Heinrich Böll Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Russell A. Berman

Critical Essay by Russell A. Berman

SOURCE: "A Language to Live In," in The New York Times Book Review, August 23, 1987, p. 27.

In the following mixed review, Berman contends that the stories in The Casualty are vivid but not as accomplished as BÖll's later works.

In one of Heinrich BÖll's most famous stories, the narrator, a young soldier just wounded in the final days of World War II, describes a makeshift military hospital. From his stretcher he sees enough of the hallways to recognize that the building formerly served as a high school, a classical Gymnasium, for the walls are adorned with busts of Cicero and Caesar, paintings of Prussian kings and imposing portraits of Friedrich Nietzsche and Adolf Hitler.

Yet not until he reaches the drawing room, now converted into an operating room, does he realize that this is his own erstwhile school, which he had left only weeks before. Penmanship had...
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