Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Böll, Heinrich (Theodor) - Robert C. Conard

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ROBERT C. CONARD

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 depravity and untruthfulness of the German language at that time."… Böll and his contemporaries had to overcome these problems and restore the literary quality of their mother tongue. (p. 29)

The linguistic problems were further complicated by the death of German literary tradition. The new writers knew that the image of man which the older generation and its predecessors had inherited could not be revived. They knew that the tradition extending from...

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1. Introduction
2. Paul Pickrel
3. Edwin Kennebeck
4. Anthony West
5. Edwin Kennebeck
6. H. M. Waidson
7. Richard Plant
8. Matthew Hodgart
9. Bernard Bergonzi
10. Joseph P. Bauke
11. Frank J. Warnke
12. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
13. Victor Lange
14. Tamas Aczel
15. V. S. Pritchett
16. Robert C. Conard
17. Richard Gilman
18. Robert Alter
19. John Updike
20. Copyright

1. John Updike