[Gruppenbild mit Dame] might well be called a "Zeitroman", a panoramic social novel which traces the impact of public events upon private lives. It is a novel form which may encourage a historical conspectus in which individual problems may be subordinated to the pattern of known, outward happenings…. Böll succeeds in embodying the moods of past times with the emotional tensions of the principal characters. Yet though poignant feeling is often present, the wider vistas of the "Zeitroman" contribute to preventing the reader from coming so constantly close to anyone in Gruppenbild mit Dame as he does to Hans Schnier, the first-person narrator and central figure of Ansichten eines Clowns. At the same time the later work can be regarded as a "Bildungsroman", as the author has indicated. He points out that his heroine learns what is inwardly relevant to her, while rejecting much else, and that...