Group portrait with lady

The 1971 magnum opus by Heinrich Boll, which pieces together German life around WWII, never resonated in the United States, despite the popularity of other WWII novels translated from German such as The Tin Drum.

My full review is here: medium.com/@Dave.Nash.33/five-reasons-you-should-read-group-portrait-with-lady-e4b00402077a#.u77ihnuy2

The 1973 New York Times book review is telling;
Although 11 of his books have been published here to good reviews, the award of the 1972 Nobel Prize for Literature to Heinrich Böll for his “contribution to the renewal of German literature” has made little impression in America.
Judging by the dearth of online reviews, that little impression has not changed since the begrudging NYT review in 1973.

Here’s 5 reasons why, America, you are missing out!

1) Crowning Achievement for a Nobel Prize winner: this prize canonizes modern literature. Boll’s life work — rebuilding the German language from the ashes of WWII led to this award, he would be worthy even without out this crowning achievement and further, it is extremely rare for the committee to single out one work. Very few novels have the distinction of being singled for the Nobel Prize — don’t you want to find out why?

2) What your teacher didn’t tell you: while a fictional work, actual historical events drive this novel. Boll personally experienced the terror, shootings, hangings, lootings, and arrests that gripped the Rhineland in the few weeks before the Allies, the Americans, took control. This is a part of the war is not taught in America — high school or college. Germans were frequently shot by other Germans for hanging up a white flag. After surviving six years of war, to perish in the final days with the end in sight is truly tragic. Even after the allies took control, any able body man under the age of 50 couldn’t move outside in public without proper documentation. That authoritarian-like restriction on freedom was placed on Germans by all the allies, not just the Soviets. Boll and other German soldiers, conscripts, were sent to POW camps for up to 5 years, it’s estimated the three to ten thousand died in these POW camps alone — so much for Gitmo.

While trying to remain factual, the novel is heartbreaking in dealing with aftermath of WWII. When Leni’s love is taken to one of those POW camps:

She took off right away, on an old bicycle. She got across all the zone borders all the national frontiers, into the French Zone, into the Saar Territory, from there to Lorraine, going from camp to camp and asking each of the commandants after Alfred Bullhorst, pleading for him, courageously and stubbornly, I tell you, but she didn’t know that in Europe there were probably fifteen to twenty million German POW’s. She was on the road with her bike till November, coming home at intervals to replenish her supplies — and the she’d be off again….Well she found her Boris, her Yendritsky, her Koltovsky, her Bullhorst — pick any name you’d like. She found him, she found him in a cemetery.

Boll brings a new level of humanity to this forgotten chapter in history, a chapter in history that very much involves the US.

Personally, I’ve closely associated with the Rhineland with Germany, most likely because of Wagner’s Ring Cycle. Wagner, perhaps because of this, was co-opted by the Third Reich as a cultural hero. Yet, not all Rhinelander’s saw themselves in the Third Riech:

You see correctly, views of the left bank of the Rhine only. I used to be a separatist, and still am and not only theoretically; on the fifteenth of November, 1923 I was wounded near the Agidienberg not for the honorable side, but the dishonorable one which to me is still the honorable one. No one can talk me out of my belief that this part of Germany doesn’t belong to Prussia and never has, nor in any kind of so-called Reich founded by Prussia.

The history taught in schools homogenizes all Germans, except Jews. It depicts a nation comprised of goose-stepping Aryans, marching in mass towards us, which makes fire-bombing Dresdin and long-standing POW camps palpable, thus enabling us to maintain our irreproachable moral status in at least this theatre of the war.

Meet the new demagogue:
3) We see ourselves in history: history doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes and its riffs keep rocking us today. In one Trumpian example, towards the end of the novel, the Au. visits Hoyser Sr — Leni’s father’s former bookkeeper who has profited nicely off the 25 years of reconstruction. Leni through a series of financially reckless decisions sold her family’s apartment building in Cologne to Hoyser. Now she can’t pay the rent because her son is in jail and Hoyser wants to evict her. Hoyser at this point is old, capricious, and senile — he rips a button off the Au.’s jacket attempting to emphasize a point before his grandson make excueses for him. I could see Trump doing this.

Later, his grandsons ape the most far right capitalist rhetoric about the financial necessity of not forbearing on Leni’s rent and why for financial reasons they must evict her:
Our action is something I am not ashamed to call a corrective measure, and affectionate guidance, that unfortunately has to make use of somewhat brutal means of execution.
The more grandsons talk, the crazier they sound, their patrician veneer vanishes under their acrimonious oratory — not too different from WWII ideologues or the Trump family. As they talk, the room fills thick with smoke, asphyxiating the Au. who can’t get a word in— they’d like open the window but:

[The Au.] would even have been prepared to admit the unimportance of the annoyance of the jacket in view of the weighty problems these people had who were not even allowed fling open the windows in their own building;
This interview portrays the achievement oriented society led by the Christian Democrats in 1970's Germany and is reminiscent of our Republican Party in the eighties and nineties. Combining a small thread of Christianity to Capitalist thought, Republicans painted America as a meritocracy and used this line of thinking in opposition to the welfare state best symbolized through the welfare queen caricature.

4) Unique Narrative form: the story is told by the Au. as a series of interview reports which piece together the protagonist. The narrator, Boll himself, takes pains from the start to write in a investigative police-like matter:

The female protagonist in the first section is a woman of forty-eight, German; she is five foot six inches tall weighs 133 pounds….The woman’s name is Leni Pfeifer, nee Grutyen,…as a result of having causally given away during the inflation, a considerable fortune in real estate, a substantial apartment house in the new point of town that today would easily fetch four thousand marks, she is now pretty much without resources.

This style against the backdrop of World War II does not get tiresome. Almost instinctively after the war the Au. summarizes quickly and switches to a series of other primary source styles to finish out the novel with a psychologist’s report, letter from a nurse, and a police report. He also references an encyclopedia of sorts at one point, so it truly gives that investigative report feel. Only a highly skilled writer can pull this off over the length of events. Through the end, Boll adroitly maintains this narrative device:

The Au. by now totally engrossed in his role of research (and always in danger of being taken for an informer while his sole purpose at all times is to present a taciturn and reticent, unrepentant person such as Leni Grutyen Pfeifer — a woman as static as she is statuesque — in the right light), had some difficulty in gaining or searching out from those involved a reasonably factual picture of her situation at the end of the war.

5) Literary Conversation: many artists and historians have published works on WWII and its aftermath. Gunter Grass, a German language author, German POW, and later Nobel winner, naturally compares to Boll. As the 1973 New York Times review drew this comparison:

for most Americans, and for many writers and critics in Europe, the more aggressive and innovative Günter Grass is certainly as well‐known and often more admired.

I’m not most Americans. Grass’ Tin Drum (1960), features a unique narration style and chronicles life in the free city of Danzing/Gdansk before and during WWII and then in Germany post war. Grass, who self-identified as a Kashubian (not German), is unable to maintain the narrative and drama in the third section, which explores post-war Germany. Tellingly, the movie version ends with the second section, sitting through the third section damages the first two. Grass does not achieve resolution or justifies the novel’s length with the third section. Moreover, The Tin Drum is less about the war and more about Oskar’s antics — a freakish, unreliable narrator who makes Holden Caulfield and Chief Bromden look normal. I also read Grass’ 2002 Crabwalk, which lacks the magical realism and inventiveness of The Tin Drum. The resolution there was simply to assassinate the past and create an internet hero for a new age of bigots.

While there is no magical realism and no psychedelic adventures, Boll stays closer to reality - the real horror of WWII is more than enough fodder for novelist as skilled as Boll. As he shifts paces and styles before, during, and after the war, he’s able to keep drama and bring resolution.

On a related note, Boll’s The Clown compares favorably with The Catcher in the Rye, if WWII is too immense or too miserable, The Clown may be a lighter read for you.

Just Starting to Paint
Some critics panned this monumental work because it has a happy ending: Leni loses her best friend, her teenage love, her mentor, her brother, mother, and father during the novel and at the end she can’t pay the rent, her son is in jail, and she just found out that she’s pregnant — given the privations of World War II evidently that constitutes a happy ending.

Boll’s genius is not simply bringing humanity to an inhumane place, it is in bringing resolution, a resolution that has eluded other authors. A resolution of sorts to the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century. He brings humanity through a seemingly sterile and cold investigative reporting form, but the life stories of these enduring characters jumps out and grabs the reader during the barrage of successive interviews. Our struggle to find order in chaos and meaning in destruction has driven creative works from Homer’s Iliad to Springsteen’s Rising. Boll’s Group Portrait with Lady does an admirable job in that struggle.

While it didn’t jump off US book store shelves in the seventies and doesn’t rank high on today’s electronic search algorithms, Boll’s work is rich in literary invention, historical reflection, social commentary, and above all humanity. A single review can’t do it justice, but you can start to do it justice by reading Group Portrait with Lady today.