Heinrich Böll Kreuz ohne Liebe: Roman - sowie unveröffentlichte Erzählungen und Gedichte (Cross without Love) Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch, October 2002. 525 pp. ISBN 3-4620-3149-X This is a rediscovery and a gem, not only for Germanists. Previously unpublished, Heinrich Böll's Kreuz ohne Liebe now appears for the first time as part of the twenty-seven volumes of his Complete Works. This volume also includes several short stories and poems and an appendix provides useful information for academics and for everyone who appreciates some help in assessing Böll's early work. Böll himself needs little introduction. He is one of Germany's most important postwar writers, respected for his politics and social criticism, and it is therefore important to include these early texts among those suitable for translation in order to show the range of his narrative voice. In Kreuz ohne Liebe the metaphor of the cross is used in all its complexity to characterise the Hitler years in Germany, the social and political changes from a democracy to a dictatorship, and what this meant for individual citizens each of whom, during these rites of passage, had his or her own cross to bear. Far from overusing his metaphor, Böll establishes it as a powerful symbol, contrasting the Christian cross with the pagan swastika and thereby rendering the atrocities of the Nazi regime all the more horrendous. Sarcasm and cynicism are unnecessary here, except below the surface where, as rhetorical devices, they lurk and have their effect. The shorter pieces have their own interest, drawing as they do on the author's experiences during the Second World War, during which he was stationed at various times in Poland, France, the Soviet Union, Hungary and Romania. Written immediately after the end of the last war, in 1946-47, when he was in his late twenties, these pieces show Böll transforming his highly subjective and personal experiences into thinly disguised fiction. It is through the immediacy of the writing, the very lack of artistic transformation or sublimation, that we share his traumas and begin to hear the voice that would make him famous as a writer, and a worthy winner of the Nobel Prize in 1972.