La storia in 3D: l’eredità di Böll nel Familienroman contemporaneo

Due to the fact that since the beginning of the new millennium the German literary field has seen a rebirth of the family novel (Familienroman), a genre which seemed to have disappeared in the previous decades, it has become increasingly important to reflect on this phenomenon and at the same time on the history of this genre. In this context, the paper will try to fill a gap in literary history, by shedding light on some characteristics of the contemporary German family novel that have wrongly been considered as novelties, despite the fact that they were already present in some literary works of the Nachkriegszeit, such as Heinrich Böll’s Billard um halb zehn. By underlining the polyphonic, multiperspective and mainly threedimensional structure of Böll’s novel and comparing it with the narrative framework of two contemporary German family novels – Arno Geiger’s Es geht uns gut and Eugen Ruge’s In Zeiten des abnehmenden Lichts – the article will attempt to show how these texts show a similar configuration, thus demonstrating the legacy of Böll’s work in this genre.