Lennon, Brian. "'This lousy war'." Review of The Mad Dog, stories by Heinrich Böll. The Boston Book Review 4.9 (November 1997): 38.

Reproduced here in edited form, for personal or classroom use but not for republication. Citations should follow the original printed version.

The truism "war is hell" has always had its fullest and most bluntly theological meaning for the infantryman standing in a trench. Heinrich Böll was one of these. Like Graves, Sassoon and Owen in the First World War, Böll brought to the Second (what his soldier narrators, in a characteristic mix of apathy and disgust, call "this lousy war") a literary sensibility that would virtually condemn him to trade in the tableaux of horror he had observed. In Böll's case, having fought for Germany made this a public moral, as well as a personal cathartic imperative -- a responsibility he willingly embraced, in the popular role as "Germany's conscience" consecrated by the Nobel Prize in 1972.

Born in 1917 in Cologne, Böll was drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1939 and wounded four times while serving in France and on the Eastern front before ending up in an American POW camp. Released in 1945, he enrolled in the University of Cologne, but soon dropped out to concentrate on writing about the war. His work found publication almost immediately, and by the 1960s Böll had earned a reputation as one of the most influential German writers of the postwar period. (Along, of course, with Günter Grass, author of Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum, 1959), and Arno Schmidt. Schmidt's radically experimental work, brilliantly translated by John E. Woods in a four volume series published by Dalkey Archive Press, is just beginning to find readers in English.)

Following the posthumous novel Der Engel schwieg (The Silent Angel, 1992) and a volume of Böll's correspondence, this is the third extraction from material left by the author at his death in 1985. Published last year in Germany as Der blasse Hund, the volume presents nine unpublished stories and a novel fragment, all written between 1936, when Böll was nineteen, and 1950, a year in which twenty of his most shocking and extraordinary war stories appeared in German periodicals. (These, along with six others published from 1947-49, appeared in English in a volume entitled Children Are Civilians Too, and comprise the best introduction to Böll.) As such, they anticipate Böll's best work, in the war stories and in early novels such as Billard um Halbzehn (Billiards at Half-Past Nine, 1959) and Ansichten eines Clowns (The Clown, 1963), and the volume will be of most interest to those equipped, as Breon Mitchell puts it in his translator's introduction, to "hear echoes of almost every familiar motif from Böll's later work," who "will be listening to the original source of those very themes."

The Mad Dog is a browser in any case. "Youth on Fire" ("Die Brennenden"), the earliest work here, is poignantly clumsy, a kind of youthful parable that yields a fascinating picture of what Böll took with him into war. "Heinrich," the narrator, is a sixteen-year-old of Wertherian turn of mind, who is "walking -- on yet another December day -- along the bank of a broad river, thinking of only one thing: killing himself." As he stands at the water's edge, reflecting on the imminent grief of his family and of "one or two young women... who thought they loved him," he hears the voice of God and abruptly changes his mind. He then enters a disreputable café, where a prostitute approaches him; he waves her away with a copy of the New Testament, whereupon she reveals herself to be a Christian in disguise, out to save young men's souls. Heinrich immediately falls in love with her (her name is Susanne) and they go to visit a couple of her acquaintance named Benedikt and Magdalena, who ask them to attend their wedding.

Only once here -- during a demi-parable uttered by Benedikt's cousin -- is there a flash of the mature writer's bitter humor: "Veit believed in nothing. When we entered his room, he would ask with mock solemnity: 'What is the basic rule of life?' and our high-pitched children's voices would respond according to his teaching, 'Everything is shit!"' Nothing could be further from the otherwise dominating piety of "Youth on Fire" than a pair of stories composed ten years later, in 1946: "The Fugitive" and "Trapped in Paris." Each is the story of a desperate, solitary soldier -- in the former, an escaped POW or possibly a deserter, in the latter a German soldier cut off from his unit during street battles. The iconic and discursive idealism of "Youth on Fire" has been replaced by the naturalistic German Expressionism that became Böll's signature in the immediate postwar years, peaking in one of his most famous stories, "Stranger, Bear Word to the Spartans We..." While "Trapped in Paris" bears some affinity to the pre-war story -- namely in the retention of the salvific female figure, a French citizen who hides the soldier from the liberating American troops -- "The Fugitive" is closer to the model of Böll's postwar work: a dramatic narrative of claustrophobia and fear that concludes with the protagonist's abrupt and violent extinction:

He raised his head again and screamed, blinded by the light, before a final burst from the snarling muzzle extinguished his cries. All was still as his tormentors surrounded him, shining their flashlights on his torn body, which resembled the earth so closely the earth itself might have bled. "Yes... that's him," said an indifferent voice.

"The Rendezvous," composed in 1948, is on the other tine of Böll's thematic fork: difficult love. The writer had as keen a sense of the excruciating absurdities of Eros as he did of those of Thanatos; and though many of his love stories, like the lovely "My Pal with the Long Hair," are a record of love's triumph, others seem to dwell on its impossibilities. "The Rendezvous" records, with the economy and ambiguity of Böll's best postwar stories, the silences and recriminations of a mysteriously turbulent affair. By contrast, "The Tribe of Esau," an experiment in rendering a feminine perspective, and "America," a hunger years panegyric on bread and cigarettes, are less tightly circumscribed portraits of the war's domestic aftermath; "The Dead No Longer Obey," according to the translator's notes a "reworking of a passage from the draft of a play entitled Wie das Gesetz es befahl (As the Law Demanded)," is another nasty little soldier-parable in characteristic grotesque: "Suddenly we felt we were all dead -- the lieutenant too, for he was grinning now, and no longer wore a uniform."

"The Tale of Berkovo Bridge" and the novel fragment "Paradise Lost" stand out as the work of the mature Böll. The former, which was rejected for the collection Wanderer, kommst du nach Spa... (Traveler, if You Come to Spa...), found its way into the eighth chapter of Wo warst du, Adam?, then in 1952 became a radio play entitled "Die Brücke von Berczaba" (Berczaba Bridge). The reflections of a German military engineer who rebuilds a Russian bridge to facilitate the retreat of 1943, then witnesses its hasty demolition -- just minutes after completion -- as Russian tanks speed toward the river, it offers a tangible physical absurdity as metaphor for the regimented chaos that is war. In its modulation from the satisfactions of precision to its emptiness, to the essential and depressing circularity of "destruction for gain," "The Tale of Berkovo Bridge" anticipates Böll's great novel Billiards at Half-Past Nine, itself the story of a demolitions expert who destroys his father's architectural masterpiece. There is, in all this work, a manipulation of emblem that some of Böll's readers have found objectionably schematic, or simply too obvious; but one might say he had his reasons. As the engineer-narrator puts it:

The tale of this bridge was a lively topic of discussion at the time. Men cursed and wept over it, some laughed about it, some saw it as one of the countless events forming the general course of war, refusing to accord it any special significance -- and indeed in the end the story was forgotten, since it was of no strategic or historic importance.

Yet now I feel obliged to tell what really happened on that decisive day.

The text of "Paradise Lost," composed in 1949, was partly incorporated into Der Engel schwieg (itself was cannibalized by later novels), and Böll published two extractions from the manuscript as "Die Liebesnacht" ("Night of Love") and "Die Dachrinne" ("The Gutter"). As it stands, it is a returning-soldier story that dwells long on another of Böll's themes: the seemingly random, and therefore poignant stasis of solitary objects amid great destruction or decay. Returning to the familiar home of a lover after seven years' absence as a soldier, Böll's narrator notices a section of the rain gutter hanging down, "just as it had seven years earlier, when I stood at this spot and took my leave":

So very much had happened to me in that time, and it shocked me to think that this damaged gutter had been hanging here those same seven years, guiding the rain at an angle against the facade of the house. This piece of tin had dangled on what remained of its clamp for seven years, roof tiles had blown off, trees had been uprooted, plaster had crumbled, and bombs had fallen from all sides on the sweet open flanks of the city, in the suburbs, woven about with greenery, but this small piece of tin had never been hit, nor forced by a blast of wind to abandon its angle and fall to the ground. Rain had fallen heavily in those seven years, but it had splashed against the facade of the house, had been absorbed by the porous, sandstone wall, and had emerged again, whitish and gray.

Sorrow has always formed the most palpable current in Böll's fiction; as the title of this fragment suggests, his work is an apposite elegy for the twentieth century. 

--end--