If Heinrich Böll had been living now, would he have chosen to self-publish The Silent Angel? His first novel was never published in his lifetime, ostensibily because the subject of surviving in the ruins of a carpet-bombed German city was too raw for the German public to digest. I suspect, however, that the publishers (and Böll himself) also knew that as a novel it didn’t pass muster. Finished in 1951, the novel was published posthumously in 1992. While it may belong on the shelf of a Böll completist, it’s not a book I can recommend.
Not that The Silent Angel is entirely without merit. The realistic descriptions of an unnamed post-WWII bombed-out German city are full of poetic power and motifs.
Most of the streets were impassable. Debris and rubble piled up to the first floors of the burned-out facades, and thick, heavy fumes of smoke were still rising from some of the row houses.
What once had been a ten-minute walk from the ring road to the Rubenstrasse now took him almost an hour. Stovepipes thrust up between ruined walls, wisps of smoke drifted away ….
And always the angels remain silent, observers only of man’s inhumanity to man. Time and time again the remains of an angelic statue is found broken, crushed and half-buried amidst the debris of the city. Only once in the expression of one of these statues is there any suggestion that their heavenly counterparts are pained by recent events on earth.
The people, be they ex-servicemen or civilians, are exhausted by their losses. Their city is reduced to rubble. Their families are dead. Their faith too, symbolised by those stone angels, is buried in the dust. Man cannot live by bread alone said Christ. In this scenario, sometimes they don’t even have that. It’s a good day – no, it is an excellent day – when they have a slice of bread to eat.
The promise of Boell as a writer and his ambitions for the novel in the various plot strands and the themes of human compassion vs post-war corruption are evident. Unfortunately these are not bound together to form a cohesive narrative whole. Particularly lacking I thought was the depth required to explain some of the human relationships. I never bought into the central love story. Or even the convolutions surrounding the executed soldier. Why would he sacrifice himself for the deserter, Hans, at the same time ensuring that his dying wife would receive his will and the vast riches that came with it? Why did he choose not to return to take up his own inheritance and defy his hated father himself?
This was a frustrating bitty read for me. Brilliant vignettes brought low by meagre psychological explanation. Much of The Silent Angel was reworked in a later novel, And Never Said A Word. I shall now look that out as I’m curious to see how the 1972 nobel laureate improved this material when writing at the height of his powers..
I read The Silent Angel for the German Literature Month readalong hosted by Caroline of Beauty Is A Sleeping Cat. Now let’s see what other readalongers thought …..
Lizzy's Literary Life (Volume One) 
Not a big fan then? 🙂 I agree that this is very much an incomplete novel, and that it is more for Böll completists – like me (eight and counting!).
However, I think that the parts are much greater than the whole here, particularly the sketches of Hans in his search for food.
The scene at the end with the will though – definitely very strange and badly thought out…
I was at one time a Böll completist. I remember answering on him in my finals but for some reason, he’s not an author I’ve revisited much, even though I enjoyed reading him then.
I did reread the 5-star Katharina Blum a couple of years ago and I suspect that that one day I will own some (if not all) of those magnificent Melville House press volumes I do intend treating myself to their Collected Stories of Heinrich Böll which is due to be published next week ….
While I would rate it much higher, I did, if you read my post, muse at the end whether it was well written as a novel, as it does indeed read like short stories and sketches.
I think the psychology of frontline soldiers is hard to understand for us but Böll served and was imprisoned too, whether or not a sacrifice is possible, he would know… I think it is. The love story was surprising but believable for me.
Und sagte kein einziges Wort is a far better novel, that’s for sure still, because the individual parts are outstanding for me, I like The Silent Angel a lot.
The excuse of the first novel doesn’t count, btw as The Train Was On Time was written earlier.
Isn’t the Train Was On Time much shorter and, therefore, a novella?
Ok, yes but he wasn’t a first time writer, the flaws in this novel cannot be excused and they are even for someone like me who loves Böll striking flaws. As I just commented on Christina’s post, it would have needed some serious reworking.
I can see an aspect of the lack of depth in the characters, initially. I did compare them to zombies — too caught up in their hunger. The war robbed them of the will to live. But toward the end though there’s a sort of transformation in them and their perception of the world. They’re slowly waking up from passivity and becoming more responsive to one another, enough to contemplate marriage and carry on.
Caroline
What I’m trying to suggest in my review is that the author himself knew it to be substandard and, therefore, chose to rework it in a later novel. The fault, it is lies anywhere, is with the publishers for cashing in on a big name after his death.
Just to offer a different point of view, this was my first Böll novel and I loved it. What was missing did not occur to me during the read; the clarity of the vision captured my attention. I was with him all the way.