I can’t really explain precisely how a painting of the North Frisian island of Sylt and a crime novel series set in the same region of Germany caused me to write this blog post. The painting was a very recent discovery, but my longtime habit of reading German novels for fun and vocabulary building goes back to the earliest years of my path to fluency in German.

Detlev Nitschke was born in Berlin in 1935, but most of his paintings are impressionist-style cityscapes or landscapes set in the era between 1880 and 1912. This example shows the beach promenade on the German resort island of Sylt, one of the North Frisian Islands. Nitschke’s original paintings have generally sold at auction for between €1,000 and €12,600, depending on the subject, size, and medium of the work. The record price of $14,263 USD was set in 2021. PHOTO: detlev-nitschke.de

Although my American family has deep German roots on the maternal side, I did not begin seriously learning German until I was in college – way past the ideal time to learn a language (before puberty!). My main reason for studying German was obvious: I had married a lovely lady from Austria, whom I had met in the USA. If I wanted to communicate with Elke’s family in Styria (Steiermark), I needed to speak German. Although her four siblings all spoke English to some degree, her mother knew little more than “thank you” and “Hello!”. Her father had died when she was still very young.

By the time Elke and I paid our first visit to the family home and farm north of Graz, I was fairly fluent in High German, which her eldest brother and mother spoke. But I soon discovered that the local Styrian dialect was quite a different matter. Although I had trouble understanding the locals, the family and I could communicate pretty well, so I wanted to improve my German skills – in the same way Arnold Schwarzenegger, born near Graz, had to work on his English in the US.

At that time, Elke’s married older sister worked in a bookstore in Graz. She helped me select some books to read, mostly fiction, but also some non-fiction. I even borrowed some books from one of Elke’s friends. I found the dialogue in the novels helpful for learning everyday German that I could actually use. With a German-English dictionary, I would look up words I didn’t know and couldn’t decipher by context.

“The girl on the beach” is the second book in the German “Inselkommissarin” series by Anna Johannsen. The English translation is titled “Death on the Beach”. IMAGE: Amazon.com

The Kindle Advantage
Fast forward to the age of online bookstores and digital Kindle books. I now have to look up far fewer terms or phrases, but with Kindle all a reader has to do is highlight the word or phrase to get an English translation or a definition in German!

Recently the US Amazon.com bookstore has begun offering more German titles by German authors. I stumbled upon a Kriminalroman (crime novel) bestseller series written by Anna Johannsen (which also happens to be part of Kindle Unlimited). Johannsen’s eleven-book “Inselkommissarin” series is set in Schleswig-Holstein and the North Frisian Islands along Germany’s North Sea coast. The author herself has lived since childhood in the North Frisian region that she writes about. All that resonated with me, since my maternal grandfather came from a village near Kiel, the capital of Schleswig-Holstein. Although Kiel is on the Baltic Sea, I could easily relate to the similar seaside atmosphere of the North Sea coast. Plus, in the Inselkommissarin books the main character works for the Landeskriminalamt (LKA), the state bureau of investigation, headquartered in Kiel.

That main character in the series is the female detective inspector (DI) Lena Lorenzen (in German her title is Hauptkommissarin, actually “detective chief investigator”, or DCI in British English). Detective Lorenzen was born on the island of Amrum (photo below), and in the first book of the series she is assigned to a possible homicide case on Amrum, in part because she knows the island and its people, although she has been away for many years.

Aerial view of Amrum, one of the North Frisian Islands on the German North Sea coast, south of Sylt and west of Föhr. PHOTO: RaBoe / Wikipedia, CC-BY-SA-3.0 (de)

English Translations of Two Books in the Series
NOTE: For those readers who can’t or don’t want to read German, there is an English-language option. However, to date only two books in the 11-book series by Anna Johannsen have been translated into English. Below are Amazon.com links for the two English titles in the series.

The Body on the Beach: An Island Mystery Book 1 (Der Tote im Strandkorb), 2017
English translation by Lisa Reinhardt
A man is found dead on a beach on a small island off the coast of Germany. The gruesome discovery rocks the close-knit community of Amrum. In a town where nothing stays secret for long, who among them has a motive for murder?

Death on the Beach: An Island Mystery Book 2 (Das Mädchen am Strand), 2018
English translation by Jozef van der Voort
A 14-year-old girl disappears on the small island of Föhr, and Detective Lena Lorenzen is called in to investigate. When the girl’s bloodied body is found on the beach with vicious wounds to the wrist, Lena immediately suspects that what’s been made to look like suicide was in fact a brutal and calculated murder.

The 11 German Inselkommissarin Books
in order, with (year of publication)
See the links below this list to obtain books in the series from Amazon.com. Although we do not provide Amazon.de links, readers in Germany or Europe can easily find these titles by searching under “Books” at Amazon.de or other European sources.

• 1. Der Tote im Strandkorb (2017)
• 2. Das Mädchen am Strand (2018)
• 3. Die alte Dame am Meer* (2018)
• 4. Der Mann auf der Hallig (2019)
• 5. Die Frau auf Nordstrand (2019)
• 6. Der Tote auf Amrum (2020)
• 7. Die Toten auf Helgoland (2021)
• 8. Die Frau aus der Nordsee (2021)
• 9. Der Mann in den Dünen (2022)
• 10. Die Tote am Fastensee (2023)
• 11. Die Vermisste von Holnis (2024)

*Set on the island of Sylt

“Death on the Beach” is the English translation of the second book in the German “Inselkommissarin” series by Anna Johannsen. The original German title is “Das Mädchen am Strand” (“The girl on the beach”. IMAGE: Amazon.com

The titles listed above are available in paperback or Kindle editions. The Kindle option also offers the ability to look up unfamiliar words, and translate phrases, sentences or passages from German to English. Price: $3.99 per book; free with Kindle Unlimited. The German Way may earn a commission on your purchase at no extra cost to you.

All 11 Titles in the Inselkommissarin Series (German language editions) from Amazon.com (USA) – Kindle or Paperback
You get a discount by purchasing all 11 titles at once, but you can also select individual titles using this link.

Der Tote im Strandkorb (Die Inselkommissarin 1) (German language edition) from Amazon.com (USA) – Kindle or Paperback

Das Mädchen am Strand (Die Inselkommissarin 2) (German language edition) from Amazon.com (USA) – Kindle or Paperback

For the English translations, see the two Amazon links in the box above.

I hope you’ll enjoy the “Inselkommissarin” books (or others) as much as I did. This is an enjoyable way to improve your German vocabulary and gain a deeper understanding of everyday German culture.

– HF