Two school friends, twelve years old and fatherless, are the focus of this story from the early post-war period. Heinrich and Martin grow up without fathers because they never returned from the war. Their living conditions are fundamentally different, and yet they share formative experiences. Heinrich grows up in poor conditions and has to take on responsibility at an early age.

Written between 1949 and 1951, The Angel was Silent is Böll's first novel set in post-war Germany. It begins on May 8, 1945, the day of the capitulation, and leads into the middle of the ruined landscape of a German city. Perhaps that was the reason why the manuscript, which had been waiting for publication for a year, did not appear after all. The publishing house at the time took the change...

Eleven short stories from Boell's estate – written between 1936 and 1951. In this early work, including for the first time a text by the young Boell from the pre-war period, the critical and distanced view of the dedicated writer becomes clear when he writes about his surroundings and his time .

Rarely has a book of the post-war period triggered such heated discussions as the views of a clown, which struck a chord with the morals and lifestyle of bourgeois Catholic society.

The chronological structure of the stories written between 1916 and 1939 conveys a precise picture of Joseph Roth's literary development: the arc of his storytelling art spans from the early work The Preferred Pupil to The Legend of the Holy Drinker, »one of the most beautiful legends written in the 20th century became« (Marcel Reich-Ranicki), to the novella Der Leviathan, Roth's last...

The volume edited by Jochen Schubert offers a comprehensive selection from Heinrich Böll's narrative work, following several aspects: in addition to the best-known stories, there are those that are representative due to their subject and narrative style, and others that have not yet been published or are only planned hard-to-reach places. The total of 75 stories vividly document Böll's work in...

The original version of the great anti-war novel was confiscated by the Russian secret service in 1949 and has now been found in Russian archives. Found, edited and provided with a documentary appendix by Carsten Gansel. A book, back from 70 years as a prisoner of war.

The story of nineteen-year-old Paul Baeumer, who went from school to the front as an unsuspecting war volunteer, is now common knowledge. But when you read it again, the impression is again shocking: how Baeumer experiences the whole brutality of the carnage and the senseless deaths of his comrades instead of the hoped-for enthusiasm for the war and a short adventure is touching and outrageous.

The painter and poet Fritz Schramm welcomes young people with artistic ambitions to his attic apartment. A friendship develops between him and the music student Ernst Winter, which is put to the test when Ernst falls in love with the opera singer Lanna. Remarque's debut novel: a touching portrait of the artist as a young man and the beginning of a great career as a writer.

The young soldier Ernst Graeber receives leave from the front for a few weeks - and meets the love of his life in the last days of the Third Reich. Fear, terror and persecution are only now making him realize the senselessness of the war. But it's too late - he has to go back to war...

Wolfgang Leonhard was a 13-year-old boy when he had to leave Nazi Germany with his mother and emigrated to the Soviet Union. There he grew up after the arrest of his mother in a home for German and Austrian emigrants, studied at the Moscow Pedagogical College of Foreign Languages and joined the Komsomol. He experienced the outbreak of the German-Soviet war in Moscow and was forcibly resettled...

The Leviathan tells of the Jewish coral trader Piczenik, who loves the real corals and yet falls victim to the fraud with the fake ones. The short stories The Triumph of Beauty and The Bust of the Emperor are added to this parable of human existence.