Robert Faehmel finds his structured life threatened by an old schoolmate and former Nazi

Reprint of the McGraw-Hill translation (1970) of Boll's great novel of WWII. Cited in BCL3. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

A unique entry in the Böll library, Irish Journal records an eccentric tour of Ireland in the 1950's. An epilogue written fourteen years later reflects on the enormous changes to the country and the people that Böll loved. Irish Journal is a time capsule of a land and a way of life that has disappeared.

Cited by the Nobel Prize committee as the “crown” of Heinrich Böll’s work, the gripping story of Group Portrait With Lady unspools like a suspenseful documentary. Via a series of tense interviews, an unnamed narrator uncovers the story—past and present—of one of Böll’s most intriguing characters, the enigmatic Leni Pfeiffer, a struggling war widow. At the center of her struggle is her effort to prevent the demolition of her Cologne apartment building, a fight in which she is joined by a motley group of neighbors. Along with her illegitimate son, Lev, she becomes the nexus of a countercultural group rebelling against Germany’s dehumanizing past under the Nazis ... and what looks to be an equally dehumanizing future under capitalism.

With the publication of Tomorrow and Yesterday, Heinrich Boll was truly regarded as the spokesman of modern Germany. Boll's novel is the story of a group of families living in a house in Germany. The members of each generation - those who lived through the war, and those conceived and born during its terror - must assess their pasts and their collective futures. This moving story is the crowning achievement of Boll's extraordinary career.

Acclaimed entertainer Hans Schneir collapses when his beloved Marie leaves him because he won’t marry her within the Catholic Church. The desertion triggers a searing re-examination of his life—the loss of his sister during the war, the demands of his millionaire father and the hypocrisies of his mother, who first fought to “save” Germany from the Jews, then worked for “reconciliation” afterwards. Heinrich Böll’s gripping consideration of how to overcome guilt and live up to idealism—how to find something to believe in—gives stirring evidence of why he was such an unwelcome presence in post-War German consciousness . . . and why he was such a necessary one.