Böll, Heinrich "The Silent Angel"

1949/50



(German: Der Engel schwieg)


 

Reviewed by Marianne
from Let's Read




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".



Read my other reviews of the Nobel Prize winners for Literature.  

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