Group Portrait with Lady

Group Portrait with Lady is a 1971 novel by German author Heinrich Boll. First published in Germany, it describes life in Germany between World War I and the 1970s, the heart of the Cold War. It is told by an unnamed narrator who knew the central character, Leni Pfeiffer, who strove to prevent her apartment building in Cologne from being demolished. Pfeiffer’s struggle is symptomatic of mid-century capitalism in Germany, which, Boll suggests, alienated and dehumanized its people. Leni and her son, Lev, adopt countercultural beliefs, rejecting German efficiency and work ethic and the greed that fundamentally drives them. An attitude of ambivalence pervades the work as its characters find themselves unable to choose which parts of their lives are essential and good, versus which are malignant and must be discarded. The novel, sometimes celebrated as Boll’s magnum opus, was cited by the Nobel Committee when he won the 1972 Nobel Prize in Literature.

The novel begins in a small city in West Germany in the late 1930s. Most of the plot takes place during the period in which Hitler’s Nazi regime rose to and held power. The narrator identifies himself as an investigator who, in 1970, is producing a written report on then-forty-eight-year-old Helene Marie “Leni” Gruyten Pfeiffer. He calls himself “Au,” short for Author. Au relates that Leni witnessed firsthand the Third Reich and the Nazi Occupation, as well as the emergence of the Federal Republic. Au has collected information about Leni from the titular portrait in which she makes an appearance in a group of 125. At the beginning of his report, Au has already made up his mind: he believes that Leni is indisputably one of the great people of her time, having preserved humanity in the darkest places of German society. He contrasts her with the figures of Christian capitalism, lost souls who care only about themselves and their dreams of wealth.

Au’s research into Leni’s childhood incorporates interviews from informants he found via the portrait. Au repeatedly attempts to synthesize these vignettes into a larger picture of Leni. A stereotypically blonde and blue-eyed girl, she was named “Most German Girl” in primary school. In her teenage years, she attended convent school but left it to assist her father in his construction business. In 1940, when Leni was eighteen, her boyfriend and her brother were both executed for undermining the Nazi regime, having sold a gun to the Danish army. For the next year, Leni was overwhelmed with grief. Then she met and fell in love with Alois Pfeiffer, a soldier. When he died in battle, she returned to her convent school and met with Sister Rahel, a Jewish mystic. Sister Rahel died of malnutrition before the war ended. After Leni’s father was thrown in prison for stealing money from the government to enrich his businesses, Leni lost everything except her house.



In 1943, she started work at a nursery, where she would spend the next three decades. The nursery’s owner, Pelzer, employed both Nazis and disguised Jews, as well as Communists. One of Pelzer’s employees was a Russian prisoner named Boris. He and Leni fell in love and, shortly after, got married. As World War II culminated, they gave birth to a son named Lev. Cologne was struck by a severe air raid that nearly killed the family. While dressed in German uniform, Boris was captured by the Allied powers and died captive in the town of Lorraine. Leni then decided to join the Communist Party, though she found it difficult to relate to the party ideology, based in esoteric history and literature to which she had little access.

After the war, Leni sold her house to her father’s former accountant, Otto Hoyser. From then until the novel’s present day, she rented an apartment in the house and sublet the rest to travelers and guest workers, following the Marxist tenet of “to each according to his need; from each according to his ability.” Eventually, the Hoysers tried to get rid of Leni and replace her with more capitalist tenants. A committee of Leni’s Communist associates stalled the eviction by blocking access to the house with garbage trucks. Leni defeated the eviction order. At the end of the novel, Au reflects that Leni and her comrades experienced unimaginable despair. He hopes that Leni’s life will serve as a model for how to live one’s life well despite the horrors of war and injustices of capitalism.