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 anxious to judge the present from a detached, cosmopolitan point of view. To these more independent younger readers Böll has sometimes seemed provincial in attitude and old-fashioned in his technique; they have not, of course, been indifferent to the integrity and seriousness of Böll's moral position, but they have been troubled by his reluctance—or perhaps his inability—to bring the radical resources of modern fiction to bear upon intellectual and emotional issues that cannot be fully explored in the conventional designs of his novels. (p. 37)

Absent Without Leave and Enter and Exit … are once again characteristic variations on Böll's central theme of isolation and moral indifference. The first relates the experiences of a student—half Jewish, half Christian—in the Nazi labor service and later the German army: his detachment (in order "to make a man of him") to latrine duty, his marriage to the sister of a fellow soldier, his arrest for going AWOL, and the return to his unit. He scarcely sees his wife again, she is killed in an air attack. All of this is twenty-seven years later recalled by the disillusioned survivor of the war, a man still, so to speak, absent without leave, the bitter citizen of a prosperous Germany, whose "aim in life has been to become unfit for duty."

These deliberately sparse and banal events are little more than convenient occasions for Böll's attempt at illuminating the interplay of past and present; confused days are remembered by a narrator who is radical in his cynicism, intensely in doubt as to the intellectual perspectives of the reader whom he specifically addresses, and above all, curiously mocking of his own narrative method. Böll here transcends the straightforward realism of his earlier fiction in favor of a deliberate effort at structural complexity. He adds, in any case, a dimension of rather obvious satire on literary fashions to his customary savage social criticism: he offers the story in the bare outlines of a coloring book, which the reader himself may complete or vary. "Like a miserly uncle or a thrifty aunt, I take for granted the possession of a paintbox or a set of crayons. Those who have nothing but a pencil, a ballpoint, or the remains of some ink, are free to try it in monochrome."

Miscellaneous excerpts from the newspapers of the 22nd of September, 1938—the day on which Neville Chamberlain arrived in Bad Godesberg to settle the Sudeten crisis—are interpolated for whatever use the reader may want to make of them…. The narrator is willing to satisfy the reader's expectations of literary gamesmanship. "I hope these flashes back and forth will not upset the reader. By grade 7, if not before, the nearest child knows that this is called changing the narrational level. It is the same thing as change of shift in a factory, except that in my case these changes mark the places where I have to sharpen my pencil before supplying more strokes and dots."

The effect of these elaborate eccentricities is sometimes galvanizing but more often heavy-handed; instead of intensifying the impact of a bizarre history, instead of clarifying the puzzling interconnections between memory and actuality, Böll's self-conscious technique may merely irritate and deflate. If he attempts to provide a sort of musical coherence—gestures, movements, images, quotations, scraps of popular songs and the like echo throughout the story—these elements of continuity remain obvious rhetorical devices and seldom come to life. Böll's passionate desire to illuminate an obscure and pretentious world and to clarify our perception is unmistakable; yet there is a quality of abstraction in his story-telling, a mechanical and pseudo-highbrow allusiveness, and a stubborn recourse to inane stereotypes of speech and behavior. (pp. 37-8)

The second of these stories, Enter and Exit, describes, again in almost a monotone, remembered events in the career of a young German soldier, first at the outbreak of the Second World War and then after its end. It is a series of sharply and ironically focussed scenes that evoke the absurdity and inhumanity of life in the army, and in the physical and moral rubble of his native Cologne. What Böll calls forth in both of these topical and allegorical tales is not so much our compassion for the victims of a system, nor our dismay at the prevalence of evil; as a pragmatic moralist he attacks greed, stupidity, pretentiousness and arrogance—the traditional targets of satire—and insofar as they are curable, reminds us of the rational resources that might, with varying degrees of success, be marshalled against them.

The strength and weakness of Böll's art are, even in these minor works, obvious enough: the senselessness of war and the corruptibility of man are its moving themes; the gap between moral pretensions and the pursuit of a pointless existence is hauntingly explored with the fervor of a born storyteller who may at times seem in danger of being swayed by his own compassion into melodrama and sentimentality.

Böll has been compared to Camus: they have a moving emotional integrity in common, and a profound awareness of the need of individual moral commitment in a society of increasingly abstract relationships. Camus is altogether the more impressive analyst of the private dilemma, Böll perhaps the more specific (and satirical) recorder of public attitudes and of a collective experience desperately determined by an inheritance that is probably easier for the younger Germans totally to disavow, than for their parents to transcend. (p. 38)