SOURCE: "The Rhetoric of Citation and the Ideology of War in Heinrich BÖll's Short Fiction," in Cultural Studies of Modern Germany: History, Representation, and Nationhood, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1993, pp. 147-58.

In the following excerpt, Berman analyzes the semiotic aspects of BÖll's short story "When the War Began."

Böll's 1961 story ["Als der Krieg ausbrach" ("When the War Began")] presents itself as a personal recollection of a historical moment, linking objective and subjective dimensions by eliding the title—"When the war began" with the initial sentence, "I lay in the window, sleeves rolled up, looking out the window to the telephone office . . ." Grand history and individual experience evidently run into each other, collide, and generate the existential scenario typical of much of BÖll's work: the living individual in conflict with hierarchies of power, be they political, social, military, or ecclesiastic. Approaching the text in...