Billard um halbzehn

Three generations of a Rhineland architect family gather on September 6, 1958, to celebrate the eightieth birthday of their patriarch. Heinrich Fähmel received the commission to build the Abbey of St. Anton in 1907. His son Robert, who plays billiards daily from half past nine to eleven at the Hotel Prinz Heinrich, destroyed this abbey as a demolition expert for the Wehrmacht during the last days of the war. The grandson Joseph will be involved in the reconstruction. In Robert's conversations with the hotel bellboy, as well as in flashbacks and memories of his father, the past and present intertwine, and the situations of each time period become clear. The fundamental conflict that Böll addresses with the symbolism of the "lamb" and the "buffalo" is the conflict between independently thinking and acting individuals and the opportunistic majority.