Heinrich Böll

The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, or: how violence develops and where it can lead (original German title: Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum oder: Wie Gewalt entstehen und wohin sie führen kann, pronounced [diː fɛʁˈloːʁənə ˈʔeːʁə deːɐ̯ kataˈʁiːnaː ˈbluːm ˈʔoːdɐ viː ɡəˈvalt ʔɛntˈʃteːən ʔʊnt voˈhɪn ziː ˈfyːʁən ˈkan]) is a 1974 novel by Heinrich Böll. The story deals with the sensationalism of tabloid news and the political climate of panic over Red Army Faction terrorism in the 1970s Federal Republic of Germany. The main character, Katharina Blum, is an innocent housekeeper whose life is ruined by an invasive tabloid reporter and a police investigation when the man with whom she has just fallen in love turns out to be wanted by the police because of a bank robbery. The book's fictional tabloid paper, Die Zeitung (The Newspaper), is modelled on the actual German Bild-Zeitung. (Source: [Wikipedia](

The Silent Angel is a haunting love story set amid the ruins of a bombed-out city, which is in fact Cologne but has been compared by the critics today to destroyed Sarajevo, Beirut, and Belfast. Suppressed in Germany for over forty-one years, the book has quickly become a major literary event and a bestseller in Europe, for it was Nobel laureate Heinrich Boll's first book, a work that was originally judged too strong for German readers still suffering from the ravages of war. The story begins with the return of a hardened and cynical soldier, Hans Schnitzler, who quickly falls into a dangerous web of financial and personal intrigues as he searches for the widow of a comrade. He meets Regina Unger, another war widow who has just lost her baby, and their ensuing love story, set among the ruins of the city, will force readers to recall Nathan and Sophie in William Styron's Sophie's Choice. Yet Boll's characters reach a completely different ending, for in Regina and in his reexposure to the church, Hans Schnitzler finds a redemptive purpose for living, and his psychic and physical recovery take on heightened meaning as he wanders through the "naked destruction, desolate and terribly empty, as if the breath of the bomb still hung in the air.". Fans of Boll's classic works and new readers alike will be startled by the power of the novel's language, particularly by Boll's use of irony and imagery. For the remarkable language for this book, so ably translated by Breon Mitchell, echoes the power of earlier German writers like Franz Kafka and Max Brod yet also serves as the first harbinger of a generation of postwar literature that was still to come.

At the center of a terrorized society buttressed by oppressive police protection and surveillance is the Tolm family, Fritz, the father, the elected head of the Association, and the children, part of the counter-culture.

After being drawn into the Second World War to command retreating German forces despite his anti-Nazi feelings, Faehmel struggles to re-establish a normal life at war's end by creating a rigorous routine for himself, which includes a daily game of billiards.

Rip Van Winkle / Washington Irving [Young Goodman Brown]( / Nathaniel Hawthorne [Fall of the House of Usher]( / Edgar Allan Poe The lightning-rod man / Herman Melville The diamond lens / Fitzjames O'Brien The celebrated jumping frog of Calaveras County / Mark Twain The outcasts of Poker Flat / Bret Harte [Damned Thing]( / Ambrose Bierce The turn of the screw / Henry James The Hiltons' holiday / Sarah Orne Jewett The gift of the Magi / O. Henry The moving finger / Edith Wharton The open boat / Stephen Crane Lou, the prophet / Willa Cather The men of Forty Mile / Jack London Babylon revisited / F. Scott Fitzgerald [A rose for Emily]( William Faulkner Big two-hearted river / Ernest Hemingway Flight / John Steinbeck

A compilation of Heinrich Böll's writings on literature, politics, and contemporary history, 1952-1985.