Heinrich Böll

Heinrich Boll

Ein Roman über Terrorismus, Sicherheit und Überwachung”Das ist eine hübsche Idee, unterm Regenschirm auf der eigenen Terrasse zu stehen und mit der eigenen Frau Flüstergespräche zu führen, zu hoffen, dass die nicht angepeilt werden können.“Fritz Tolm hätte eigentlich Museumsdirektor werden wollen, aber eine Erbschaft machte ihn zum Verleger und schliesslich zum Präsidenten eines mächtigen Interessenverbands. Ein Netz von Sicherheitsmassnahmen ist nicht nur zu seinem Schutz da, sondern dient auch zur Be- und Überwachung seiner Familie. Seine Kinder aber legen wenig Wert auf diese staatliche Betreuung. Sie gehören zur gesellschaftlichen Opposition, und es gibt auch Kontakte zu jungen Menschen, die als Terroristen verdächtigt werden. Überwachung und Bewachung einer in der Öffentlichkeit stehenden Familie - ein Thema unserer Zeit.

Roman

Fürsorgliche Belagerung

Böll’s well-known opposition to fascism and war informs this moving story of a single day in the life of traumatized soldier Robert Faehmel, scion of a family of successful Cologne architects, as he struggles to return to ordinary life after the Second World War. An encounter with a war-time nemesis, now a power in the reconstruction of Germany, forces him to confront private memories and the wounds of Germany’s defeat in the two World Wars.

Billiards at Half-Past Nine

صورة جماعية مع سيدة

Fotografta Kadin da Vardi

The hauntingly beautiful first novel by Nobel Prize winning author Heinrich Boll Twenty-four-year-old Andreas, a disillusioned German soldier, is travelling on a troop train to the Eastern Front when he has an awful premonition that he will die in exactly five days. As he hurtles towards his death, he reflects on the chaos around him - the naïve soldiers, the painfully thin girl who pours his coffee, the ruined countryside - with sudden, heart-breaking poignancy. Arriving in Poland the night before he is certain he will die, he meets Olina, a beautiful prostitute, and together they attempt to escape his fate... 'His work reaches the highest level of creative originality and stylistic perfection' Daily Telegraph 'Boll combines a mammoth intelligence with a literary outlook that is masterful and unique' Joseph Heller, author of Catch-22 'My most-admired contemporary novelist' John Ashbery 'From the moment I stepped on board the troop train with Private Andreas, concerns pertaining to my own world fell away completely. Holding this impelling book is tantamount to holding the young soldier's fate in one's hands. It is impossible to let go.' Claire-Louise Bennett, author of Pond

The Train Was on Time

Returning to the ruins of post-World War II Cologne, Hans finds his cynicism fading through his healing relationships with the Church and with his new love, Regina

A Novel

The Silent Angel

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.

The Clown

A vivid account of growing up poor, rebellious, and anti-Fascist in Nazi Germany What’s to Become of the Boy? is a spirited, insightful, and wonderfully sympathetic memoir about life during wartime written with the characteristic brilliance by one of the 20th-century’s most celebrated authors. It is both an essential autobiography of the Nobel Prizewinning author and a compelling memoir of being young and idealistic during an age of hardship and war. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Or, Something to Do with Books

What's to Become of the Boy?

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. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Group Portrait with Lady

Includes the full German text, accompanied by German-English vocabulary. Notes and a detailed introduction in English put the work in its social and historical context.

Ansichten Eines Clowns

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.

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.

Irish Journal

A young woman's association with a hunted man makes her the target of a journalist determined to grab headlines by portraying her as an evil woman. As the attacks on her escalate and she becomes the victim of anonymous threats, Katharina sees only one way out of her nightmare.

How Violence Develops and where it Can Lead

The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum

The definitive short story collection by the Nobel Laureate and master of the form These diverse, psychologically rich, and morally profound stories explore the consequences of war on individuals and on an entire culture. The Collected Stories of Heinrich Böll provides readers with the only comprehensive collection by this master of the short-story form. Includes all the stories from Böll’s The Mad Dog, Eighteen Short Stories, The Casualty, and The Stories of Heinrich Böll. A Nobel Laureate, Böll was considered a master 20th century literature, and The Collected Stories of Heinrich Böll contains some of his finest work. From the Trade Paperback edition.

The Collected Stories of Heinrich Boll

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.

Tomorrow and Yesterday

18 Stories

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature In this collection of stories, written between 1938 and 1945, Heinrich Böll (1917-1985) recalls Erich Maria Remarque in his ability to depict war and its psychological aftermath. As in The Clown or Billiards at Half-Past Nine, the stories in The Mad Dog demonstrate Böll's early and continuing commitment to certain basic themes: the religious impulse toward meaning in the midst of human chaos, the hope love offers to those for whom all else seems lost, and the enduring possibility of an ethical core of action in a maelstrom of personal and political corruption.

Stories

The Mad Dog

Und Sagte Kein Einziges Wort

Depicting German life from WW1 until the early 1970s, Boll's novel follows Leni Pfeiffer and her illegitimate son, Lev, as they fight against the demolition of their Cologne apartment building.

Heinrich Boll

Books

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