Breaking the Silence : THE SILENT ANGEL, <i> By Heinrich Boll</i> . <i> Translated from the German by Breon Mitchell (St. Martin’s Press: $19.95; 182 pp.)</i>

When I was growing up as a girl in the silence of postwar Germany, Heinrich Boll wrote about what other adults wouldn’t speak about. From him--not from my family or teachers--I began to learn about German soldiers, about war widows and war orphans, about the impact of the war on the survivors. It was a time when most Germans were using their energies to forget the war, to push forward into a clean and tidy future by rebuilding bombed out buildings, by creating a history for their children that would make it impossible for them to ask questions about the war. I took Boll’s books with me to Catholic boarding school as an adolescent, packed them into my suitcase when I immigrated to America as an 18-year-old.

When Boll died in 1985--a Nobel laureate and internationally acclaimed author--the manuscript of his first novel, “Der Engel Schwieg” (“The Silent Angel”) had lain unpublished for 34 years. It would remain unpublished for another seven years, before it would be presented to German readers and become a major success.

This stark and brilliant novel of a German soldier’s return from the war, came to publishers in 1950, when it simply did not fit into the German practice of silence. Boll, who had only published one novella so far, promised in his letter of submission: “Nothing is told about the war itself, and hardly anything is said about the postwar period. . . . The novel simply portrays the people of the time and their hunger . . . a generation that knows that there is no home for them on this earth.”

Boll’s protagonist, the soldier Hans Schnitzler, never reveals what he did in the war. Hans simply does not think about the war. And yet, he is surrounded by the evidence of war, by the untold horrors that manifest themselves in the destroyed landscape, in the gray-faced survivors who move through their days like shadow phantoms, in the heavy and sour and cold air, and in the desperate drive of hunger.

The first bread Hans eats upon his return from the war is given to him in a hospital by a nun. It is stale; yet, to him it tastes sweet. “While he ate with his right hand he held the loaf fast in his left, as if someone might come and try to take it from him, and he saw his hand lying on the bread, thin and dirty, with a deep scratch that was soiled and scabbed.”

The day of receiving his orders for military training is far more vivid in Hans’ mind than the war. “That first tormented afternoon seemed to him worse than the entire war.” Boll’s portrayal of Hans Schnitzler’s mother evokes the sorrow of every woman who has ever lost a child to war. Hans remembers his mother’s sob when he received the registered postcard with his orders that summon him to Adenbruck, a “long, dry sob . . . a sob that contained everything, all the horror not one of them could have known about then.”

Though his body tries to survive in a country that has suddenly been thrown into peace, his soul mourns his survival. He envies the dead, because to go on living is so much worse. “Your husband stole my death,” he tells a woman whose husband saved him by trading uniforms with him before Hans could be shot as a deserted by the Germans. “I couldn’t have that quick, clean death; he had to take it for himself. . . . He’d made a good bargain.”

Hans is not the only one who would have chosen death over life. He meets Regina Unger, a war widow, who too was left behind in life when her infant son was killed by a German machine gun. In their encounter, Boll creates a brittle, intense love between two people who are bewildered that they still are capable of love. Love is not part of wanting for them because their wanting has been focused on death and food and warmth.

Breon Mitchell’s translation from German into English is strong and accurate. Mitchell, who also translated Kafka’s “The Trial,” stays as close as possible to the pattern of Boll’s language, preserving the original austerity of the novel.

Though “The Silent Angel” was initially rejected for publication, the material stayed alive for Boll, who worked themes and details from the manuscript into some of his future works. Given Boll’s letter to his publisher, it might be intriguing to speculate if indeed it is his character, Hans Schnitzler, who has blocked his memories of the war, or if this became an authorial decision in order to find a readership. After all, Boll was desperately poor and worried because he could not support his family with his writing. “My wife can’t take any more, I can’t take any more,” he wrote to his friend, Paul Schaaf. “I’ve simply undertaken something impossible.”

And yet, considering the impressive body of Boll’s later work and his unwavering commitment to explore the consequences of the war, it seems to me that despite his letter to his publisher, Boll knew that “The Silent Angel” was about the war, that he intended it to be about the war.

Because the war is there.

In every description.

In every gesture.

In every silence.