Heinrich Böll is one of the most significant writers in contemporary Germany. Though he has never been so extravagantly praised as Günter Grass or Jakov Lind, his reputation has grown steadily over the years. In the late forties, when his countrymen turned to rebuilding their towns and their industry and started to forget the Nazi interlude, Böll established himself as the spokesman of those who remembered. His early novels, full of passionate pacifism, captured the mood of a generation that wanted peace at any price and won for their author audiences in more than a dozen languages. A decade later, Böll castigated the materialism and the spiritual vacuity of the new Germany in Billiards at Half-past Nine, and, more recently, took a brilliant swipe at the German upper classes in The Clown.

Now approaching 50, Böll is generally acknowledged as the moralist among his country's novelists, the man who looks for authentic humanity in a society thriving on ersatz. He is a kind of one-man Der Spiegel, grimly determined to expose what's foul on the banks of the Rhine. While a number of German critics are increasingly irritated by Böll's insistence on focusing on the darker side of the economic miracle, reviewers in this country usually find their suspicions about the Germans confirmed with every new book from his pen. Mistaking Böll's satiric distortions and ironic exaggerations for realistic description, they regard Böll as a voice of reason and humanity in a morass of Teutonic perversion. They sometimes overlook that Böll is primarily an artist.

This new collection of stories, [18 Stories] written over 15 years, is Böll's eighth book to appear in translation. There are no new or unexpected themes here, but Böll's admirers will not be disappointed. The stories encompass the whole range of the author's concerns, from the memories of war ("The Post Card," "A Case for Kop"), to loving portraits of German Holden Caulfields (Böll translated Salinger into German) and savage invective against the flourishing Kultur business of Germany.

The English version, by Leila Vennewitz, an experienced hand at translating Böll, flows naturally and is almost flawless. One could wish, however, that the publishers had given the dates of the original publication of the stories. "Bonn Diary," kept by a general of Prussian persuasion, reads like an oblique commentary on recent headlines about Bonn's military establishment. Apparently Böll has a touch of the prophet.

At his best, Böll creates satiric close-ups of unsurpassed power. In my favorite, "Murke's Collected Silenees," Böll evokes the venal atmosphere of the broadcasting stations whose influence and power are far greater in Germany than in this country. A typical radio star is Bur-Malottke, "who had converted to Catholicism during the religious fervor of 1945, had suddenly . . . felt he might be blamed for contributing to the religious overtones" in broadcasting, and now decides to omit mention of God "who occurred frequently in both his half-hour talks on The Nature of Art and [replace] him with a formula more in keeping with the mental outlook which he had professed before 1945." The trahison des clercs may be a familiar theme, but the opportunism of German intellectuals has never been pilloried as ruthlessly as in the 30 pages of this Swiftian exercise.

"Aetion Will Be Taken" is a take-off on the vaunted economic miracle that, in Böll's telling, is worked by people who only by a strong effort of will keep "from singing away all day long." No one cares what Wunsiedel's factory produces as long as it runs full speed. The laziest employee survives the frantic pace and is designated to carry a wreath of artificial flowers behind his boss's coffin. In the end he joins a funeral home to become a professional mourner. His counterpart is the professional laugher, who laughs "mournfully, moderately, hysterically .. . like a streetcar conductor or a helper in the grocery business," exactly as requested. His own laughter has never been heard.

The mourner and the laugher are cut of the same cloth as the protagonist of "This Is Tibet!," a cicerone with credits from five universities and two doctorates. Decent people, Böll leaves no doubt, are clowns or court jesters in a world run by the wicked and the rich. As in all of Böll's work, in these stories goodness is where the heart is: left of center. Sometimes Böll's art is made to serve the ends of this naive belief, as in "The Balek Scales," a preachy tale of a wicked landlord who cheats his tenant farmers.

But Böll is not Brecht; his assault is directed against the indolence of the heart, not the social order. Hence the slightly smug attitude of his non-heroes who feel good because they are good. It is better to throw away the mail, as "The Thrower-away" actually does, than to participate in a communications racket where the "envelopes are worth more than the contents."

These 18 stories are not those of an innovator. Unlike his younger colleagues, Böll makes no attempt to exploit the form for experiments and new perspectives. More in the tradition of Hemingway than Thomas Mann, he casts a poetic glow over the commonplace and lovingly characterizes the dropouts of the Volkswagen and Mercedes society. It is a measure of Böll's insight and wisdom that his stories, despite their intensely local color, have universal application. The present collection proves once again that Böll is a master storyteller.