LITERATURE FROM THE RUBBLE
AN EARLY WORK BY HEINRICH BOLL GIVES FRESH INSIGHT INTO POSTWAR GERMANY'S
IDIOSYNCRATIC SEER

Author: By David Mehegan, Globe Staff

Date: Sunday, July 24, 1994
Page: 41
Section: BOOKS

"The Silent Angel" had slept in Boll's personal archives since 1950, when it was rejected by his German publisher, until his estate published it to coincide with his 75th birthday in 1992. Written three years after "The Train Was On Time," a grim 1947 novella about a doomed soldier returning to his unit on the Eastern front, "The Silent Angel" joins "And Never Said a Word," "And Where Were You, Adam?" and "The Bread of Those Early Years" in a group of early Boll works called by critics trummer-literatur (rubble literature), set in the agonies of prostrate postwar Germany.

For the new reader, Heinrich Boll can be a thrill or an exercise in frustration. Nothing about him was conventional: neither his roots nor his personal history, his style nor his idiosyncratic way of structuring a book. The nearest literary comparison would be Graham Greene, for his stylistic polish, characterizations, plots, pitch-perfect irony and deep seriousness.

"The Silent Angel" is set in an unnamed German city (apparently Boll's hometown of Cologne) right after the German collapse in May 1945. An army deserter, Hans Schnitzler, searches for Frau Elisabeth Gompertz to give her the overcoat of her husband, Willy, one of Schnitzler's comrades. Willy Gompertz had exchanged coats and places with Schnitzler just before Hans was about to be shot for desertion. Hans does not understand Gompertz's motives until he searches the coat and finds a note willing all his estate to his wife.

Hans knows then he must deliver the coat: It certifies the note's authenticity. He does so, but things are not so simple. The Gompertz family is wealthy, and others in it have a financial interest in the soldier son having died intestate, without a will. The delivered coat complicates matters, and a struggle ensues between the cynical family and the daughter-in-law, who is herself dying of cancer.

After delivering the coat, Hans is destitute and wretched. He finds a single woman, Regina Unger, whose baby was killed when the Americans took the city. As he sinks into depression, the result of hunger and war fatigue, she takes him into her small lodgings and finds food for him. Their closeness increases, and as he recovers, they reencounter the drama of the Gompertz family.

Boll's publisher balked at this book, written when the author was not much better off than Hans, because it was so gloomy and grim. Indeed, it is saturated with images of darkness and destruction -- a dystopian world. Boll mined portions of the book for later works, especially the 1953 "And Never Said a Word," but as a discrete book its weaknesses are apparent. It is top- heavy with Catholic symbolism. The darkness-vs.-light images are relentless, sometimes three or four on a page.

Born in 1917, Boll came from a staunchly liberal Catholic Cologne family that loathed Hitler and everything he stood for. His delightful 1984 memoir, ''What's to Become of the Boy? or Something To Do With Books," is presented as an account of his high school days, but it's really a record of Boll's efforts to avoid taking "the Host of the Beast," the euphemism in his 1958 novel "Billiards at Half-Past Nine" for the sinister blandishments of Nazism. "The Nazis," he writes, "repelled me on every level of my existence: conscious and instinctive, aesthetic and political."

He successfully resisted joining the Hitler youth, but when war came, he was drafted into the Wehrmacht. He served in the Crimea and in France, and was wounded four times before being captured by American forces in April 1945. Released in September, he returned home and slowly and painfully pursued a writer's life. Twelve novels and many shorter works later, Boll received the 1972 Nobel Prize in Literature, the first German Nobel laureate since Thomas Mann in 1929.

The gloom and deep solemnity of Boll's trummer-literatur gave way in the 1950s, '60s and '70s, the years of the German miracle, to brilliant ironic treatments of postwar hypocrisy, of the Germans' ways of insulating themselves against the inconvenient past. The themes of remembering and forgetting energize four extraordinary later works, "Billiards at Half-Past Nine" (by some estimates his greatest), "The Clown" (1963), "End of a Mission" (1966) and "Group Portrait with Lady" (1971).

In "Group Portrait with Lady," a powerhouse book, the mysterious ''author" is researching the wartime experiences of one Leni Pfeiffer, who, during the present of the book, is a middle-aged single woman down on her luck. "The au." approaches his subject with the detachment of the objective historian, but comes closer and closer to breaking as he articulates the painful details of Leni's life. We gradually perceive that he is in love with Leni. In one extraordinary section, he sets about explaining grief to the reader by coolly recounting encyclopedia entries under "tears" and ''weeping."

Boll's style takes some getting used to. There is always a central story line, but instead of following it straight, he narrates in circles. Each circle crosses the straight line eventually, and each time it does so, the reader learns a little more and the story becomes more dramatic and intense.

This circling back to and away from the heart of the story, like a comet, can make a reader impatient, but it creates a beguiling tolling-bell effect. The bell keeps getting louder. Says another Hans -- Hans Schneir -- in "The Clown," "my sensitive artistic nature has a feeling for the esthetics of repetition."

In Boll's moral world, evil is always person-to-person. He does not show us the evil deeds of a regime, a party or an army, but those of one man against another. "The secret of the terror," says Hans the clown, "lay in the little things. To regret big things is child's play." Nazism is a matter of personal hatred, score-settling, foolish vanity or avarice. Its fruits are something postwar Germans could not weasel out of by blaming the times, the
pressure of a movement or the diabolical intentions of one leader.

There is a hint here of Boll's deeply ingrained Catholicism. Though he was bitterly critical of Catholic hypocrisy and clerical cynicism and ignorance, he maintained a deeply orthodox sense that good and evil deeds are recorded one soul at a time. For Boll, evil doesn't drop from the sky; it grows in the soil.

Yet he was no misanthrope. There is strange unexplained goodness in the murk of "The Silent Angel," as Regina Unger cares for and comes to love Hans Schnitzler, a lost soldier she does not know. Boll's world glows no less with hope for the horrors that beset it. Hans the clown could be speaking for his creator when he says, "Strangely enough, I like the kind to which I belong: people."

New paperback editions of some of Heinrich Boll's books have just been published.

From Penguin:

-- "The Last Hour of Katharina Blum," $9.95.

-- "The Clown," $10.95.

From Northwestern University Press:

-- "Irish Journal," $9.95.

-- "And Never Said a Word," $10.95.

-- "The Train Was On Time," $9.95.

-- "End of a Mission," $10.95.

"I beg your pardon," said Hans. "Could you give me something to eat?"

His gaze wandered across the priest's sloping shoulders, past his large ears, to the square in front of the church: old trees in bloom, their trunks half buried in rubble.

"Of course," he heard the priest say. The voice was hoarse and weak, and now he looked at him. He had a peasant's face, thin and strong, a thick nose, and remarkably beautiful eyes.

"Of course," he said again. "Will you wait here?"

"Yes." Hans sat down again. He was amazed. He'd made the request because it occurred to him that the priest would have to try to help him, but he was amazed to find that someone actually existed who would agree without hesitation to give him something to eat.

HEINRICH BOLL, "The Secret Angel"

MEHEGA;06/28 NKELLY;07/25,12:25 BOLL24