The first novel by the outstanding German writer, Nobel Prize laureate Heinrich Böll, written immediately after the war (1946–1947). The hero is a young man from an ordinary German family who is drafted to the front. Love for a woman and hatred of Nazism, the joy of finding something and the bitterness of loss—everything Böll later wrote with such power in his works is fully present in this novel, which was published in Germany only half a century after the end of the Second World War.