Group Portrait with Lady

Böll refuses Leni Pfeiffer, née Gruyten, a conventional narrator. Instead an unnamed investigator, credited only as "Verf." for Verfasser, author, interviews dozens of witnesses, her old friend Lotte Hoyser, the nun Sister Rahel, the Soviet prisoner Bogakov, her tenants and neighbors, and assembles Leni's life the way a court or a journalist would, through testimony that contradicts, corroborates, and gossips rather than through omniscient narration. The method insists that a life lived through the Third Reich, its aftermath, and West Germany's amnesiac prosperity cannot be delivered whole by a single trustworthy voice; it can only be triangulated, and the gaps between witnesses are where the truth actually sits.

Leni's appetite, for bread, for coffee, for Schubert played on the organ, for sex without guilt, runs through the testimony as a stubborn refusal of both Nazi discipline and postwar bourgeois respectability. Böll treats her unideological hunger for pleasure as the closest thing to ethical clarity anyone in the book manages: while the Reich demands sacrifice and the new Federal Republic demands forgetting, Leni simply keeps wanting what she wants, in a body nobody else in the novel trusts as much as she does her own.

Leni falls in love with Boris Lvovich Koltovsky, a Soviet prisoner of war forced to labor beside her at the Pelzer wreath-making firm, at a moment when relations between a German woman and an "Ostarbeiter" fell under Rassenschande, racial defilement, a charge the Reich punished with death. Their son Lev is born amid Cologne's ruins in the war's final days. Böll gives the affair no melodrama, only the plain fact that loving Boris was, under the regime governing every other choice in Leni's life, the single most dangerous and most human thing she ever did.

Leni's father, a building contractor, spends the war systematically defrauding the Nazi construction economy, padding requisitions and inventing projects with his wife's help, treating sabotage as ordinary commerce rather than heroic resistance. Böll uses Gruyten's scheme, eventually discovered, to puncture any tidy postwar story about German opposition to the regime: profiteering off a corrupt system, it turns out, required no ideology at all, just an eye for its weak points.