With the occasion of the history of three generations of the Faemel family, architects in a city in the Rhineland, Heinrich Bell biographs Germany itself. "Billiards at Half-Past Nine", first published in 1959 and achieving great success, presents in an artistic composition the great image of German "reality" during the first half of the 20th century, with a particular emphasis on the period of Nazism and its later survivals. The Faemels, creators as well as destroyers, represent with their dual nature a fundamental contradiction, which Bell interprets through the symbols of the "lamb" and the "buffalo": the clash between the individual with uncontrolled and free thinking, on one hand, and the "many" time-servers who exercise or at least accept violence, on the other.

"Billiards at Half-Past Nine" was adapted into a film in 1965, directed by Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet.