Der Engel schwieg

This beautiful German softcover holds a genuinely remarkable literary story: it is, in fact, Heinrich Böll's first novel, written in 1949-1951 but left unpublished in his lifetime, only emerging from his literary estate in 1992, on what would have been his 75th birthday. My copy is in very good condition, with light creasing to the front cover and pages that remain crisp and entirely unmarked throughout. From my personal library. 5. Auflage (5th printing), 1997. Published by Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Köln. Text copyright 1992, 1994 by Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch. Edited from Böll's literary estate by Annemarie, René, Vincent, and Viktor Böll together with Heinrich Vormweg; prepared for publication by Werner Bellmann and Beate Schnepp, with an afterword by Bellmann. Cover photograph courtesy of the Sächsische Landesbibliothek, Dresden. Heinrich Böll, born in Köln, received the Georg Büchner Prize in 1967 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1972. Der Engel schwieg was written in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War and is set, though never named outright, in the bombed-out ruins of Böll's native Köln.