Heinrich Boll: 10 books

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...

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...

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...

Heinrich Böll’s taut and haunting first novel tells the story of twenty-four-year-old Private Andreas as he journeys on a troop train across the German countryside to the Eastern front. Trapped, he knows that Hitler has already lost the war ... yet he is suddenly galvanized by the thought that...

Anna Seghers’s Transit is an existential, political, literary thriller that explores the agonies of boredom, the vitality of storytelling, and the plight of the exile with extraordinary compassion and insight.       Having escaped from a Nazi concentration camp in Germany in 1937, and later...

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,...

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.

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....

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.

Fritz Tolm has risen to the most powerful position in Germany. With fame comes fear and vulnerability. Threats to his life are met with the all-pervasive “safety-net” of police protection and surveillance. Trapped in a house they dare not leave, where every visitor is suspect and every object...