Heinrich Böll has written short stories, Novellen, novels, radio plays and drama, but his true talent lies in telling stories. His first "novel," Adam, Where Art Thou, is really a series of terse short stories, held together by a theme—the little man in war—rather than by central characters. In Böll's radio plays several stories are usually told by a commentator to amplify the dialogue. His Irish Journal likewise consists of a sequence of stories about life in Ireland.

Much less convicting than these early works are Böll's ambitious novels, Acquainted with the Night, Billiards at Half-Past Nine, and The Clown. Here Böll revels in contrived symbolism and in monotonous attacks on German nationalism and chauvinism. These are the works, of course, for which he won the widest acclaim behind the Iron Curtain, where he is celebrated as the foremost West German representative of the so-called Critical Realism; by 1962 more than 800,000 copies of his books had been sold in Communist countries. Unfortunately, the literary appeal of his writing is all too often diminished by the uncompromising hatred of the capitalist society in the Federal Republic that Heinrich Böll reiterates in his novels. The author here plays the fatal role of the Praceptor Germaniae, the moralist and prophet of his nation, the Nestor of our century. Böll's last two major publications, Absent Without Leave and End of a Mission are tendentious in an obtrusive manner, leaving little to the imagination in their overzealous criticism of West German militarism.

None of this is detectable in Children Are Civilians Too. Here speaks a true teller of tales, Böll at his best. These short sketches appeared between 1947 and 1951, when the author was trying to come to terms with the experiences of the Second World War. Böll is a devout Catholic—not an orthodox adherent of the official church doctrine, but an unwavering disciple of Christ. The six long years he was forced to fight in Hitler's war were against his inner convictions, certainly, yet he never openly took issue with Nazi despotism and crime. This contradiction, a prevalent one among the rank-and-file soldiers of the former German Wehrmacht, is reflected in most of Böll's early stories.

Twenty-six of them have been selected and well translated by Leila Vennewitz; together they present a valid testimony of the situation of those who do not really act in wartime, but are acted upon. Two of the stories do not actually belong to the collection. One of them, "My Sad Face," is a somewhat lame farce about modern totalitarianism, written in the parable form of the Kafka tradition. The second, "Black Sheep," is a humorous exploration of the artist's existence. For "Black Sheep," incidentally, Böll received, in 1951, the Gruppe 47 prize, which established his reputation as a writer in Germany and abroad. All twenty-six stories, originally conceived in the laconic, careless speech of the ordinary German, are impressive for their precise settings, firm structure, and forceful, pregnant dialogue.

In his presentation of war Heinreich Böll never depicts the real fighting; he never confronts the reader with gruesome pictures of human suffering as did Theodor Plievier and others. It goes without saying that any glorification of war in the fashion of Ernst Jünger is excluded from his writings. Böll prefers to show the monotony of war, the waste of time and effort—he talks of dirt and lice and boredom and of the little yet utterly frustrating privations. He describes the war from the...