It took 20 years before Patrick Süskind's 1985 bestselling historical fantasy novel Perfume: The Story of a Murderer was finally turned into a movie. Director Tom Tykwer carried it off magnificently, with entertaining, sumptuous scenes starring Ben Whishaw and Karoline Herfurth.

"One of the greatest war films made," said the critics. German director Wolfgang Petersen's 1981 filming of the novel by Lothar-Günther Buchheim is set in the faithful replica of a World War II German submarine. The film was Petersen's breakthrough to Hollywood and was nominated for six Oscars, a Golden Globe and a BAFTA award.

The 1959 novel earned Günter Grass the Nobel Prize for Literature. In 1979 came the film adaptation, starring the 13-year-old actor David Bennent as Oscar Matzerath, the boy who at age three decides to stop growing. Director Völker Schlöndorff's film was the first German production to take the Oscar for best foreign language film.

Timur Vermes' 2012 debut novel, Look Who's Back, was a smash hit in Germany. His satire featured a character Germans tend not to take lightly: Adolf Hitler. The dictator wakes up in a park in Berlin in this millennium — and everyone believes he is an actor. David Wnendt adapted the book into a movie in 2016.

The movie In Times of Fading Light was released in 2017, six years after Eugen Ruge's novel tracing the life of a family in East Germany hit the bookstores. Another example of a well-done adaptation of literature, director Matti Geschonneck's satirical movie explores the last days of the East German regime with humor and tragic depth.

In 1975, two years before leftist Red Army Faction insurgents started making headlines in Germany with kidnappings and murders, Volker Schlöndorff adapted Heinrich Böll's novel The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum for the screen. The novel gives a detailed description of the social atmosphere in West Germany at the time. Schlöndorff cut right to the chase and hit the mark.

A best-selling book turned into a successful film: that's the exception rather than the rule, in particular if the book touches on a difficult topic. Bernhard Schlink's novel The Reader looks at the repercussions of the Nazi era in Germany, and how the country deals with its past. Stephen Daldry's 2008 adaptation was a strong film also thanks to the superb actors, Kate Winslet and David Kross.

This film from the early days of sound movies is an excellent example of an arresting movie adaptation of a literary work. US director Lewis Milestone brought the horrors of WWI to the screen in 1930, based on Erich Maria Remarque's novel All Quiet on the Western Front. The Nazis made sure the movie was rarely shown in Germany.

In 1971, Italian director Luchino Visconti surprised the world with his film adaptation of German author Thomas Mann's 1912 novella, Death in Venice. Visconti's movie is very close to the narrative tone of the original. The film starring Dirk Bogarde is ponderous, melancholy — and stunningly beautiful.