German graded readers, A1 to C2
Every story below is rewritten at all six CEFR levels — the same plot, the same characters, the language rebuilt for where you actually are. 107 episodes across 7 titles, from public-domain classics to originals written for learners. Tap any word for an instant translation, and follow the native audio line by line.
Browse by level
German at A1
Short sentences and everyday words — your first stories in German.
German at A2
Simple past and everyday narration, still one clause at a time.
German at B1
Full narrative prose at a pace you can follow without stopping.
German at B2
Longer sentences, idiom, and character voice.
German at C1
Near-original register, with the author’s rhythm kept intact.
German at C2
The story as it was written, unsimplified.
All titles
The Gift of the Magi
by O. Henry
It is the day before Christmas and Della has one dollar and eighty-seven cents, most of it in pennies saved a few at a time. She has exactly one thing left worth selling — and so, though she does not know it yet, does Jim.
The Gold-Bug
by Edgar Allan Poe
William Legrand lives half-wild on a sandbar off the Carolina coast, ruined, alone, and lately obsessed with a beetle of solid gold he swears he has found. His friends think the fever has taken him. Then the scrap of parchment he handled turns out to be written in invisible ink.
The Thirty-Nine Steps
by John Buchan
A framed man on the run with secrets that could start a war.
Richard Hannay is bored half to death with London until the man across the landing talks his way into his flat, explains a plot against Europe, and turns up three days later with a knife in his chest. Wanted by the police and hunted by the men who did it, Hannay runs for the Scottish moors with a dead man's notebook.
Call of the Wild
by Jack London
From pampered pet to legend of the wild.
Buck is stolen from a sunlit California estate and sold north into the Klondike, where a dog is a tool and a beating is a lesson. Club and fang teach him quickly. What they wake in him is older than any of it, and it is calling from the timber.
Nebelkante
A woman died under a crane nobody inspected. The file says the case is closed — and it's signed in Jana's name.
Harbour police officer Jana Reincke pulls the file on a routine workplace death and finds her own signature on a closure she never wrote. A woman is dead under a crane nobody inspected, and the paperwork says Jana already decided it did not matter.
Swiss Family Robinson
by Johann David Wyss
Shipwrecked. Resourceful. Unbreakable.
A Swiss pastor, his wife and their four sons wake to find the ship broken on a reef and everyone else gone. The island gives them wood, water and animals enough to live; what they build from it, season by season, turns out to be less a camp than a country of their own.
Treasure Island
by Robert Louis Stevenson
X marks the spot—but the real treasure is surviving.
Jim Hawkins keeps his head down at his family's quiet English inn until a dying sea captain leaves a map behind — and men with knives start asking after it. He sails for the treasure among a crew he has no reason to doubt, and the friendliest man aboard is the one who means to kill him.