Down history's dark road

Press, 27 August 1977, Page 17

Down history's dark road

The Bread of Those Early Years. By Heinrich 8011. Translated by Leila Vennewitz. Seeker and Warburg. 124 pp. $6.50. Reunion. By Fred Uhlman. Collins I Harvill Press. 112 pp. $6.85. (Reviewed by Ralf Unger) This is a simple tale of a young man meeting a girl and falling in love. But beneath this is Boll’s ability to present a segment of time in the history of a nation and the personal history of a man which involve the imagination in an atmosphere of decay and hatred from the past. Bread, for the narrator who is obviously 801 l himself, is something that must be seized and held if not immediately stuffed down the gullet for fear that other people’s claws will snatch it away. It, and the soup doled out from emergency depots in immediate post-war Germany, slopped around feebly in the citizens’ stomachs and came out in the sour taste of hatred. Memories of an abused and exploited apprenticeship in which industrialists capitalised on the achievements of workers, and theft and graft were commonplace, contrast with the purity and goodness of Boll’s heroine who gives promise of eradicating some of the ghosts of the past. The book ends as a fragment of an autobiography with glimpses of shadowy figures. When it was first

written in 1955. it showed the promise fulfilled in Boll’s later books, such as "Billiards at Half Past Nine,” which became penetrating portraits of Germany’s middle-class.

“Reunion” is a fragmentary short story of a society gone mad. Its point of sanity is a romanticism which paints everything in pastel colours as it appears to two 16-year-olds in the Germany of the 19305. That was a time when people either fanatically supported the evolving system of National Socialism, or opposed it clandestinely. Seme belonged to a group that was not asked for opinions but automatically fell into the enemy camp. The two boys attend school in Stuttgart together and become close friends although their changing world puts them into opposing camps. Konradin von Hohenfels is an aristocrat whose family despise all other groups as inferior. Hans Schwarz is the son of a Jewish doctor, and therefore marked for annihilation as less than human by the new regime. For one year the two boys find reflected in each other their own groping for an understanding of nature and mankind while ignoring the rumblings of aggressive politics and their teachers’ propaganda. They part, and 30 years later Hans, now in America, looks back at the dark days of a decisive stage in his life and his country’s.