Heinrich Böll

The narrator looks at the life of a struggling war widow named Leni Pfeiffer, exploring her effort to prevent the demolition of her Cologne apartment building and her role in a countercultural group rebelling against Germany's past under the Nazis and future under capitalism.

Twenty-four-year-old Private Andreas boards a troop train to Germany to return to the front; recognizing that he will not survive the war, he predicts the time and place of his death. As he meditates on the futility of war, his early battles, and his regrets, he is shocked to More ... find that he can still make friends, sleep, eat and drink-still live.

This cynical novel, adroitly composed of dialogues and soliloquies that explore the depth of Germany's "metaphysical rigor," boils with post-war Germany's corruption; no more chilling portrait of political machinations is imaginable. But politicians as pawns aren't the true focus; Boll concentrates on the power-brokers and ex-Nazis behind the scenes, those for whom politics is "just a game, a profession, a business." Central characters Herman and...

A German soldier returns home at the end of World War II. The novel follows him through the ruins of Cologne, searching for the widow of a man who died in his place. This was the Nobel Prize winner's first novel, only now translated into English.