The Art of Fiction No. 74 (original) (raw)

After riding a streetcar through the green fields and meadows south of Cologne, the interviewer got out at the small station at Merten and gave a taxi driver an address: “Oh, you're going to see Böll,” was the immediate comment. The address was a three-storied, nondescript and unadorned brick building. After standing at a wooden gate with no apparent latch, the interviewer was hailed from a porch above by a balding, somewhat florid-faced man who called out: “Simply push the top board to the right.”

Once inside, Heinrich Böll welcomed the interviewer with a hearty handshake; he introduced Annemarie Böll—his helpmate and wife of almost forty years—and led the way into a dark living room filled with overstuffed chairs and couches. Böll recently sold his residence of many years in Cologne to move near the Lamuv Verlag, an enterprise of one of his sons, where Böll himself lends a hand as an editor and advisor to the fledgling publisher.

The writer, wearing a rumpled suit with no tie, moved slowly and spoke softly. When he and the interviewer had settled themselves, Böll leaned forward and said, “Let's simply talk with one another.” His remark set the tone for the relaxed conversation that followed.

INTERVIEWER

I think of surprises in your works which startle the reader, as in Adam, Where Art Thou? where the protagonist is killed on the last page. Or in Group Portrait with Lady, where the reader waits in suspense for the meeting of the narrator with Leni Pfeiffer, and when it does happen, there are only a few words about it. What kind of function do such surprises play? Did you contrive such surprises on purpose?

BÖLL

No, I don't think so. In Group Portrait with Lady the reason is possibly—I emphasize the _possibly_—that the narrator has been very aloof during the whole book. He has become a researcher, collecting impressions, facts, moods, and also events, and therefore he probably shrinks from the encounter. In Adam, Where Art Thou? there is very possibly an experiential component. I spent the last months of the war here in the western part of Germany before I became a prisoner of the Americans, and I observed that houses where a white flag had been put out were often shot at by the Germans. With the advance of the American army, villages and small towns between the fronts waited for the American army, and raised the white flag; that was prohibited, prohibited on penalty of death. Naturally, with the shifting of the fronts, the occupation of some villages changed; those houses with white flags hanging out were fired on by the German army or at least by certain units. Therefore, the white flag had a personal significance for me; possibly—I no longer know exactly what I had in mind at the time—it was the thought of being killed at the last moment that brought me to end the story that way. It happened to a lot of people. Here in the Rhineland there was a whole wave of executions of deserters, about which very little is known even yet. They were hanged from trees; they were shot to death on the spot. There was a kind of arbitrary jurisdiction. I believe there was a mandate by Hitler that anyone could shoot anyone else whom he considered a deserter from the colors. And I was myself, with my brother, a deserter in the last months of the war and lived in the constant fear: “Will we get away with it? Will we get out of this alive, survive it?” Then, in order to escape this peril—it seemed to me the safest way—I went back to the army. During that fortnight or so in the armed forces before I came into American captivity, I often observed what happened to the white flags. And certainly for me—a deserter from the colors who was frightened for his life—that was significant to me. It wasn't just a capricious ending.

INTERVIEWER

I was with that soldier in front of his door, where a white flag was flying, and when I turned the page there was the sudden, surprising moment. I almost collapsed myself.

BÖLL

I remember one young man, a noncommissioned officer, who left the front to go drink coffee with his mother. She lived only four kilometers or so away. He was shot as a deserter.

INTERVIEWER

But he wasn't one?

BÖLL

That was not clear. He wasn't militaristic or an enthusiastic soldier, but he had gone away only four or five kilometers to visit his mother, and they shot him. Such things happened. On a visit to Cologne in March 1945, after a heavy bombing I met hundreds and hundreds of deserters who were squatting in the rubble, many in the deep cellars left from Roman times. They had been hiding there after the retreat from France. They lived by selling cigarettes on the black market, by bartering, and so on. People like these, who fled the war and were nevertheless killed at the last moment, are indeed significant. The white flag is a very important motif. I still remember keeping my father from putting out the white flag too early. He always had his handkerchief and a broomstick ready and, long before the Americans came, he wanted to put them out; and we said: “Now watch it, that could turn out bad, don't do that too soon.” So you can see what the white flag means to me.

INTERVIEWER

For a long time I've noticed that throughout your works there is a considerable emphasis on arrivals and departures . . .the train station a focal point.

BÖLL

Oh, yes. I suppose that's also related to the war, to hundreds of departures and farewells which could always be final. Nobody knew: “Will we see one another again?” I experience this metaphysics of farewell even to this day when I leave someplace, when I change localities, which I unfortunately do very often. The farewell is always conceivably a final one. Even when I travel from the house we have in the country to this house, where we live officially, so to speak, I have to pack; I have to climb into a car or a taxi. It's always difficult to depart; the realistic aspect does not exclude the metaphorical one—the interpretation that here on earth we find ourselves in a waiting room.

INTERVIEWER

You could say: Meeting Place Earth, couldn't you?

BÖLL

Yes, you could say that. But I long for the time of no more departures. It has something to do with age probably.

INTERVIEWER

I think of Hans Schnier in _The Clown_—how he sits there on the steps.

BÖLL

Within the absurd events of war there is always a constant back-and-forth, a constant change from here to there. You get put into another train and shipped off; you arrive somewhere, stay only a couple of days, and then you are again shipped off—this absurd line of movement brought about by war. If you translate that into all the people, whether civilian or soldier, there's something like fugitive flight involved.

INTERVIEWER

Only in wartime?

BÖLL

It was there before. The threat posed by those in power, the Nazis, was always that of having to leave. You could be arrested, you could be taken away. Also the economics of the time meant that we moved around a lot. The fear of not being able to pay the rent was deeply lodged, very deeply. Just imagine a boy of ten or twelve who has no clear concept of economic matters but knows only: “Oh, God, I hope we can pay the rent or we'll be thrown out.” All of that is related. My father owned several houses—we had one that he had to sell because of the Depression. The deluge came a year later when a bank failed. We had to get out of our house. It was auctioned off. And with that the fear began: “Do you have a place to live? Do you have a bed?” Later, with my own sons, it has always been my main concern to have a home for them, and a bed, and a blanket. It's all connected with that. A train station is not a home, you know. Nor is a waiting room, and least of all the army barracks.

INTERVIEWER

You have sometimes been compared with Hemingway. Do you think that is justified?

BÖLL

Not entirely. I was influenced in regard to form, that's very obvious. His style was for us an enormous surprise, and we were fascinated because apparently—I emphasize _apparently_—he was so superficial . . . such a contrast to our famous German profundity. But behind this apparent, let's say almost journalistic, superficiality one can perceive a depth. Where I differ completely from him is in his trauma of masculinity—it probably was a trauma in his case—or this hero worship, virility worship! I never liked that. It had no appeal for me; it was distasteful to me. Nonetheless, his means of expression were so important.

INTERVIEWER

You and your wife had something to do with the success in Germany of J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye.

BÖLL

Well, it had been translated, and indeed very well, but it wasn't a success. It hadn't even been noticed. It had been done by a Swiss publisher. We compared the translation with the English original, and discovered that, for reasons of censorship of one kind or another, some parts had been left out. The Swiss do a lot of censoring—especially references to sex and anti-militaristic things. So we looked for a new publisher, actually our own, and after convincing him—which was very difficult, he didn't want to do it at all—we redid The Catcher in the Rye, checking through it, correcting a bit, and adding what had been left out. And we did translate other works by Salinger, Franny and Zooey and Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters.