Heinrich Böll Books

Nobel Prize winner Heinrich Böll's powerful novel about a woman terrorized by the media A Penguin Classic In an era in which journalists will stop at nothing to break a story, Henrich Böll's The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum has taken on heightened relevance. 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. Turning the mystery genre on its head, the novel begins with the confession of a crime, drawing the reader into a web of sensationalism, character assassination, and the unavoidable eruption of violence. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

These stories by the Nobel prizewinning German author were written between 1946 and 1952, but not published in Germany until 1983. They are short but bitterly exact sketches of the daily lives of Germans during World War II and its aftermath.

English, German (translation)

'Böll's novel blows a stent in the human heart. . . It feels more necessary than ever.' Anna Funder, from the introduction 'This is the best book I have read this year; not by miles, but by whole astronomical units; I am stunned by it as if by a blow. It is *astonishing* to the extent that I cannot convey to you its power' Sarah Perry, bestselling author of The Essex Serpent and Melmoth 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

This is Ireland seen through the loving eyes of a novelist and a stranger - the lilt of the voices, the laughter of the children, the smell of the wet earth, and the warm, heady friendliness of the pubs are evoked here with amused understanding and a matchless vitality.

Hitler's once great army is broken and demoralized, the end of the war is imminent--but still soldiers are rounded up like criminals and sent to the front, Jews are 'evacuated, ' guns are fired, shells explode. In this novel Boll paints war as a series of idiocies, senseless accidents, and bizarre coincidences related only through death.

Acclaimed entertainer Hans Schnier 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.

First published in 1953, And Never Said a Word is one of Heinrich Böll's finest novels. He explores the extremities of marriage with depth and compassion. Böll evokes an entire emotional world in the space of a day and a half, as husband and wife alternately relate this story of love and isolation, poverty and injustice. Weakness, as well as strength, provides the subtle emotional threads that weave the bonds of their love; married life, they discover, takes a far greater toll on all those who truly love than on those whose hearts are empty. Böll writes with a moral resonance that extracts significance from the most commonplace lives.

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.

Novel of post-war German society as revealed through the lives of the Faehmer family.