is set between Hamburg and the Baltic coast, and it has the kind of long, patient structure that translates well because it does not depend on wordplay. The title means “See you around”, which is exactly what these two keep saying to each other.
4. Anna Dushime: 1000 letzte Dates
Strictly speaking this is the one non-novel on the list, so forgive me for cheating. Dushime, a journalist and presenter in Berlin, went back to dating apps after twelve years and a separation, as a single mother in her mid-thirties, and wrote down what happened, from a McDonald’s car park to bars in Berlin to a trip to Kigali. What makes it worth translating is not the dates themselves but what she does with them: the book turns into an argument about why the standard two-person relationship might not be the goal at all. It came out in autumn 2025 and started a proper discussion here.
5. Gero Wenderholm: Manfred mi Amor
The newest title on the list, out on 22 October 2026 with a small Hamburg publisher, and the only one of the five told from a man’s point of view. Our narrator is dating his way through St. Pauli, in real bars and on real streets you could visit tomorrow, with his own personal Cupid called Manfred as a second voice in his head, commenting on every swipe and every awkward silence. I read an early copy in spring and wrote about it here; it is a comic novel first and a love story second, and the Hamburg setting alone deserves an English audience.
Why none of these has crossed the Channel yet
I have my theories. Comedy is hard to sell in translation, the German book market is big enough that publishers do not need to look abroad, and dating novels from Germany are not what foreign editors expect to find in Frankfurt. Still, three of these five are about people over forty trying again, which is not exactly a niche audience in Britain either.
If you read German, all five are easy to find. If you do not, and you happen to work in publishing, you know where to look. And if I have missed a German dating novel that you think belongs on this list, tell me in the comments. My friend in London is still waiting.
