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COPYRIGHT 2002 Modern Humanities Research Association
Theodor Adorno and Jean Amery both praised Heinrich Boll (1917-1985) as a moral figure. Amery maintained that without him 'die Bundesrepublik Deutschland ein schwacher entwickeltes moralisches Bewusstsein hatte', that Boll knew the continuities of German history and actively opposed them. Writing in 1972, the year that Boll won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Amery had his significance as an author in mind. (1) Adorno, four years earlier, dealt more with Boll the man, praising his independence and integrity. As a Catholic, Adorno wrote, Boll was forever being tempted by the West German establishment to become an apologist for the political and social status quo. It took all of his 'geistig-moralischer Kraft' to resist. (2) Comments like these underline that in the Federal Republic of Germany Boll played a public role as 'the conscience of the nation', although he voiced misgivings about this label: 'Nein, nein, ich bin nicht das Gewissen der Nation. Mir graust vor einer lehrhaften Literatur.' (3)
Scholars and critics often characterize Boll as a moralist. The major tendency has been to use moral terms both for interpretation of his work and for admiration of him as a person. (4) The standard note of dissent has been that Boll oversimplified German politics and history into a struggle of good and evil. A recent book by Ernestine Schlant goes further, arguing that there was a specific limit to his moral view, a contradiction in his treatment of one issue. That issue was the Holocaust, and the contradiction was between his 'acute moral conscience' and his 'unconscious [...] prejudices against Jews'. (5)
Schlant's judgment is harsh. Her study also typifies an irony at the core of Boll criticism: while critics reduce interpretation to an assessment of moral character, the fiction itself is so marked by shifts in narrative perspective that a viewpoint of 'the author', of Boll himself or of some persona who inhabits the work, is hard to infer. (6) The crucial discussion by Rainer Nagele, published in 1976, widened critical interest in Boll by including reception in his approach, along with such technical issues as composition, use of detail and symbol, perspective, voice. Boll's reputation for simple moralizing was put in doubt. Questions of form and style, not reducible to 'character', were so central to Nagele's study that if Boll appeared to harbour a contradiction, it was as likely between moral or historical vision and literary means, as within the vision itself. (7) Personal or authorial point of view was no longer the pre-eminent issue. There was no illusion that Boll infused 'himself ' into all that he wrote. Schlant, by contrast, rivets the attention on Boll's moral outlook, maintaining that formal issues do not interfere, for Boll 'does not explore new modes of expression, and his narrative presentations follow traditional patterns' (p. 25). Her dubious claim supports her argument that in this case fiction is the straightforward exposition of an author's personal limits. This all seems too easy. Boll's was a complex and ambivalent moral vision; it was also mediated by structure and style.
Boll's public statements about the Holocaust belong to a culture of memory and mourning that began to develop in West Germany after about 1955. In this culture the crimes of National Socialism, the murder of Jews and others, and the guilt of Germans became matters of public speech. 'Silence' began to lift. The courts, the theatre, and the press were among the institutions that in part supported the new awareness. Historians of this process too often divide into defenders, who declare West German efforts a success without closely assessing them, and sceptics who rush to label them a failure. However, historical understanding has increased, based upon a growing body of solid research. It is apparent now that the late 1950s saw more openness about Nazi crimes, and more sympathy for Jewish victims, than were expressed in the first decade after the war. (8) 'Coming to terms with the past' (Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit) became a watchword of the new cultural trend. Not all West Germans favoured this interest in the past: some complained that the nation should not air its guilt (or that there was no guilt to air), while others concluded that 'coming to terms' had as its real, unstated purpose an exoneration of the guilty. (9) A public discussion of Nazi crimes had begun, however, and one of its active participants was Boll. His growing literary fame increased his status as a public figure and guaranteed a hearing for his voice.
Literary scholars have been slow to study Boll apart from his fiction, although he often used non-fiction as a vehicle for moral and political comment. (10) In the following I offer a study of his remembrance as manifest in three texts: his 1956 speech 'Wo ist dein Bruder?'; a conversation in which he took part, published in a 1959 book, Die Juden in Koln; and 'Hierzulande', an essay that first appeared in 1960. (11) I will examine the last of these first, because of its formal complexity and its deep ambiguity.
Conversation, a speech, an essay: the basic forms differ from those of fiction. As 'author' or 'speaker' Boll represents himself, his 'view', his 'opinion', and so the issue of perspective is of less scope. Modulations of voice still occur, but Boll does not cede his role in the way that a novel may allow a character or an obscure 'narrator' to take over. The viewpoint is his own. That said, the formal aspect of these works cannot be disregarded any more than in his fiction. Form still imposes its condition on the text. Scholars like Nagele have demonstrated that Boll's literary oeuvre was complex in both construction and style; it would be a mistake to approach one of his essays or speeches as if it were simple. Characteristics of his fiction indeed reappear in these other kinds of text: a fixation upon detail, which establishes immediacy of experience; a concern with 'the little man', whose perceptions, memories and emotions are used as a measure of reality (Nagele, pp. 21-22 and 87-94; Reid, pp. 84-98; Herf, pp. 46-47).
'Hierzulande', which appeared in the periodical Labyrinth in 1960, is formally the most complex of the three works. An essay seems more open to formal experiment than a speech or conversation; there is no need to keep a listener in tow. Reid has used the term 'montage' to describe the patched-together quality of Boll's early fiction, and 'Hierzulande' is montage-like in the way the essayist slips from one patch of consciousness to the next, now in the present, now amid memories or reflection on the past (Reid, pp. 84-87). The slippage seems random, except that it is always away from a direct awareness of the suffering of 'others'. 'Hierzulande', knowingly and unknowingly, demonstrates the tenuousness of 'coming to terms'. Boll's 1956 speech 'Wo ist dein Bruder?', printed that same year in the magazine Geist und Tat, uses a technique common both to public speaking and to Boll's fiction: the repetition of key terms and phrases until they become a kind of reprise, like 'die Schwelle', Boll's symbol of the challenge to memory, or 'Wo ist dein Bruder?', the title question asked again and again, first put to Cain (Nagele, p. 21). Formally, of course, the 1959 conversation in Die Juden in Koln belongs no more to Boll than to the other three who take part: the Cologne Rabbi Zvi Asaria, the book's editor, the Cologne writer Paul Schalluck and the Jewish writer Wilhelm Unger. The topic is the danger for Jews in contemporary Germany. Speaking the least and a bit slow to enter in, Boll is also the least intellectual of the four. His contribution is to show his own anguish and thus affect the emotional tone of the exchange. His formulations of the question are simple but also the ones that animate the group: how to deal with guilt? What is a Jew? After the crime of genocide, can Jews in fact return and feel secure?
Boll's basic conviction is that Germans must acknowledge the crimes; this is 'die Schwelle', the threshold, that many refuse to cross. He does not minimize the difficulty of the task. If he demands that Germans remember and mourn, he is no less certain that confusion, frustration, and anguish await the ones who try. Nothing like closure or transcendence is in sight. It haunts Boll that a German cannot rest on remembrance of the crimes, that ambivalence will rack those who deal with the past. He knows that it is hard to face a victim, hard to understand guilt, hard to remember any but German suffering even if one admits the suffering of which Germans were the cause. In coining the term 'second threshold' to describe his sense of the problem, I am converting one of his own images to this end. 'Being German', in short, is at the crux for Boll. The kind of German that he wants to see does not hate Germany, but is full of the emotion of loss, including both personal loss and the immense losses caused by German aggression. The interest of Boll's idea lies not in its originality or even in the moral fervour with which he states it, but in his recognition of the emotional difficulty that it entails.
'Hierzulande' is an ironic title. It sounds easy and colloquial, 'in this country' or even 'here at home', but it leads into an essay about frustration. A Jewish man who fled Germany in 1937 and remained in Britain after the war had recently paid Boll a visit in Cologne. 'Hierzulande' is about Boll's inability to speak with him: 'Als wir um Mitternacht zum Hauptbahnhof fuhren', the essay begins, 'schwiegen wir bedruckt; unser Gesprach war missgluckt; der Besucher hatte von mir genaue Auskunft uber die Bundesrepublik erwartet, aber...
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