The Silent Angel

Heinrich Boll's first novel (after his novella The Train Was On Time) was suppressed in Germany in the early 1950s and not published until several years after his death in 1985. The traumas of a defeated nation were still too fresh, despite the fact that The Silent Angel has virtually no wartime content. Instead it tells of a man's search for bread, an identity, and some human comfort in the ruins of Cologne in May 1945. Boll makes a powerful and austere statement of universal value.