[In the following excerpt, Berman analyzes the semiotic aspects of BÖll's short story "When the War Began."]

Böll's 1961 story ["Als der Krieg ausbrach" ("When the War Began")] presents itself as a personal recollection of a historical moment, linking objective and subjective dimensions by eliding the title—"When the war began" with the initial sentence, "I lay in the window, sleeves rolled up, looking out the window to the telephone office . . ." Grand history and individual experience evidently run into each other, collide, and generate the existential scenario typical of much of BÖll's work: the living individual in conflict with hierarchies of power, be they political, social, military, or ecclesiastic. Approaching the text in this manner, one ends up asking only whether it should be treated as primarily a subjective, nearly impressionistic remembrance, more than twenty years after the fact, or, on the other hand, as above all an attempt at a definitive, i.e., objective account of the fact itself, the historical moment, "als der Krieg ausbrach."

Yet even if the opening of the text stages the collision of person and history, subject and object, the course of the text demonstrates nothing if not the inadequacy of either account in isolation. For the I who, at the outbreak of the war, is lying at the window never achieves much substantial particularity, and all the purportedly personal memories are strikingly devoid of any nuance or idiosyncrasy that might indicate a concrete individuality. That is, if the text is about personal memory, it is also about the dissolution of personhood. A similar dialectic undermines any naively objectivist reading as well. The title's insistence on temporal specificity is irreparably undercut by the ambiguities of the text: does the war break out at the beginning or the end of the story? The narrator, at least, refuses to accept the notion of the war's having commenced at all, even when he learns of his friend Leo's death, i.e., the moment named by the title remains frustratingly elusive, and the pretext of the story, the promise of chronological accuracy, turns out to be highly labile, with presumably far-reaching consequences for any historiographic project.

If the text is neither purely autobiographical nor naively historiographic, subjective or objective, it is evidently about the relationship—or disjunction—between the two, i.e., it is not an untroubled unity of subject and object but a staging of their separation, their unity as separated, at a specific conjunction in time. The figure who initially lies at the window in a posture of seclusion, recognizably romantic no matter how deflated—indeed he is waiting to call his lover, even if this eroticism is extraordinarily arid—this latter-day romantic ego of the outset is, by the conclusion, marching in a column of soldiers singing "Muss i denn" ("For I must go"), the crucial citation in the text and the announcement of both compulsion (a far cry from "Kein Mensch muss müssen") and separation: the fate of the Schatz left behind, never articulated as such in the text but, like the concluding line of the popular song, precisely therefore all the more prominent.

The text records the process by which the prone ego is gotten up out of bed and integrated into the mobilized masses, but this apparent integration of the individual into society remains an unfree and therefore false sublation precisely because it depends on the compulsion and separation named by the citation. Compulsion: at stake is an arbitrary order, the establishment of an arbitrary code that lacks any referential legitimacy vis-à-vis a rapidly vanishing life-world. The code depends on the production of differences and, consequently, of separations. To talk about the text as an account of a reorganization of meaning and social structure would be wrong precisely because it investigates something like the enforced organization of meaninglessness and the painfully felt absence of society, i.e., a genuine or adequate human society. A natural order, traditionalism, is present only as memory—what Leo and the narrator used to do; it is replaced by arbitrary signification and the laceration of community, semiotics and alienation (names for the dual absence of meaning and society).

The objection that this relatively simply story cannot support an examination in terms of semiotics and alienation (in other words: structuralism and Marxism) can be easily countered with reference to the frequency with which the text itself foregrounds the problem of signification (and social division as well; more on that later). The point therefore is not to produce a semiotic reading of "Als der Krieg ausbrach" but to note that "Als der Krieg ausbrach" is already a critical reading of semiotics. For the story itself thematizes the status of signs and the proliferation of certain sorts of sign systems as constitutive of the moment of the outbreak of war. Thus the story commences with an account of a sign language: the narrator "waited for my friend Leo to give the agreed-upon sign," and the text proceeds immediately to describe the act of signification: "coming to the window, taking his cap off and putting it on again." This seemingly absurd act is dependent on an arbitrary difference—"Leo alone wore a cap, and only in order to take it off to give me a sign." That is, he is not a lover of caps or a mysteriously formal dresser but rather an element within a system dependent on abstract differentiation.

The initial description of the sign system is surrounded by two questions, each inquiring into the relationship between the system and specific social or political terrains. First we are told that although the system is itself only conventional—what Leo has on his head is meaningful only within the code—it does have an extrasystemic goal: to alert the narrator to the fact that at certain points in time he can use a telephone to call a girlfriend for free. Is there any tighter relationship between the semiotic code and the communicative act (indeed the communication between lovers)? The answer is yes, but it is, counterintuitively, not the relationship suggested by the opening scene. Instead of an elaboration of sign systems augmenting communication, the opposite transpires; as codes proliferate, the connection between the narrator and his lover snaps—their sole conversation is one in which he admonishes her not to come for a visit (as if signifying chains were incompatible with marriage bonds). Yet this marginahzation of the woman, or her repression, is itself part of a code of patriarchal separation that is inscribed in the unwritten continuation of the leitmotific citation: "Aber du mein Schatz bleibst hier" ("But you my dear stay here").

If a dimension of communicative authenticity, eros, and woman is left, so to speak, behind the expansion of a semiotic system, does the system—this is the second question—run up against another border too, i.e., what is outside the system? "I suddenly noticed that the rhythm of plugging and unplugging had changed; the arm motions lost their mechanical character, became imprecise, and Leo threw his hands over his head three times: a sign we had not agreed upon but which told me something extraordinary had happened." It appears that the system has broken down, that the code has come to an end, and that war amounts to the end of the semiotic order. But the sentence goes on and, in a stunning reversal, keeps the question open. Is war located subsequent to the semiotic scene, or is it, in contrast, the outcome and expansion of semiosis? Is signifying order concluded by the disorder of war, or is the system which produced arbitrary distinction and the repression of communication the sine qua non of war? Thus the text proceeds: "then I saw how one telephone operator took his helmet from the closet and put it on; he looked ridiculous, sitting there, sweating in an undershirt, his tag around his neck and a helmet on his head-but I couldn't laugh, since I recalled that putting on a helmet meant something like 'battle-ready' and I was afraid." If the Stahlhelm is not the Mütze, they are after all both hats, and the difference between them can be accounted for easily within the same binary paradigm of hat-on and hatoff, i.e., the basic system of signification has not changed at all. Is the system itself implicated in the war that is just now breaking out?

Böll's text is centrally concerned with a political critique of the economy of the sign. The initial example of Leo's covered or uncovered head is quickly expanded by a different difference, i.e., the difference between a soldier with or without a helmet. This sort of pattern pervades the story; we read of differentiations between military ranks, discussion topics, and social groups, between Poles and Germans, Protestants and Catholics, open collars and buttoned ones. Meaning constructed in this manner is a function less of reference than of difference, and the production of difference is complicitous in that outbreak of agonistics called war.

Consider a further example: "Once there came a field kitchen. We got lots of goulash and few potatoes, and real coffee and cigarettes we didn't have to pay for. It must have been in the dark, since I remember a voice saying: real coffee and free cigarettes, the surest sign of war; I don't remember the face that went with the voice." The "surest sign of war" is therefore identifiable as such not because of any subjective involvement; it is after all a disembodied, faceless voice that speaks, and the agency distributing the wares disappears into the anonymity of the Feldküche. Neither sensuous enjoyment nor intentional consciousness is at stake but solely the difference between cigarettes and coffee for free and another state of affairs where one would have to pay for them, i.e., the difference is an absence, costlessness, umsonst, in other words, nothing at all, which nevertheless makes all the difference between war and peace. What is the form of social organization that prevails in the bureaucratic context of signification via arbitrary difference?

It is a society of alienation, characterized by an estrangement between groups that is as emphatic as it is absurd: the rank and file soldiers divide into opposing cliques, the foot soldiers face the officers, the Germans confront the Poles, and everyone goes to war. Because of differential semiosis, not only 1939 but also 1949, hot war and cold war ensue, both dependent on the differences. The text suggests a linkage between a specific mode of signification, alienated society, and belligerence. Is this an ontological claim? Does BÖll, in his glorious existentialist abstraction, suggest that meaning necessarily means war? Not at all, since the problematic is relativized by a historicizing reference which, on its own, would be rather unconvincing, were it not simultaneously bound to the central question of repression and patriarchy. When Leo reports the news—of full mobilization—he immediately adds that it would be a long time before the two could again bicycle in the countryside, to which the narrator appends the parenthetical comment: "(In our free time, we bicycled through the country, out in the fields, and we had peasant women make us fried eggs with bread)." The figure of a Utopian return to nature—which is also a return to women—of rustic simplicity and sensuous pleasure, is bracketed between parentheses and relegated to an unretrievable past (although of course even its merely parenthetical presence in the text disrupts the postromantic normalcy of the present). That remembered travel into a gendered world of Bauersfrauen, a life-world of preconceptual experience, is now proscribed by a semiotic order that disallows precisely such material experience—subjectivity doesn't count—while it marks women, arbitrarily, as an alterity to be repressed. In place of the journey to the peasant women, the narrator breaks with Marie and moves off from her, represses her, as the repressed verse itself recommends: "Aber du mein Schatz bleibst hier." That is, the world constructed in terms of a proliferation of differentiation is simultaneously both alienated and patriarchal, and it is also a world of universal necessity, general mobilization, and compulsion: "Muss i denn."

Is this world of unfreedom describable as society? Barely, for as the narrator puts it: "I needed company and had none." A stranger in his own land because it is a land of universal estrangement and encoded difference, he finds no society—society, or companionship, sinks into the past of the bicycle trip with Leo. A different mode of organization prevails; instead of society, signifying chains: "this time we loaded detergent cartons, piled in a gym .. . we made a chain, and carton after carton passed through my hands . . ."

Significatory order is associated with an authoritarian organization of mechanical labor, i.e., the same principle of compulsion announced by the title of the song. The system of formal difference that excludes subjective consciousness is not just a guarantor of meaning but also a foundational element in the system of domination that depends on an ideology of compulsion. "Sometimes we met or passed soldiers singing 'Muss i denn.' There were three bands and everything was quicker. It was later, after midnight, when we finished the last cartons—and my hands remembered the number of pots and noted little difference between cartons of detergent and cooking pots." Labor, difference, and intractable necessity are brought into a proximity defining the authoritarian structure at the outbreak of war.

Yet BÖll's text does not only delineate this structure and explore the resonance between semiotic order and alienated society; it also articulates a critique in the course of the final scenario of the narrative. The structure of this final scenario is such that it repeats features of the opening; the narrator is again lying on his bed, his comrades are quibbling over minor points, and an interpretive event transpires: the signs of general mobilization in the first scene are paralleled now by the announcement of Leo's death. This death, however, is presented as a consequence of the system of differentiation: only now is the narrator distinguished by being addressed with a formal Sie, only in death does Leo become a person with a last name. Death intervenes as the ultimate differentiation, between the living and the dead, and the point where, after all, everything is the same, since nothing matters any longer, which is why the narrator protests and refuses the news. His rejoinder to the report that Leo Siemers had become "der erste Gefallene des Regiments" repeats the congruence of history and individuality evidenced in the first sentence of the story. For Leo cannot have become a Gefallene, since there has been no declaration of war—that is the objective argument—and Leo, too, his personal friend, with his disregard for military order, is not one to have sought a hero's death: "Leo doesn't die in battle, not him . . . you know it."

The comment on the "surest sign of war," which figured importantly in the investigation of the structure of the sign, was pronounced by an invisible speaker, and the story might well be read as a subtle record of the disappearance of speech: crossed telephone wires giving way to an arbitrary sign system, proceeding finally to the death notice brought, tellingly enough, by a writer, the Kompanieschreiber, as if the vocality of the outset (the telephone call) were displaced by the silence and epitaphic writing of the end. The story that records the loss of a life-world and viable communication simultaneously suggests the privileging of writing, a sort of backhanded self-reflection of the author BöLL, for whom writing is about its own impossibility or, which is to say the same, will always verge on the obituary.

That a story about the outbreak of the war might be primarily morbid is hardly surprising. Is it only morbid? Preserving Leo's memory, the narrator also rescues him, i.e., the same Leo who enfigured a sort of resistance to division, disregarding the separations of telephone lines and bringing lovers together. The text thereby suggests an alternative to the strategy of difference and control, divide and conquer, the bureaucratic-administrative repression of the life-world whose mode of operation BÖll so cogently dissects. "Als der Krieg ausbrach" entails by no means solely a report on the past, the war, and the origins of divided Germany, but something like its redemption and therefore also an imagination of an obliteration of artificial differences and borders: between classes, genders, and states as well.