The Silent Angel

I stumbled upon this book in a used book store and decided to give it a read. The prose is lean and economical and conveys rich sense of the of Germany immediately after WWII. I have never read anything quite like it. While it doesn't have a gripping storyline in the usual sense it was compelling and difficult to put down. I highly recommend this book and have been inspired to read more of Boll's better known works.

The overwhelming feeling you get when reading this book is the desperate struggle for short term survival. The background is a German city (possibly Cologne) in the firstDays and weeks after the capitulation of the German army in 1945. Every conversation is focused on bread - not even full meals, just slices of bread. The city is bleak and devastated, the characters are transient figures struggling, dazed and nauseous, into whatever the future may hold. Their pasts are briefly mentioned, but the conditions in which they find themselves allow for almost total dislocation from their past lives. The language of the book is austere, the characters are not clearly distinguishable, the colours mentioned - apart from grey destruction - are greenish and yellowish hazes. These tune in with the bilious, nausea of the characters as they continuously search for food and shelter. Throughout the story each character is portrayed as exhausted, struggling, nauseous. The novels main character has deserted the German Army in the final days of the war, and under a certain sentence of death for desertion, has assumed numerous identities as he flees. He has, however, promised a dead comrade that he will return a coat to his comrade's widow. A will is discovered in the lining of the coat and this yields an subplot of intrigue and corruption. The main character meanwhile meets and briefly lives with a dazed, tragic woman who has been psychologically damaged by the war. The novel's main impression is the exhaustion of emotion, the breakdown of society brings about a breakdown of morality and order. Stealing and dishonesty of all kinds are part of daily life, as are small gestures of generosity. In the broken cityscape, there is neither trust nor complete anarchy, just a meandering from one slice of bread to the next. Towards the end of the book , the main character has established a certain routine which allows him to steal coal from trains, which gives him some power to barter. Boll's austere tale, gives us a view of the amoral aftermath of a societal dislocation. While neither describing nor moralizing, he shows us a set of normal characters and the lives they adopt to survive in the much reduced circumstances.

I enjoy reading Heinrich Boll in part because he offers a perspective of WWII through the eyes of an every day German. Most German perspectives of WWII seem to be written by someone who wants you to know that they are one of the "good guys". In his books I have been given a glimpse of what it was like to be on the losing side. In "The Silent Angel" we get a glimpse of what it is like to return to a home that doesn't really exist any more. The vivid depictions in this novella are the works not only of one whose knows of what he speaks, but also of one gifted to tell the world. Boll is no apologist for Germany but he conveys the world as he experienced it. The destruction and the despair are overwhelming but there is hope in the relationship between the common sufferers. Many will read this book in a single sitting but the impressions will last long afterwards.

Heinrich Boll occupies for me the same place Dostoyevski does for many people: a deeply,morally complex writer who tells stories of profound depth involving average people thrown into situations not of their making. In the SILENT ANGEL, Bolls first novel{suppressed in germany for over 40 years},he tells of the immediate aftermath of WWII{the war ends in the first few pages, to his disbelief} on average germans, including the main character, a soldier struggling with fear and hunger to stay alive. In one of the early scens, the protagonist finds a nun in a hospital making soup, who gives him a piece of bread. The ecstasy the bread gives him{also symbolic of Bolls then Catholcism} can only been written by someone who actually expierenced hunger{I think much of this is autobiographical} Later the main character rediscovers love,amidst the falling plaster,the cold the hunger. A kind priest gives him a bottle of wine,which leaves him stunned at first,thenhe brings back to share with his new life. The idea of love flowering among people in such straits is remarkable,as is the ability to make one empathise with average germans, not an easy task after the horror of WWII> A Later scene with his new wife,where she describes a piece of pipe still standing after all the bombing{the unnamed city is Cologne}is marvelous, the touch of a master. That this is his first novel is almost astonishing,for it has true depth without much of the maudlin coming of age nonsense associated with first novels.If Heinrich Boll was not the most important novelist of the last 40 years, he was damn close. The opening act of a magnificent, important writer, thinker and moral witness.

Much as one can feel in the less mature works of Joyce, Marquez and even Shakespeare, there is the distinct feeling in this work that the author is destined for greatness. This novel is the sensitive, first-person account of the events during and after the end of World War II. At a time when Germany had been ravaged by war and the effects of its own over-ambition, Boll gives us the story a man, apolitical and barely alive. He shows us how love can blossom in and around the rubble left by the bombings and the shortages of the war. This love of his is strong, yet odd and difficult to imagine. Boll's setting of post-war Germany is seemingly the only context it could have I recommend this work to anyone looking for a novella that is deep in its emotion and broad in its observations of a culture.