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

It may very well be that "national voices" in literature, as they used to be known, are disappearing. In the time of Dostoevski and Tolstoi people talked about the "Russian Soul." The German tone of Hesse and Mann, the Scandinavian mood of Hamsun and Selma LagerlÖf, the Frenchness of Paul Bourget, are unmistakably linked with their national origins. There was an "American voice" in fiction that began with Twain and Melville, and was still recognizable in the writers of the '20s and '30s.

But this is no longer so, or not to the degree that it used to be. It is a common-place to say that technology is making us all alike, making the world into a single nation, and it is evident that this law applies in literature too. These stories [Children Are Civilians Too] of Heinrich Böll, concerned with the war and the confusion of the postwar period, could easily be by any American writer of the parallel generation, an Irwin Shaw or a Norman Mailer.

The immediate reaction of the American reader is to imagine he has detected an influence. But this is too easy. We are dealing with an "international style" that was really no more caused by Hemingway than freeways were caused by the invention of cement. As with freeways, you can like it or dislike it, but there is nothing much you can do about it. It is what is happening in the world these days.

Böll writes very well. And, having suffered the war a great deal more deeply than the average Shaw or Mailer, he writes about it a little more profoundly. The best of the war tales, in this book of 26 stories, is probably the first, "Across the Bridge"—a simple anecdote turning around a fragmentary memory of the war, an image seen through a train window, "a spindly little girl of about nine or ten holding a large, clean doll and frowning up at the train." The precision and vividness of this phrase are so powerful, and yet it is so simple, that you wonder how it is done. It is done with very great skill, and a lot of hard work; it is not as easy as it looks.

This story manages to be plotless and yet have a surprise ending. A unique achievement in the history of fiction.

The war stories tend to be gloomy and horrifying; the ones set in the period after the war tend to the grotesque. Many of them are about economic difficulties: "The Man With the Knives," for instance, in which the narrator is delighted and yet terrified to get a circus job as a knifethrower's assistant—". .. all I needed to do was stand still and dream a little. For twelve or twenty seconds"—while the knives thud into the wall around him. Or "My Sad Face," in which the hero is arrested first for looking happy and then, after a change of government, for looking sad—a Kafkaesque scenario with Charlie Chaplin in the lead. The motto of the imaginary society of the future, in this story, is "Joy and Soap." All of Böll's precision, and all his sarcasm, is in this phrase.

The stories date over a period from 1947 to 1951, and they are rather diverse in tone, in length, and even in quality. By working your way through them you can see the process working in Böll that operates in so many writers: he begins as a realist, then gradually acquires complexity, an idiosyncratic style, and a penchant for the fantastic or imaginative.

These are not pleasant stories. But it is a well-known paradox that art may give us pleasure even dealing with experiences that give us pain. This has been true at least since Dante, and Böll serves as a kind of miniature Dante of our time. He has no Virgil to guide him, and gets along without Beatrice; like most Germans of his generation, he has learned to mistrust authorities.