Engel schwieg

by Heinrich Böll

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 th