The novel by Heinrich Böll (1917-1985), a great figure of post-war German literature, is a story about one woman's life in Germany's eventful and fateful decades.
During the war, Leni Gruyten-Pfeiffer loses all her loved ones — father, mother, brother; after three days of marriage, her husband, who falls on the front. Leni finds short-term happiness in her love for Boris, a Russian officer and prisoner of war, but Boris also dies, but Leni is left with a son, Lev. Their natural purity of soul and selflessness leave Leni and Levi as outsiders in the rush towards universal well-being of the "German economic miracle" of the 1960s, but the author emphasizes their eternally human spiritual values, which are above everything material and temporal.