In the following essay, Sinka summarizes how Die verlorene Ehre has been classified (variously as a novella, novel, and political pamphlet) and explores how genrebased perceptions affect interpretations of Böll's work.

In the following essay, Sewell analyzes the form of Böll's novella Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum, describing it as "a structure which threatens to slip into chaos, but paradoxically does not"

In the following essay, Armster examines the issue of sexual exploitation in Die verlorene Ehre her Katharina Blum.

In the following essay, Holbeche explores the significance of the carnival in Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum.

In the following essay, Conrad determines the influence of Adalbert Stifter's novel Der Nachsommer on Böll's story "Epilog zu Stifters 'Nachsommer', " and asserts that "although [the story reads as an entertaining spoof, on close analysis it reveals Böll's serious social concerns at the beginning of the seventies. " ]

Heinrich Böll was born in the last year of the Kaiser's reign and the first of the Russian revolution. Almost all of his stories have the local and topical affinities that this suggests: they are mostly set in the city of his birth and deal with the tumultuous era of European history that coincides with his life. Like a character whom he describes in one of his short stories he is "as old as the hunger and the filth in Europe, and the war". The local associations of Böll&#...

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

In the following essay, Holbeche examines Böll's interpretation of the relationship between "the artist as social critic and the state" as evinced in his Ende einer Diensfahrt.

Heinrich Böll writes about people living in the present. The last twenty years in European history have been prodigal with raw material for the realistic novelist. Many an author has been under the inward compulsion of writing it all out of his system; often compellingly, though at other times one has the impression that the process of creation may have been more useful to the writer than to the reader. For Böll the war was an experience of horror and waste on an immense scale. What came befor...

When the war ended in 1945 and the writers returned from the POW camps to the bombed-out cities, they found their homes unfit for habitation and their language not ready for literary use. The corrupting idiom of the Nazi propagandists and the bureaucratic jargon of the government had poisoned the German vocabulary with the taint of death. (p. 28) Böll's single sentence seems to sum up the problem fairly well: "It was a difficult and hard beginning to write in 1945, considering the depra...

In the following essay, Baacke provides a thematic analysis of Böll's short fiction.

Even a cursory glance at a West-German literary magazine will reveal a bewildering number of new writers, most of them unknown to the American public. Among the few who have found an international audience is Heinrich Böll…. [He] was a member of the Group 47, together with Hans Werner Richter, Paul Schallück, Günther Eich and Alfred Andersch. In the United States, four of Böll's novels have been published so far, and there also exist several college textbooks, conta...

As far as the early satires of Heinrich Böll are concerned, attention has been paid to his targets, and to the reason for the satire, and these are often fairly straightforward. Although some general comments have been made, the question of technique in some of the early pieces bears closer critical analysis. Such an investigation may be of value, incidentally, not only in the determining of the relationship between form and context as a stage in the aesthetic appreciation of the works concerned, but...

Enright is an English man of letters who has spent most of his career abroad, teaching English literature at universities in Egypt, Japan, Berlin, Thailand, and Singapore. His critical essays are frequently marked by sardonic treatment of what he considers the culturally pretentious in literature. In the following favorable review, he examines the plots, characters, and major themes of the stories collected in The Stories of Heinrich Böll.

[Gruppenbild mit Dame] might well be called a "Zeitroman", a panoramic social novel which traces the impact of public events upon private lives. It is a novel form which may encourage a historical conspectus in which individual problems may be subordinated to the pattern of known, outward happenings…. Böll succeeds in embodying the moods of past times with the emotional tensions of the principal characters. Yet though poignant feeling is often present, the wider vistas of the &#x...

The Irisches Tagebuch occupies a somewhat ambiguous place in Böll's oeuvre. Chronologically and stylistically it stands closer to the early stories and novels, with their studied, stark simplicity, than to the major novels, with their modernist interweavings of narrative perspectives and disruptions of temporal and spatial continuities. The travel book likewise occupies an intermediate generic position between Böll's essays and his novels, for it uses traditional conventions of b...

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, s...

The German novelist, Heinrich Böll, reflects a striking change in West German attitudes that has taken place since the end of World War II, when Böll started writing. The change concerns a basic dilemma of modern, Western society: the incongruity between man as a private individual and as a citizen of the state. This liberals' dilemma is expressed clearly in the first chapter of Emile, where Rousseau explains that a true conformity between the two is impossible, and that, therefore, the...

In the following essay, Smith explores the childlike aspects of Böll's short fiction.

The novel as interrogation has turned out to be more than experiment; it is as natural a product of war, the fixed trial, as it is of personal guilt and self-defence. Psychoanalysis, sociology, case-histories and the huge bureaucracy of files and records train the novelist for the techniques of inquisition and tempt him away from the private graces on which we contrive, as best we can, to live. Not only are we now watched by Big Brother in what Heinrich Böll (in his new novel for which he will get th...

'What portion in the world can the artist have,' asked Yeats, 'but dissipation and despair?' Hans Schnier, the hero of Heinrich Böll's … The Clown, doesn't take to dissipation—he is an innocent, a pure person, irretrievably monogamous, and cognac costs money—nor completely to despair. The book ends with him begging outside Bonn Railway Station, the first coin falling into his hat. Charity? But he is singing for his supper. And rather the ...

Böll is remarkably popular among older German readers: his fiction combines a sharply localized, vivid sort of reporting with that mixture of involvement and spectatorial reserve with which the experiences of the past twenty-five years are viewed by many Germans who have remained emotionally entangled in their aftermath. He is himself—now at 48—not quite one of the "younger" Germans, who view the Nazi decade with far less immediate concern than their elders, and who are an...

In the following negative review, Annan finds The Bread of Those Early Years typical of Böll's work.

Potoker is an American educator and critic. In the following favorable review, he examines themes common in BÖll 's short fiction.

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 the following review, Bauke lauds 18 Stories, maintaining that "it is a measure of Böll's insight and wisdom that his stories, despite their intensely local color, have universal application. "

Prawer is a German-born English critic and educator specializing in German literature, particularly the work of Heinrich Heine. In the following review of The Stories of Heinrich Böll, he analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of the short fiction comprising the collection.

In the following essay, Schwarz asserts that most of Böll's early stories depict the dreariness of war

Heiney is an American educator, novelist, and critic. In the following favorable review, he examines stylistic aspects of Böll's Absent without Leave.

Vonnegut is an American writer of darkly comic fiction which reflects his essential compassion for humanity and his complete pessimism. He rose to prominence during the 1960s with such works as Cat's Cradle (1963), God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965), and Slaughterhouse Five (1969), which is considered his best novel to date. His novels and short stories, which frequently contain elements of science fiction, satirize human stupidity, shortsightedness, and brutality, assailing in particular humanity&...

The Safety Net is pervaded by a profound nostalgia, although it is Böll's great virtue here that he does not sentimentalize the past; he suggests only that we cannot dispense with it as the revolutionaries and the technological profiteers, in their complementary ways, would have us do: The aging Tolm and Käthe, his wife of thirty-five years, are deeply attached to their own origins, but their flashbacks to childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood do not soften the remembered contours...

Heiney is an American educator, novelist, and critic. In the following review, he provides a positive assessment of Children Are Civilians Too.

For a novel about terrorism, "The Safety Net" is remarkably deficient in suspense, of both the ordinary thriller sort and of any more complex kind, an imperiled progress toward wisdom, let's say. This is due in part to Böll's decision to keep the terrorists at the far edges of the story, so that we only know about them through the reports and musings of others. But more responsible, I think, is Böll's wider intention, which is not only to examine the effects ...

In the following review, the critic commends the diverse range of characters in Böll's novella Ende einer Dienstfahrt.

In the following posive review, Lesserday compares BÖll's early war stories to those of Ernest Hemingway.

Disturbing, queer things these—two unconnected novellas in one thin volume ["Absent Without Leave"]—tales told in the first person by German males who, like the author, were of military age during World War II. The reader must bring to each his own understanding of Germans and the war, for the principal materials used by Heinrich Böll are blanks and holes. He uses the qualities of nothingness as a modern sculptor does, which sounds like a rotten idea, but he makes it work ...

Though full of psychological insight, not to mention a noble and lofty sympathy for the human plight in general, "The Safety Net" moves its burden of circumstance minimally, and then by strange twitches of hearsay. Most novels give the impression of a tour too guided, the reader too purposefully led through a series of Potemkin villages and compressed encounters on the narrow trail the plot has laid out. The reader of "The Safety Net," on the other hand, is repeatedly and prolong...

Reading a novel by Heinrich Böll is to pick through a pile of rubble with a teaspoon, or with bare hands. Shards of domestic pottery, bits of cloth almost unrecognizable as clothing, a doll with no face, half a singed photograph emerge slowly and painfully from a great deal of disintegrated brick and plaster. These shattered fragments just begin to suggest the outlines of a former life, when the grim weight of detail renders us numb, and the ponderous but relentless pace with which Böll forces...

In the following excerpt, Wilhelmus offers a mixed review of The Casualty.

Heinrich Böll's "Acquainted with the Night" is the first nonpolitical German novel I have seen since the war, and a fine book it is. Brief, unpretentious, technically conventional, it is worth reading because it is written out of the part of life that matters. American fiction more and more retreats into the suburbs. Geographically that may be all right, but spiritually it is slow death. Böll, on the other hand, has the courage and the talent to tackle his subject where it...

While there are more sophisticated writers at work in Germany, some of whom are of great promise, Heinrich Böll has no peer as a storyteller. Equally free from the chilly academism of his younger colleagues and the blindness to historical reality so obvious in the novels of the older generation, his is straightforward and unsparingly honest in his scrutiny of character and situation. He is a disciple of Hemingway rather than of Mann or Kafka, and it is not surprising that his sturdy realism occasiona...

With some of Ernest Hemingway's simplicity and clarity, Heinrich Böll writes several vignettes about a segment of the German army as it disintegrates in World War II under the Russian advance into Hungary. His stories at times separate into dry and toneless fragments, but often they come together magnetized in some fierce, ironic little catastrophe. A young, frightened corporal at a partially evacuated German hospital goes out into the garden with a Red Cross flag to meet the Russian tanks; he...

Heinrich Böll's "The Train Was on Time" may be a little disappointing to those who have read his fine novels "Acquainted with the Night" and "Adam, Where Art Thou?," but the apparent technical regression in this book represents no falling off in his considerable powers. He has suffered what so often happens in this country to foreign authors; the success (in his case largely critical) of his later books has led to the publication of an earlier one. Lik...

[The Train was on Time] is not about a man's "whole life" passing before his eyes in his last hours. A person in genuine danger is more likely to be aware of immediate sensations and needs than of general recollections, and though the soldier Andreas does think back into his past, he does so mainly in terms of simple pleasures that he does not expect to enjoy again, or in terms of the irony of his situation—"life goes on" even though he is probably going to die. To ...

Although he began writing before the Second World War, Böll's published work coincides almost exactly with the history of the Federal Republic, and there can be few more instructive documents on the extraordinary growth and success, doubts and strains, of this fledgling democracy. The sweep of Böll's narrative world—from the bleak anecdotes of the immediate post-war years, via the artistic turning-point of Billard um halb zehn to the controlled bitterness of Die verlorene ...