See here for methodology, though now I am restricting the table to books actually set in the territory of today’s Federal Republic of Germany.
| Title | Author | Goodreads raters | LibraryThing owners |
| The Book Thief | Markus Zusak | 2,627,764 | 45,832 |
| The Reader | Bernhard Schlink | 215,039 | 13,555 |
| Steppenwolf | Hermann Hesse | 190,850 | 13,764 |
| In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin | Erik Larson | 205,301 | 7,847 |
| The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany | William L. Shirer | 136,394 | 8,045 |
| Stones from the River | Ursula Hegi | 95,788 | 4,705 |
| Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family | Thomas Mann | 31,239 | 5,775 |
| Every Man Dies Alone | Hans Fallada | 33,174 | 3,664 |
When I did this exercise in 2015, the result was the same, with The Book Thief top and The Reader second. The only other one of the top eight that I have read is Buddenbrooks.
I had to disqualify a lot of books here because less than half, sometimes none of the book at all, is set in the right country, even though LibraryThing and Goodreads users tagged them with the tag “Germany”. From the top, the disqualified were Slaughterhouse-Five (also set in Belgium, Luxembourg, the USA and the planet Tralfamadore); The Diary of Anne Frank (entirely set in the Netherlands); Night, by Elie Wiesel (mainly set in today’s Poland, also in today’s Romania); All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr (more than half set in France); Siddhartha, by Hermann Hesse (set in a fictional India and Nepal); The Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka (entirely set in Czechia); The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (entirely set in today’s Poland); All Quiet on the Western Front (mostly set in France); Perfume, by Patrick Süskind (entirely set in France); The Magic Mountain (set in Switzerland); and The Tin Drum (mostly set in today’s Poland again).
Next up: France, but I will skip next weekend so it will be on 8 September.
Asia: India | China | Indonesia | Pakistan | Bangladesh (revised) | Russia | Japan | Philippines (revised) | Vietnam | Iran | Türkiye | Thailand | Myanmar | South Korea | Iraq | Afghanistan | Yemen | Uzbekistan | Malaysia | Saudi Arabia | Nepal | North Korea | Syria | Sri Lanka | Taiwan | Kazakhstan | Cambodia | Jordan | UAE
Americas: USA | Brazil (revised) | Mexico | Colombia | Argentina | Canada | Peru | Venezuela | Guatemala | Ecuador | Bolivia | Haiti | Dominican Republic | Honduras
Africa: Nigeria | Ethiopia (revised) | Egypt | DR Congo | Tanzania | South Africa | Kenya | Sudan | Uganda | Algeria | Morocco | Angola | Mozambique | Ghana | Madagascar | Côte d’Ivoire | Cameroon | Niger | Mali | Burkina Faso | Malawi | Zambia | Chad | Somalia | Senegal | Zimbabwe | Guinea | Benin | Rwanda | Burundi | Tunisia | South Sudan
Europe: Russia | Türkiye | Germany | France | UK | Italy | Spain | Poland | Ukraine | Romania | Netherlands | Belgium
Oceania: Australia