WWII-centered Novellas by Heinrich Boll

I read most of the most acclaimed novels (and 18 Stories) by 1972 Nobel Prize for Literature winner Heinrich Boll (1917-85, there's an umlaut that won't display over the o in his name and the one in his birthplace city, Koln) long ago (though not the one that was the immediate impetus, Group Portrait with Lady), while he was still alive. Having recently picked up the posthumous collection of early stories The Mad Dog, I continued my rediscovery

I have not sought out Boll 's critiques of the postwar boom that included substantial numbers of ex-Nazis. I'm more interested in what he wrote based on his own experience as a Wehrmacht conscript infantryman, who was deployed to France, Romania, Hungary and the Soviet Union and wounded four times before succeeding in becoming an American POW.

The infantrymen protagonists of his novels set in occupied Europe (often with the Germans retreating) are not ideologues (Nazi or anti-Nazi). Their prime concern is with staying alive, secondarily with finding and consuming food. They share the universal foot soldier suspicion ranging to hatred of officers avoiding any proximity to the front and appreciation of officers who demonstrate concern for the well-being of the cogs in the war machine (food, sleep, avoiding sending others on hopeless/suicidal missions).

In that Boll himself survived, some of the novellas cannot be strictly autobiographical, though they are rooted not just in his observations but experiences. The first one, the first book by Bolll to be published (in 1949), Der Zug war panktlich (The Train Was on Time) is doom-laden, but not Kafkaesque. The soldier Andreas is traveling by train (changing a few times) from Paris to Przemyzl (Poland), where he is certain that he is going to be killed on the Sunday he will get there. Thus, he will not need anything beyond then, can consume what he has, and not worry about anything, including dying a virgin.

He joins a long-distance card game and wins regularly. The other players have a substantial stock of schnapps, which they share with him, and the card players manage to block an officer who wants to occupy space in the compartment in which they are playing. Inside Poland, but not yet to the front lines of the "eastern front" that is collapsing ever more westward, they have a feast and move on to a bordello with which one is familiar. A former music student tells Andreas how much every Pole hates the German occupiers and that she and other prostitutes pass on all the information they hear or overhear to partisans. The ending is not quite what Andreas expected.

As good as The Train is the much later (1982) Das Vermachtnis (A Soldier's Legacy). A former soldier is telling the family of an officer reported missing in action in 1943 what really happened to First Lieutenant Schelling. Seeing the prosperous former Captain Schenker in the streets of Koln (Cologne, Bolll's native city) in the early 1980s stimulates the account, which indicts Schenker as the murderer of an unusually antiauthoritarian "good German" lieutenant at the outset (so this is not plot-spoiling: the suspense is about how, when, where, the why is that Schenker was a typical cowardly authoritarian German).The narrator was a dispatch runner and orderly for Lt. Schelling. The lieutenant recognized a similar intolerance for cant in Wenk and kept him close, protecting Wenk from overt insubordination to Schencker and other officious authoritarians. Like Train, the scene moves from France (guarding the Normandy coast, while trying to ward off lethal boredom) to the Eastern Front.

Though not as minimalist as Samuel Beckett works, he came to mind as I read what is billed in "Als der Kriege ausbrach" (When the War Broke Out) and "Als der Kriege zu Ende war" (When the War Was Over). Both could be considered long stories or short novellas, but there is something brilliant about putting them together, a war story in which the wartime is entirely elided!

Though lackingl's erudition and sophistication, I think the unnamed narrator of the two is close to Boll. The conscript chains smokes (and given the portrayals of Germans addicted to tobacco and to coffee, I wonder how German supplies of either were maintained after Allied conquest of North Africa and control of the Mediterranean!) and schemes to avoid military discipline (and lethal danger, though that was not something that could be avoided in Germany or in conquered territory). In , the veteran has a difficult time getting back to his wife in Koln. What happened in between for him, in the war that, among other things, all but leveled his hometown, goes unmentioned,

I was not as absorbed in the other two, both of which seemed not just episodic (as Train and Legacy arguably are, though having a continuity of characters across space) but disjointed. Wo warst du, Adam? (Where Were You, Adam?, 1951) Struck me as a sort of WWII German "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge." The anti-hero, Pvt. Feinhals also seems a cousin in ink of Pvt. Schweik, though more aware of evading authority. There is substantial material on relations with women the occupied territory (Hungary here) and greater anger at the conduct of the Germans (including a music-loving commandant of a concentration camp who kept the best singers alive for his chorus). The novella has some searing scenes and is an indictment not only of the Third Reich, but also of rigidity and malevolence that come across as being mobilized rather than created by the Nazis.

The Boll writingEntfernung von der Truppe (Absent Without Leave, 1964) was experimenting with (I couldn't say "playing with" in the case of so High Moral Seriousness a writer as Boll). The romantic interlude within a world turned upside down is German-German in this novella. Like A Soldier's Legacy, the narrator (Wilhelm) is in booming postwar Koln recalling the horrors of war and loss. Wilhelm lives with his mother-in-law, a character who would not be out of place in Günter Grass's more fantastical Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum, 1959), nor would her son Angel with whom Wilhelm had literal shit duty. Though I could have done without the Hansel and Gretel reworking, there is much that is mordantly funny along with much that is despairingly bitter in the novel, along with the somewhat dated (early postmodernist) experimenting with narration. I guess I'd recommend it to those who love The Tin Drum but find little sustenance in Grass's later work, before his memoir, Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (Peeling the Onion, 2006). (Grass was born a decade after Boll.)

All four novellas shed led on what it is like to be a soldier in an army of occupation and in an army that is losing a war (from the perspective of a soldier who finds military hierarchy and the conquest/occupation absurd). I think that there is much that fits with the continuous need for caution in American counter-insurgency deployments (Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan), survivor guilt, occupier guilt and the combination of mortal danger and absurdity shown from American perspectives in Catch-22 and Going After Cacciato.) Though, I think, less than French pride would like to claim, the conquerors of Europe were more engaged in counter-insurgency than is generally acknowledged. As in Iraq, the blitzkriegs were the easy part.

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The novellas I've discussed have appeared in English in diverse packages. "Entrance Exit" with Absent Without Leave and in The Stories of Heinrich Boll. The other three are also in The Stories of Heinrich Boll, Adam and Train were published together (as Adam and Train), A Soldier's Legacy by itself. And though I have not seen much discussion recently of Boll 's impressive body of work, it seems that new translations of it into English have been pouring out.