Heinrich Böll belongs to a generation of German writers whose lives are inextricably linked with the historical, social, moral and spiritual collapse of their country. Their individual destinies fused with her political fate. Whether older or younger, they have all grown up in the turmoil of Nazidom, becoming conscious of the world and of themselves either during the war, under the steaming political pressures of a war machine running wild, or in the depressurized aridity during the post-war years, surrounded by a landscape of total defeat, of ruined cities, ruined lives and guilt-complexes. Romantics they may have been; realists they all had to become. This is, perhaps, the main reason why, regardless of form and substance, their primary interests lay from the outset in politics, or rather in the consequences of the political act as reflected in the lives and minds of human beings, however far they...