Marriage in Philippsburg

»Out of Germany comes an impressive young novelist – Martin Walser – with this richly-detailed picture of postwar life in Philippsburg, a typical West German city. For ›marriage,‹ in Philippsburg, read love – in a variety of forms, including the adulterous and illicit.

With a touch that is both satiric and compassionate, Walser traces the interweaving affairs and fortunes of four men and the women with whom they are involved – four very different lives, but each, in its way, fatefully prescribed by the forces which, in little more than a decade, made Germany again the most vital and prosperous country in Europe.
Hans Beumann, the illegitimate son of a village barmaid, comes to Philippsburg looking for work as a journalist. When Ann Volkmann, the daughter of an industrialist, falls in love with him, he is drawn, half against his will, into her world of wealth and fashion, and must choose between two ways of life. The handsome and urbane Dr. Alf Benrath appears to his friends in society happily married, but for him a quiet contentment is not enough – he must risk everything to seek the meaning of his existence with the beautiful Cécile.
In Alexander Alwin, selfmade lawyer and would-be politician, love takes a curious form – the tender shielding of his aristocratic wife from the pain of his own backstreet conquests. He will make it all up to her with fame and success. But a fool is his own worst enemy.
Over against these mundane figures stands the enigmatic Klaff, a crippled writer – the man of sensibility for whom there seems to be no place in the ›economic miracle‹ of the new Germany. Martin Walser was awarded the Hermann Hesse Prize for this novel when it was published in German in 1957. […]«

(Book description from the English edition by New Directions)