Heinrich Boll

We find ourselves in Germany in the years immediately following the Second World War. The wounds of war are still palpable, physical and psychological: destruction, destitution, memories of the conflict’s horrors, and no hope for the future. Fred, a telephone operator at the city’s archbishopric, has abandoned the family home where his wife, Kate, and their children live, after catching himself venting his rage on the children, beating them. He can, in fact, no longer endure the cramped misery and desolation of the single room in which they live. Given over to drink, he roams the city and arranges clandestine encounters with his wife in squalid hotel rooms, in parks, and amidst abandoned courtyards. The story is indeed constructed around one of these meetings, through the alternating narration of Fred and Kate. In this way, it becomes possible to grasp the two different points of view: Fred’s despair and Kate’s exhaustion. Despite their mutual love, they are now divided by the different ways in which they have responded to hardship. Kate is sustained by a profound devoutness, grounded in a direct relationship with God. > God alone seemed to remain with me in that malaise that overwhelmed my heart, filled my veins, circulated within me like my own blood..... I was seized by a great indifference toward them all, and nothing remained with me but the word of God . In Fred, religion offers no comfort, but rather further proof of the falsity and vacuity that govern the world; for him, nothing remains but a dark affliction, a somber existential despair, a monotonous succession of tavern visits, hurried meals, and the desperate hunt for money, often to be spent on drink. Are they by now two strangers, or is love stronger than desolation? The novel’s conclusion leans toward the former outcome. In several remarkably powerful pages, the author brilliantly renders the sense of a growing estrangement. After a night during which Kate has told Fred of her intention to leave him, the man, locked in a mute resignation and an agonizing passivity, walks aimlessly and catches sight of a woman > no longer young, but beautiful, I could see her legs, the green skirt, the worn brown jacket, I could see the green hat, but above all the sad and gentle profile..... and suddenly I knew that it was Kate. Then she seemed a stranger to me once more..... it was she, but she was different from how I remembered her.... so we walked on, one behind the other, both thinking of the children, and I did not have the courage to catch up with her, to speak to her . The novel has been interpreted in various ways: an erotic tale, where the reader waits in suspense for the love scene between husband and wife, turned once again into clandestine lovers; a meditation on the loss of meaning in religion and, more broadly, of values after a war; the description of a battered city, where survivors wander in an endless struggle to stay alive, and thus the representation of a mutilated Germany. Toward this latter interpretation points a narrative inextricably fused with madness, visions, noises, advertisements, and the popular songs of the metropolis where the protagonists live. To me, however, it seems that the novel should be read in the simplest way. It is a love story that does not, despite everything, survive destitution, because Fred and Kate react with differing moral strength to their own desolation and to that of society. Kate still looks to the future despite a deep-seated malaise; Fred allows himself to be dragged along, with self-pitying indulgence, in an attitude of victimhood and self-destruction. The narrative plot, slender and sparse, is sustained by an exceptionally effective style. The spare yet incisive prose and the stripped-down syntactic structure are clear proof of how a complex narrative can be crafted without getting lost in linguistic redundancy. Why read it? It remains intensely relevant, capturing as it does the sense of disorientation before a society that is dissolving, while no traces of the emerging one can yet be seen.

Il romanzo si avvia in un'atmosfera kafkiana: l'ingegner Robert Fahmel, esperto di calcoli strutturali, si lamenta con la segreteria per aver disubbidito a un suo preciso ordine: non dire mai dove si trova, se non alla madre e al padre, ai figli, e a un certo Schrella, che scopriremo poi essere suo cognato e amico di liceo, quando entrambi non aderirono alla gioventù nazista. Siamo nel 1958, nella Germania dell'immediato dopoguerra, quando > everything seemed submerged in the past, yet present. In the regular, even liturgical routine of his life, the distinguished engineer Fahmel goes every day, from nine-thirty to eleven, to play billiards in a grand hotel, doing so solely in the presence of an errand boy, to whom he recounts his high-school years when his classmates had partaken of "the sacrament of the buffalo" (a clear reference to Nazism, which is never explicitly named) and beat the "lambs of God," those who refused to adhere to Nazi ideology. > He struck a ball with a stroke now gentle, now hard, seemingly without reason or purpose; (...) five times, six times, as the struck ball hit the cushion or the other balls. (...) The carousel of lines was always anchored to the corners, obedient to the laws of geometry and physics. Is the daily, solitary game of billiards the pastime of a man enamored of the laws of statics, or does it conceal some mystery that engineer Robert Fahmel carries within himself? For a while, the question finds no answer in a novel characterized by a continuous shifting of narrators, from the third person to the first, and by ever-new windows opening onto the past and the present, as the laws of remembrance dictate. For pages on end, we follow the account of Robert’s father; of when, in 1909, he arrived in the city from the countryside to take part in an important competition: the construction of the Abbey of St. Anthony. The description of the hours spent in a café preparing the project drawings, eating cheese with ginger, is a light and amusing interlude in a grim, hopeless novel. Robert’s father, on the other hand, harbors great expectations, confirmed when he is awarded the construction of the Abbey, which will open up for him a future of success and renown as a great architect, and allow him an advantageous marriage, with the promise of a large family of children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. But at the very moment he was submitting the drawings, Robert’s father sensed an omen of the future: > squinting my eyes, the entire massive construction seemed to stand before me, already real, as if I were looking at it from a window: the monks bent over their work, the pilgrims quenching their thirst, and the female workers already singing below, anxiously awaiting the end of the workday, their voices bright and somber, reaching me up here like a death knell. Then I closed my eyes and already felt that chill that only fifty years later, as a grown man in the midst of swarming life, I was to feel again. Illness, Nazism, and the Second World War will take away many of his children and his young daughter-in-law, culminating in his wife’s descent into madness; the Abbey itself will also be destroyed, demolished by the Germans themselves to leave scorched earth for the Allies. From the past we return to the present, in 1958, with a seemingly marginal scene. Joseph, Robert's son, is with his fiancée, but he is taciturn, withdrawn into himself, unwilling to speak and reluctant to attend a family lunch. An architect himself, Joseph is working on the construction of the new Abbey and has discovered some numbers written by his father in several spots among the ruins of the old building: they are the markings indicating where to place the dynamite to demolish the Abbey. It was Robert, then, an officer in the combat engineers, who destroyed that masterpiece, which had meant so much in his grandfather's life. The balls, > red on green, white on green, the monotonous music of the balls, like the rhythm of a Gregorian chant, (...) almost tokens of a severe poetry , are the metaphor for the quest for an order that might heal, through its daily liturgy, the incurable wounds of a Germany in which the guilt of a people is intertwined with that of individuals, and torn family destinies are bound up with a nation's delusion of power. "Why why why"—this questioning refrain recurs often in the novel. How is it possible that an intelligent and cultured people spawned so much death? And is reconciliation with the past even possible? Through a family history pivoting on the meticulous rationality of engineering—in construction as in demolition—Böll succeeds in conveying the pain and confusion, the disorientation and despair of a people. In *And Never Said a Word* (1952), Böll depicted the condition of a people reduced to starvation amid the rubble of post-war Germany; later, in 1963, in *The Clown*, Böll would delineate the moral ravages of the economic miracle (see the reviews on this site); in this novel, the writer seems to want to distance himself from the Nazi madness, yet without succeeding: the past resurfaces incessantly, and the characters are like extras, groping between madness and indifference—perhaps the only way to process their grief. Whatever the outcome, Böll reckons with history without taking refuge behind an easy self-absolution. Have we Italians done the same? Did the likes of Moravia, Calvino, and the other post-war writers write of our own guilt, or did they retreat into familism, abstraction, or victimhood, as in Elsa Morante's *History* (see the review of this novel on this site)? We must not expect a linear plot; to appreciate the novel, one must let oneself be captivated by the writing, by the allure of a prose that at times recalls Thomas Mann (see the review of *Buddenbrooks* on this site) and at others the musicality of László Krasznahorkai (see the review of *The Melancholy of Resistance* on this site). It is a pity that, in the end, the novel loses itself in a delirious drift toward nothingness. Why read it? An anguished masterpiece upon which we Italians ought to reflect.

Hans is a young man from a wealthy and influential family who works as a clown and has been left by his girlfriend, Maria. A devout Catholic, the young woman could no longer live with Hans, who is fiercely critical of religion and, more broadly, of bourgeois respectability, and who cannot stand the Catholic circle Maria frequents. Hans turns to drink and finds himself jobless, alone in his flat, attempting to reach out to his friends, his father, and his brother. Met only with rejection, he decides to take to the streets to beg, strumming a guitar and singing liturgical hymns. The novel is heavily rooted in post-war Germany and, from this perspective, distinctly dated. Yet one theme remains universal: the rejection of a hypocritical and disingenuous society that refuses to accept the truth or tolerate any challenge to prevailing social codes. How can one react: with nothingness. > You tried to comfort yourself with Fredebeul’s stale left-wing cynicism: in vain. In vain will you have tried to get angry at Blothert’s stale right-wing cynicism. There is a fine word: nothing. Think of nothing. Not of the Kanzler or the katholon; think of the clown weeping in the bathtub, of the coffee dripping onto his slippers . The theme of nothingness is the novel's central thread, finding its origin in the figure of Henriette—the sister sent to the front to die, the young man’s profound wound, a bereavement never reconciled. Henriette would often detach herself, thinking of nothing, and remark that it was wonderful. Thus, the clown performances become a way of detaching oneself, of viewing the world from the vantage point of nothingness. The time spent in the bathtub, the waiting for the telephone to ring, the mask, and the vagrancy are all avenues through which the author pursues nothingness, thereby separating himself from a world—politico-social, but also personal—that he refuses to accept and that strikes him as monstrous in its vacuity. The narrative pace is swift, interweaving intimate introspections with conversations that are invariably broken off and disappointing. In some ways it recalls that of Javier Marías, with the difference that the caustic vein is far sharper, leaving no room for a gentle, reassuring irony. The narrative arc would seem to lead toward the protagonist's suicide; instead, he finds solace and survival in the clown’s mask, for only behind a mask can one live in a society ruled by opportunism and bourgeois respectability.