Böll, Heinrich "The Silent Angel" (German: Der Engel schwieg) - 1949/50
I know I've read books by Böll at school. But that's a long time ago and I doubt I've read one since. I don't know why. I love Nobel Prize winners and he is one. I usually read his kind of genre. Still, no idea why I never read anything by him again but here we are.
I finally made it and read one of his books. "The Silent Angel" is about a soldier who returns to Germany after WWII. With false papers. He goes back to his old home town, Cologne (also Heinrich Böll's home town) and tries to just survive, like so many others. He finds good people who help him but also bigoted ones who only think about themselves.
A very touching story about how people want to get back into life after all the horrors of the war. Cologne was particularly beaten, probably one of the most destroyed German towns after Dresden. You can still tell today because there is hardly anything left from what stood there before the war. Just the cathedral, the rest is all built new, mostly ugly buildings erected quickly after the war so people had somewhere to stay.
Even though the novel was written in 1949, it didn't get published until 1992. I guess that shows how much influence Nazis still had at the time. Not all of them ended up in Nürnberg.
Anyway, this novel shows how the "little man" fared during and after the war. Heinrich Böll has a great way of describing every little detail without it getting boring. I will surely read more of his books.
From the back cover:
"Just days after the end of World War II, German soldier Hans Schnitzler returns to a bombed German city, carrying a dead comrade's coat to his widow - not knowing that the coat contains a will. Soon Hans is caught in a dangerous intrigue involving the will; he also begins a tentative romance with another grieving woman, as together they seek an identity and a future together in the ruined city."
Heinrich Böll received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1972 "for his writing, which through its combination of a broad perspective on his time and a sensitive skill in characterization has contributed to a renewal of German literature".
I contribute to this page: Read the Nobels and you can find all my blogs about Nobel Prize winning authors and their books here.
I've never even heard of this author! How sad is that? And my library doesn't have any of his books either. Typical. This book sounds like a good one.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad I could introduce you to him. He is one of our important post-war authors. I am sure I read "The Train Was on Time" and "Wanderer, kommst du nach Spa…", a short story in school, and I also read his "Irish Journal" at some point, long before I worte down every single book I read. Other important works are: "And Never Said a Word", "The Clown" and definitely "The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum". He died in 1985, so I doubt he is available on Gutenberg, yet.
DeleteI hope you'll find one his works, I'm sure you'd like them. He was a great author.
I have never read anything by Böll. There are a few other German authors I would like to read. I will add one, or two, of them for my own challenge of reading authors outside the English/Swedish sphere. Thank you for the tip.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad you think so, Lisbeth. My favourite German authors are probably Thomas Mann, Stefanie Zweig and Günter Grass, but there are also some good contemporary ones. Do you like to read those books in German or do you read translations?
DeleteHaha, you think too much of my German speaking capability. It would just take too long, so I would go for a translation.
DeleteI will take you up on your favourites. Thomas Mann of course, I will read his Der Sauberberg for sure. How strange that there is an author called Stephanie Zweig. I though you had misspelled it for Stephan Zweig, although he is Austrian. Will have to check her out.
Sorry, Lisbeth, I have no idea how good your German is but I thought you might have picked up some. I mean, we both are fluent enough in at least one other language than our mother tongue, so we don't necessarily have to know more.
DeleteAnyway, Thomas Mann is just great. My favourite is "Buddenbrooks" but I think you read that already. And if you haven't seen the "Buddenbrook" house in Lübeck, take a detour there the next time you're in the area.
I always thought it's funny that there are two Zweigs with almost the same surname. But yes, they both wrote in German but one was Austrian, the other German. The only other thing they have in common is that they were both Jewish. "Nowhere in Africa" is one of my favourite books ever. Have a look for all her English books here.