The Silent Angel – Heinrich Böll

Translated from German by Breon Mitchell

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 …..

Caroline  Christina  Rise  Tony

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The De Luca Trilogy – Carlo Lucarelli

The seed for Lucarelli’s trilogy was a chance encounter with a man who had spent 40 years in the Italian police force between 1941 and 1981. This is how Lucarelli’s describes this man’s career.

He had started in the fascist political police, the OVRA, a secret organization the meaning of whose acronym was never known with certainty.  As an “ovrino”, he told me, his job was to tail, to spy on, and to arrest anti-fascists who were plotting against the regime.  Later, still as an ovrino, he was to tail, to spy on, and to arrest those  fascists who disagreed with fascism’s leader, Benito Mussolini.  During the war, his job went back to tailing, spying on, and arresting anti-fascist saboteurs, but toward the end of the war, when part of liberated Italy was under the control of partisan formations fighting alongside the Allies, my strange policeman friend actually became part of the partisan police.  As he was good, he told me, he had never done anything particularly brutal and the partisans needed professionals like him to ensure public order and safety.  Naturally, his duties included arresting fascists who had stained themselves with criminal acts during the war.  Several years later, when, following elections, a regular government was formed in Italy, our policeman became part of the Italian Republic’s police; his job, to tail, to spy on, and to arrest some of those partisans who had been his colleagues and who were now considered dangerous subversives.

If proof were ever needed that truth is stranger than fiction, there it is.  Had Lucarelli made De Luca’s career as torturous, he would have been accused of absurdity.   As it is, De Luca’s career is grounded in the facts above.  The trilogy begins in Carte Blanche during the final days of World War II and the allied advance through Italy.  The Damned Season continues in the months immediately following  and the third part, Via Delle Oche,  is set in Bologna against the backdrop of the 1948 national elections.  Commissario De Luca is a talented detective whose tainted background constantly threatens to derail him.  Once a fascist, always a fascist, his opponents cry.  Never a fascist, responds De Luca. Always politically neutral.  “I’m a policeman.  It’s my job and I’ll take sides with anyone who let’s me do my job.”  His actions bear this out, but is it enough to claim that he never got his hands dirty, never brutalised anyone when his office was so close to the interrogation cells that he could hear the victims’ cries?

De Luca compromises himself in other ways.  He is not adverse to involving himself sexually with females closely associated with the crimes he is investigating.   And when he wishes to assert himself, he can strop with the best of them.  This usually involves him sweeping everything off the nearest table or desk.  As a result he is not entirely likeable. Yet his talents as a detective make him a sympathetic character and I worried on his behalf.

Particularly during the second instalment,  The Damned Season, when, on the run with false papers in northern Italy, he is recognised by a partisan, turned local policeman, and coerced into helping resolve a particularly brutal case in which a whole family has been massacred.  De Luca is on a knife edge throughout.   Masquerading as an engineer,  his legendary investigatory skills, which he must employ to prevent him being turned over to the Allies, are most likely that which will give him away.  The suspense is palpable, even though we know he gets out of this alive, due to there being a third book.

He reappears in that assigned to the vice squad in Bologna in 1948, still dogged by his past.  When a man is found dead in one of the city’s brothels, the authorities are quick to explain it as suicide.  While the man hanging from a rafter does have a noose around his neck and an overturned stool beneath him, his feet don’t reach the seat when the stool is righted.  “Normal enough that a hanged man grows a little longer if he’s left a while,” De Luca quips.  “But I’ve never heard of one getting shorter.” True to form De Luca refuses to look the other way even when it becomes apparent that the evidence indicates the involvement of local politicians and the police force.  With the elections looming and new agendas to be protected, the question is whether De Luca will get his man before the old agendas catch up with him.

These books are classic noir.  Matter of fact, action-packed, with little to no character development, for which we should be grateful as it’s a challenge keeping up with the turbulence of the historical period. For that reason it is important that the books are read in chronological sequence.  De Luca’s personal story adds further moral ambiguity and suspense into the usual police procedural mix.  When photographs of a black-shirted De Luca come to light, that ambiguity intensifies and the time finally arrives to answer the questions that have been threatening since book 1.  An entirely fitting finish to the trilogy.  Firstly it is amplifies the air of moral doubt and uncertainty that has pervaded the books and secondly, it leaves this reader wanting more!

Carte Blanche  /  The Damned Season   / Via Delle Oche

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