[Potoker is an American educator and critic. In the following favorable review, he examines themes common in BÖll 's short fiction. ]

Heinrich Böll, whose prose is remarkable for its vitality, lucidity, and color, now enjoys a reputation, well and scrupulously earned, as one of contemporary Europe's most influential writers. Achieving international recognition in the immediate postwar years, Böll was hailed as the analyst—indeed, the laughing vivisectionist—of the German generation that promoted and somehow accommodated Hitler. With an integrity that must have been painful to sustain, he scrutinized Germany's so-called "undigested past," in the process rendering it clear but by no means more digestible. In his probe of the modern German condition he uncovered the quirks that lay, like noxious organisms, beneath Germany's values and social institutions, and uncovered as well the dangerous illusions which Germans cherished about these quirks.

Böll has always been a moralist in the sense that Kafka and Camus were, but his artistry, like theirs, generally triumphs over the occasional excesses of his moral passion. His novels, especially Billiards at Half past Nine and The Clown, received high critical acclaim in this country, and his readership has been growing steadily since 1962. However, since Böll began his career with short stories and continues to write them, it is gratifying to have finally available a representative collection of his work in that form.

18 Stories, written over a period of nearly two decades, shows the imaginative range, power, and wit that we expect of Böll. More important, these pieces, in a shrewd and skillful translation by Leila Vennewitz, allow us to perceive easily that Böll is a master of short prose, even if all the stories included are not masterpieces. For the most part, Böll's techniques are conventional: his narratives tend to be straightforward and realistic. Because he can write stories that are cogent, dramatic, and immediate, he seems to eschew experimental methods.

There are, unfortunately, no convenient rubrics in this collection, dates are not provided, and the order of presentation is haphazard. Nevertheless, from the satirical masterpieces scattered throughout the book a central theme emerges, one that deals with the indignities and absurdities of making a living in postwar Germany. Böll's protagonists, naïve or clownish or both, hover at the fringes of the German economic miracle, sufficiently alienated from the efficient burghers whom they mock. These protagonists frequently stem from the lower middle class, to which Böll is somewhat romantically attached, but they are not, in the inelegant speech of sociologists, "upward mobile." On the contrary, they are weirdly static. Their grotesque confrontations with higher middle-class values and occupations provide the cutting edges of these stories and much marvelous buffoonery.

"Action Will Be Taken," subtitled "An Action-Packed Story," has as its anti-hero a nameless narrator who gets a job in a factory renowned for efficiency and furious activity. His frantic boss constantly goes about shouting, "Let's have some action!" The required reply from all employees is, "Action will be taken!" One day the narrator hesitates in answering the boss's unchanging invocation, thereby shocking him to death. At the funeral he receives an offer from a firm of undertakers to join their staff as a professional mourner. Easily persuaded that he is a "born mourner," he happily pursues his true vocation, in which pensiveness is essential and inactivity his duty.

"The Thrower-Away" is about a complex stooge whose activity is devoted entirely to destruction: he throws away. Employed by a large insurance company, he uses an elaborate system for sorting first-class mail from the oppressive junk that threatens to inundate every business enterprise. Travel folders, brochures from political parties and religious sects, notifications from charities and lotteries he gleefully throws away. Suspected of nihilism, he knows that his punch-card file in the City Hall contains the symbols for "mental case" and "anti-social." These symbols are the price he must pay for his chosen activities.

The tactics in both pieces, of course, are those of Kafka, who, like Böll, was a master cultural pathologist. However, Böll's work is never as depressing as Kafka's. There is a dash of Fielding in him that always mitigates the effects of his paranoia, a gusto and vigor that enable him to envision, eccentrically but firmly, human order as well as ordure.

Although many of these stories have political overtones, most are not overtly political. The chief exception is "Bonn Diary," which does in twelve pages what Kirst did in The Night of the Generals. The German military caste and its post-war re-emergence are mordantly satirized. General Erich von Machorka-Muff, a forthright soldier and to his old superiors an "idealist," sees his pet project become a reality: the Bonn Government, with special prodding from the Ministry of Defense, has decided to erect an "Academy for Military Memoirs, where every veteran from the rank of major up is to be given the opportunity of committing his reminiscences to paper." The General delivers the Academy's first lecture, fittingly entitled "Reminiscence as a Historical Duty." He is especially pleased that his dream came to pass in a democracy. "A democracy in which we have the majority of Parliament on our side," confides a high-ranking bureaucrat from the Defense Ministry, "is a great deal better than a dictatorship."

Inevitably, such a large collection has its duds. When Böll writes about the sexual problems of adolescents ("In the Valley of the Thundering Hooves") or the religious anxieties of adulterers ("The Adventure") he is sentimental and unconvincing. Nevertheless, this volume, which contains only a few examples of Böll's sporadic gaucherie, is about as distinguished and satisfying as any collection of short stories can be.