I changed my regular morning take-out order the other day, after many, many mornings of exactly the same, and it reminded me, out of the blue, of the opening of Heinrich Böll’s postwar novel, Billiards at Half-Past Nine. The new guy in town, an architect, goes to the local café for breakfast, and since it’s his first time, orders something a little eccentric, trying to make an impression. But this act of daring comes back to haunt him, because now he’s expected to get the same damn thing for breakfast for the next sixty years. Böll also goes into a very funny sidebar about how Germans will never ask the price, when it’s not listed on the menu, for fear of embarrassing themselves. And a common daily routine offhandedly becomes a reflection on the national character.
Billiards at Half-Past Nine is in some ways an analog of Irwin Shaw’s novel Voices of a Summer Day. Böll published his book in 1959, Shaw published his in 1965. Böll was born in 1917, Shaw in 1913. Both served in the war, Böll with the Wehrmacht, Shaw with the U.S. Army. Both of them wrote about their experiences in the war, Böll with The Train Was on Time, Shaw with The Young Lions, and both had critical and commercial success. (Shaw, of course, had enormous commercial success later on, with an extra helping of critical schadenfreude.) Billiards at Half-Past Nine and Voices of a Summer Day are mid-career novels, the two writers stretching their legs but not showing strain, using a comfortable voice but not falling into lazy habits of mind. Structurally, very similar, both books generational, but the narrative arc a single day, told in flashback and multiple POV. In other words, very fluid and fluent, with a lot of grace notes - Dickensian, even, meant very much as a compliment, and not to imply cluttered. The books are actually terrifically clean, tight and exact and effective, like a good pitcher in the sixth inning.
Böll is also that generation of German
writers who lived through Nazism and the war, and wrote what might be called
stories of atonement, although the Germans call it die Trümmerliteratur,
literature of the rubble. Günter Grass is another – born in 1927,
Grass was 17 when he was drafted into the Waffen-SS, an admission he made long
afterwards – and German historical guilt is his subject. Hans Hellmut Kirst, author of Night of the Generals, was born in
I’ve
talked about German “atonement” before.
We’d do well to remember that an entire generation of younger Germans
wanted nothing whatsoever to do with regret, or war guilt, or the whole concept
of collective responsibility. They
thought the Nazis were their parents’ problem, not theirs. In the late 1960’s and early ‘70’s, when
Baader-Meinhof was active, the young German Left accused the government of
being riddled with Nazis – the
chancellor, Kurt Kiesinger, had in fact been a party member, so the Left wasn’t
all that far wrong. My point here, is
that those kids indulged their own unexamined moral superiority. We have a similar blind spot in white
Speaking of Baader-Meinhof – I’ve said this before, too - it’s a sign of maturing political health in the German social psyche, that the toxic hand-me-downs of that era, crocodile tears over the Red Army faction, the culture of betrayal encouraged by the Stasi, the self-satisfaction of bourgeois West Germans and their condescension to Ossis, is all fair game. I was startled when the movie Downfall was released, about Hitler in the bunker, and even more so by The Lives of Others, about the brute surveillance regime in
Only
the weak accommodate history. The bold
march on.
