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

Walter Fendrich, a washing-machine maintenance man, is the first-person hero of this novella [The Bread of Those Early Years;] twenty-three, Catholic, a virgin, and engaged to his employer's daughter, Ulla Wickweber. The story takes place in Cologne on a Monday in March during the early 1950s. Walter's father, a schoolteacher in a small town, has asked him to find a room for the daughter of a colleague who is coming to the city to train as a teacher. The moment Walter sees Hedwig he falls in love with her, both sexually and ontologically. In a semi-mystical flash he realizes that she represents an alternative way of life—less tough and less materialist than life with Ulla. By the end of the day and after various vicissitudes, including Walter's farewell interview with Ulla, Walter and Hedwig are ready to fulfil their destiny by going to bed together—without the blessing of the Church, although Hedwig is also a practising Catholic. Why they cannot wait to get it is never quite explained, but their hurry is made to seem somehow existential.

Böll has always been anti-clerical and anti-establishment: not a very startling position for a German Catholic, even in 1955 when this book first appeared, and it is obvious that the sexual act the novel leads up to but does not include is a rite in what J. P. Stern (TLS, January 30, 1976) called "selfconscious Roman (or rather Rhenish) Catholicism, a weird spirituality". The Bread of Those Early Years is a textbook example of Böll's work. An examination candidate having to answer a question on his themes, Weltanschauung and symbolism would not need to read much else. First, there is the typical petty bourgeois milieu with built-in alienation. Then want: Walter is doing well in the early years of the post-war economic recovery; but flashbacks reveal a childhood and early youth of deprivation—he was always hungry and the thought of bread obsessed him until bread eventually became an addiction. Now he cannot pass a baker's shop without going in to buy some. But bread is not just the counter-symbol to want, it is also a sacrament: there is a symbolic scene when Walter offers Hedwig a roll and watches her break it. In fact, there is so much bread about that one is inclined to agree with Ulla when she says: "Please don't say the word 'bread' again."

Ulla and her family stand for the acquisitive society in the black market years just after the war when the strong and wily exploited the weak. In later works Böll's target shifts towards the consumer society; here the Wirtschaftswunder is only just beginning: in both cases society is selfish and materialist. The weak are not only exploited but killed. The landscape of Walter's memory is littered with corpses, especially young corpses—another favourite theme of Böll's. Walter's mother dies of tuberculosis, an unattractive spotty girl in Wickweber's factory from a nutritional deficiency disease. The poorest boy in Walter's class is drowned, and that too because of poverty: his mother had made his swimming trunks from an old petticoat of hers, and he was so ashamed of them that he went to bathe as far as possible from the other boys. Finally there is Walter's fellow apprentice with whom in the days of shortages he and Ulla went hunting for metal scrap: he dies when the floor of a bombed building collapses under him, and Walter watches Ulla cross his name off the pay sheet.

Ulla and her father are the only two "bad" characters; or more accurately "least good", because Böll sees some goodness in everyone. Goodness is what interests him and it comes in various packages and strengths: Ulla's brother is a decent, loyal, well-meaning fellow; Walter's landlady—called Frau Brotig, which would, if it were a word, mean "bready"—is generous, warm, and speaks gently to her child; his distant cousin Clara is a nun (Böll always puts in a nun when he can), another selfless giver of bread; his father is a low-key saint; and Hedwig represents Böll's ewig Weibliche, later to turn into Katharina Blum and the Lady in the Group Portrait: a streak of Raskolnikov's Sonya in her, but more mysterious, much more attractive, and much keener on sex, so long as it is suffused with spirituality (see Professor Stern above). Walter himself is the holy fool whom critics have spotted in other works of Böll's.

Professor Stern was sorry that Böll won his Nobel Prize for literature rather than for his "immense decency". His moral stance, he said, was impeccable but unoriginal, and artistically he was unadventurous, even "quietist". True, but the same accusation—of being a guter Mensch aber schlechter Musikant—could equally well be levelled at Solzhenitsyn: perhaps it is something to do with the Nobel Prize. Böll may turn out to be one of the overrated writer's of the century. Still, he is not despicable and far from unreadable: his bread goes down easily, even though in this particular work he adopts a hushed religious tone throughout—mitigated by the translation which (mercifully perhaps) is not quite faithful in this respect. Whether the book merits a new translation (Mervyn Savill made one in 1957) is another matter, although it exhibits some of Böll's special gifts: he is wonderful at creating atmosphere and describing smells, sounds, and, of course, tastes, as well as sights. His metaphors are unexpected and illuminating, and he can draw out the lacrimae rerum better than almost anyone. Too well perhaps, but his books are getting steadily dryer, and this early one is a reminder of how far the process has gone.