4 - “In this prison of the guard room”: Heinrich Böll's Briefe aus dem Krieg 1939–1945 in the Context of Contemporary Debates

Summary

Introduction

HEINRICH BÖLL (1917–1985), THE FIRST CITIZEN of the old Federal Republic of Germany to be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, established his literary reputation with the antiwar novels Der Zug war pünktlich (The Train Was on Time, 1949), Wo warst Du Adam (Adam, Where Art Thou?, 1951), and the anthology of short stories, Wanderer, kommst Du nach Spa … (Traveler, If You Come to Spa, 1950). The title story of the latter volume, a satire on military heroism, remains required reading in German schools and the enduring impact of war surfaces to a greater or lesser extent as a theme in Böll's entire oeuvre. The firsthand experience of war also influenced the writer's often impassioned interventions as a critical intellectual in the period after 1945, earning him epithets such as the “Conscience of the Nation,” and the “Good Person of Cologne,” which he found particularly irksome. Of the many political causes he was to embrace, perhaps the most relevant in the present context were his opposition to German rearmament in the 1950s; to the ethical evasions, omissions, and compromises of official attempts to deal with the legacy of the National Socialist past (Vergangenheitsbewältigung) and, in his later years, his support for the Peace Movement's campaign against NATO's deployment of Cruise and Pershing missiles on German soil.