Group Portrait with Lady (novel)

Group Portrait with Lady (German: Gruppenbild mit Dame) is a 1971 novel by Nobel Prize winning author Heinrich Böll.^[1] The novel is concerned with a woman named Leni Pfieffer (née Gruyten) who faces eviction from her apartment building in Cologne. It structured as a report compiled from interviews conducted by an unnamed author with Leni’s friends, family, employers, coworkers, and others, forming a detailed social portrait of life in Cologne from the 1910s to 1971.^[2] Like many of Böll's novels, there is a particular focus on representing the Nazi era from the perspective of ordinary people.

First edition
(publ. Kiepenheuer & Witsch)

The Nobel Prize committee referred to Group Portrait with Lady as Böll’s "most grandly conceived work."^[3]

The novel was adapted into a film in 1977.