[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.]

Born into a liberal Roman Catholic family in Bonn in 1917, and the least military of men, Heinrich BÖll was drafted into the German army in 1939 and eventually taken prisoner by the Americans. His first novel was published in 1949, and in 1972 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for a body of work that, in its emphasis on life and a positive vision, fulfilled the ideals the prize is meant to honor. Possibly his sense of noblesse oblige induced him to serve as the quasi-official conscience of postwar Germany—who else was anything like as eligible?—and this function, one may surmise, proved a burden to him. How could so private a person, the ironic champion of the outsider and the lone wolf, feel comfortable as a spokesman on public issues and for large and sometimes simple-minded causes?

Böll became an advocate and arbiter, someone from whom decent, balanced appraisals were expected, someone who was obliged—or who obliged himself—to see both sides of every question, including the Berlin Wall. In his collection of essays, Missing Persons, he felt it necessary to correct Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's "unworkable" preference (expressed passingly in his Gulag Archipelago) for the Gestapo over the Soviet M.G.B., predecessor of the K.G.B.; again, he felt he had to explain, in connection with the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, that both the population and the Soviet soldiers were victims, "both devout, both deeply wounded in their trust," the one side unable to halt their tanks, the other unable to offer tea and bread and the use of their toilets. The present generous volume [The Stories of Heinrich BÖll] is a memorial to the far more subtle-minded author that he was; and also a tribute to Leila Vennewitz, his faithful English-language translator of more than 20 years.

BÖll's characters fall into three categories: the ill-treated near-saint; the reprobate who is good at heart; and the plain villain, more commonly a hypocrite or a bully than a monster of iniquity. The second category has always been a favorite of fiction writers, of course; its most famous exemplar in English is Fielding's Tom Jones, who falls into error and commits peccadilloes but is honest and endowed with "natural" virtue. The boundary between the first category and the second isn't always firmly defined. Margret SchlÖmer, a minor character in BÖll's richest novel, Group Portrait With Lady, is suffering from a peculiarly advanced form of venereal disease: "tears might come out of her nipples and urine out of her nose." She is not a prostitute, we are told, but a "woman forever tangled in certain masculine desires," and she caught the infection from a visiting statesman in whom, on official instructions, she sought to inspire a "treaty mood." That is, she worked for the benefit of society, a society that wants to know nothing about the sacrifices made on its behalf. She dies not of the disease but of blushing, for in reality she was a modest woman.

The reference to "certain masculine desires" sounds like a failed euphemism. And here and elsewhere resistance may set in on the part of the reader, who senses a loading of the scales to the advantage of pet characters, although the author might argue that it was only fair to go easy on those on whom an "achievement-oriented" society has borne down hard.

Margret was a modest and sweet-natured woman and a sacrificial victim, but scarcely a saint. She allowed herself to be used; she was not sufficiently independent in spirit. A more complete BÖllian hero is Hans Schnier in that fine albeit slightly overinsistent novel, The Clown. Schnier, a talented mime, is a man of honor and integrity, lacking worldly power: he will always be out of step. People with dubious pasts are doing nicely in postwar Germany; Schnier's mother, for instance, once keen on driving "Jewish Yankees" from "our sacred German soil," is now active in reconciliation work and gives lectures on the remorse of German youth. Schnier could himself make a good living were it not that reality keeps getting in the way. He gives up his successful number, "The General," when he is visited by a little old woman, the widow of a general killed in battle. In East Germany his satiric "Board Meeting" would go down splendidly, as would his "Party Conference Elects Its Presidium" in West Germany; but he wants to do the latter in Leipzig and the former in Bonn. Perverse of him, to aspire to be effective rather than simply to poke fun harmlessly and lucratively!

Schnier epitomizes BÖll's way of thinking and feeling. A similar situation is evoked in the novella Absent Without Leave, published in 1964, a year after The Clown. Here, the narrator's admired mother-in-law says the rosary with the children of one son, a leftist and atheist, and encourages obstinate rebelliousness in the children of a pious, "churchy" son. She is instinctively religious, as opposed to mechanically or expediently so. And in her habit of commenting "Then all I can say is, the Pope was wrong," she reminds us of Schnier's animus against the Catholic Church, whose agents have persuaded his beloved to marry "one of them." Despite his bitterness, Schnier accepts that there are Catholics who are good men; it is Catholicism he objects to, the party line, the ganging up, and equally atheism Germanism, socialism and any other institutionalized ism or ology. It is the individual who matters; for BÖll, more consistently so than for Brecht, the truth was concrete.

As one would expect, his stories are less schematic or calculated than his novels, and also less inward in the presentation of character and its quiddities. Some of them are agreeably lighthearted, close to fantasy or not far from farce. "Recollections of a Young King" tells how the ruler of Capota runs away to join a circus as its cashier. "The Staech Affair" concerns a celebrated Benedictine abbey, a showpiece for prominent visitors from abroad, whose monks are frequently absent with or without leave, attending writers' conferences or studying Bavarian baroque, so that on ceremonial occasions young demonstrators have to be brought in off the streets to substitute for them, in return for 40 marks and a solid meal. Life's little idiocies are exposed in brief anecdotes: one man makes a living as a thrower-away of circulars, another counts the people crossing a newly constructed bridge, a third has knives thrown at him in a vaudeville act ("a profession where all I needed to do was stand still and dream a little"). A more pointed anecdote tells of a well-meaning, camera-carrying tourist who urges a lazy fisherman to catch more fish so he can buy a second boat, then a whole fleet, then a pickling factory, and grow rich enough to doze in the sun without a care. But he was doing exactly that, the fisherman retorts, before the tourist's clicking camera woke him up.

Like the novella And Where Were You, Adam? (answer: in the middle of a world war), the earlier stories of wartime concern people whose present life is not their life but who (sustained by tobacco and cheap drink, and sometimes sex) have to behave as if it were. One of them reflects, "Our patriotic literature has no room for reality": reality, or the absurdity of what passes for it, was exactly the author's subject. These sad and bitter, often harrowing, stories are relieved only by imaginative touches; for example, in his first publication, The Train Was on Time, antiaircraft searchlights are thought of as fingers groping for a bedbug, "a tiny bug in the cloak of the night." Or by moments of stoical humor: in "A Case for Kop" a consignment of sugar tongs finds its way to a Russian village. But there is no sugar. You could use the tongs for pinching yourself in the behind, says a man. If you still had one, a woman replies. Well then, the children could play with them. And they all laugh, for there are plenty of children around.

Not surprisingly in so firmly principled an author, the preoccupations of the novels reveal themselves fleetingly in the stories. "On Being Courteous When Compelled to Break the Law," which construes a bank robbery, undertaken for good reasons and conducted in an amiable spirit, as a "forced loan," bears a family resemblance to the novel The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum. The latter is an animated tract against the gutter press and its readers' taste for what the 19th-century British historian Macaulay termed "periodical fits of morality." The crime of Katharina's "gangster" sweetheart is merely to have deserted from the army along with the regimental pay. In his small way he is a Tom Jones figure, as is Katharina herself.

In another story a man is sent to prison for displaying a happy face and later, political circumstances having altered, imprisoned again for displaying a sad one. BÖll's characters have the gift of always being in the wrong—which proves they are right. (This, it must be admitted, makes for a certain predictability, but perhaps no more than resides in reality.) In the novel Billiards at Half-Past Nine, the anti-Nazi Schrella escapes to the Netherlands, where he is jailed for uttering threats against a Dutch politician who maintains that all Germans should be killed. When the Germans enter the country they free him under the impression that he is a martyr. They soon discover their mistake, and he flees to England, where he is jailed for threatening a British politician who contends that nothing should be preserved of Germany but its works of art.

Ironies of a more up-to-date kind feature in BÖll's last novel, The Safety Net. Protection against terrorism is itself a form of terrorism: privacy ceases to exist, phones are tapped and rooms bugged, minor offenders against the conventions of society are inadvertently caught in the "safety net," and the daughter of the protected household has virtually no choice but to fall in love with the security guard assigned to her. As for the terrorists, somewhat rosily represented here as bunglers, they succor capitalism by burning and blowing up cars, and then they blow themselves up.

My own favorite among the stories is "Murke's Collected Silences." A young broadcasting editor, working on the cultural side, is sorely oppressed by the pretentious rubbish he handles, in particular the outpourings of a "spiritual thinker" who, having experienced a fashionable change of heart, insists that all his references to "God" should be replaced by the phrase "that higher Being Whom we revere." This operation lengthens the two talks by half a minute each and entails rescheduling; so it is fortunate that the word "art," which Murke notices occurs 134 times, is left untouched. He snips out the rare moments on tape when speakers have paused to take breath, splices them together, and preserves his sanity by playing them back, at home, in the evenings. This story, like that of the mime, epitomizes beautifully its author's thought and sensibility.

BÖll died in July 1985. We may hope that he too found comfort, and some relief from his public persona, in a collection of saving silences.