Study Guide to Tomorrow and Yesterday and Other Works by Heinrich Böll

Intelligent Education

• Publisher: Influence Publishers
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781645424338
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Study Aids
• Subtopic: Study Guides

A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for selected works by Heinrich Böll, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1972. Titles in this study guide include Like A Bad Dream, And There Was The Evening And The Morning, The Balek Scales, The Death of Elsa Baskoleit, The Thrower-Away, Murke's Collected Silences, Action Will Be Taken, This Is Tibten, My Uncle Fred, Group Portrait With Lady, The Clown, Billiards At Half-Past Nine, and Tomorrow and Yesterday.As an author of the twenty first- century, Böll's short stories gained him a reputation as one of the "most respected voices on political and social issues in Germany" at the time. Moreover, his writings incorporate villains based on authority figures such as businessmen, politicians, and church leaders. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Heinrich Böll's classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons they have stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains: - Introductions to the Author and the Work
- Character Summaries
- Plot Guides
- Section and Chapter Overviews
- Test Essay and Study Q&AsThe Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.

INTRODUCTION TO HEINRICH BÖLL

 

BÖLL’S LIFE

Heinrich Böll was born in Cologne, Germany, on December 21, 1917. His father owned a carpentry shop, placing the Böll family in the lower middle-class. Böll has remained faithful to this milieu and its people in many of his works. The simple values and the virtues characteristic of Böll’s protagonists are those traditionally, and idealistically, associated with the German lower middle-class. Geographically, too, he has retained his roots. He still lives in his native city, and the locale of most of his important works in Cologne or the Rhenish area close to it. Böll was born a Catholic and remains a believer. However, the Rhenish brand of Catholicism is relatively liberal and unrestrained, as Böll indicates in his works by his numerous irreverencies toward the Church. His entire family - he was the sixth child - was characterized by this free, yet tenacious Catholicism, which was coupled with a lack of nationalism also typical of the Rhineland. These factors to a large degree helped Böll develop a strong sense of antipathy for, and independence of, the Nazi movement.

Though Böll managed to sidestep the Hitler Youth, he could not escape the draft. After high school, a brief apprenticeship in the book trade, and university study in German literature, he was inducted in 1939. Böll was wounded four times, but he was anything but a model soldier. In all the years until 1945 he managed to remain a private. Returning from English and American POW camps to his wife, whom he had married in 1942 and with whom he has three sons, Böll took up work as a census taker, and as a worker in his brother’s carpentry shop. He also began to write.

Böll’s first publications were a few short stories, followed by his first breakthrough, the novel The Train Was on Time, which appeared in Germany in 1949. His reputation as a writer grew steadily and he emerged also as one of the most respected voices on political and social issues in Germany. Along with Gunter Grass, Böll was able to break the tradition in Germany according to which the literary writer is to remain aloof from politics. Böll became a personal friend of Willy Brandt and he urged his countrymen to vote for Brandt’s party in order to effect a modicum of spiritual renewal that, in Böll’s view, Adenauer’s Christian Democrats had failed to generate after the war.

All of Böll’s involvement, however, was critical. For all his immense success, he felt progressively alienated in Germany. For a number of years, he took frequent trips to Ireland, where he maintained a cottage, in order to find solace in a country more to his liking. With the election of Brandt, however, Böll found the political and social climate less impalatable. He now retreats to a cottage in the Eifel region near Cologne. Böll’s political involvement has brought on several public assaults on him. Most notably his calling for a fair trial for the Baader-Meinhof group (leftist revolutionaries involved in robbery and manslaughter) netted him the wrath of the right-wing press in Germany. Böll has traveled widely and has been to the United States several times for lectures and interviews.

Having won numerous literary awards in Germany, among them the two most prestigious, the Buchner Prize and the Prize of Group 47, Böll received the Noble Prize for literature in 1972.

BÖLL’S WORKS

Böll began his literary career with a number of stories and novels about the war. The novel Der Zug war punktlich, 1949 (The Train Was on Time, 1956), made him famous both with the critics and the general reading-public. The book deals with a German soldier who returns to the front from furlough. On his journey he realizes that he is going to die. With inescapable artistic logic, Böll makes the soldier’s premonitions come true, showing the senseless, yet crushing fatefulness of war. In 1950, a collection of short stories appeared under the title Wanderer, kommst du nach Spa . . . (Traveller, if You Come to Spa, 1956). Here Böll adds to his repertory the themes of the soldier returning from the war, the post-war experience in Germany, and the topic of the black market. In 1951, Wo warst du, Adam (Adam, Where Art Thou, 1955), confirmed Böll’s growing reputation as a novelist of stature. This novel is an absolutely convincing indictment of the war and the refusal of the participants in it to take individual responsibility for it.

In 1954 follows Haus ohne Huter, (Tomorrow and Yesterday, 1957). Here Böll turns to the victims of the war, the women and children in a fatherless world. Their plight is not only to survive without their husbands and fathers, but to suffer under the male survivors of the war, who are largely alive because they were more rapacious than those who died, and who now are the leaders of society.

Between 1955 and 1958, Böll published several collections of short stories, some of which had appeared earlier in newspapers. Among them are “And There Was the Evening and the Morning,” “The Death of Elsa Baskoleit,” “This is Tibten,” “Murke’s Collected Silences,” “The Thrower-Away,” and “Action Will Be Taken,” all anthologized in 18 Stories, 1966. In these collections Böll establishes himself as Germany’s foremost satirist and shortstory writer.

Böll’s reputation now founded solidly as a superb writer of short prose, he attempted to counteract the charge by some critics that he lacked the breadth for the long epic by producing his first major novel, Billard um halb zehn, 1959 (Billiards at Half-Past Nine, 1961). Though a long novel, it approaches the structural density of the short story and provides the definite proof that Böll is indeed the major novelist that many critics had claimed him to be.

Disillusionment with the German post-war scene, a leitmotif in Böll’s works, reaches a note of stridency and the intensity of an absolute indictment of his society in Ansichten eines Clowns, 1963 (The Clown, 1965). It is the best satiric novel produced in Germany since the war. The protagonist in The Clown is so aggressive that he drives himself right out of the confines of society, losing his forum for effective criticism.

In his next novel, Ende einer Dienstfahrt, 1966 (The End of a Mission, 1968), Böll retreats a few steps as a critic to provide his hero with possibility of an efficacious social protest. His hero protests although he is an integrated member of society. He burns an army jeep, implicitly as a protest against the senseless and wasteful principles of order to which the army adheres, and explicitly, as a happening, in order to stir up a controversy over his act. He finds response and sympathy among the public.

Gruppenbild mit Dame, 1971 (Group Portrait with Lady, 1973), is as ambitious a novel as Billiards at Half-Past Nine and The Clown, and an extremely hopeful book. The individual, so battered and endangered in the contemporary novel, scores some triumphs in this novel. However, it takes a Leni Pfeiffer, a human being so exceptional as to be almost mythical, to survive the antagonistic forces in her society that are brought to bear upon her. Moreover, her individualism, though it is rather passive, generates respect and even love by many of those who know her.

Böll has done some work in drama - with little success - and has written a number of good radio plays, a genre still very popular in Germany.

In an interview on the TV show Book Beat, in the wake of the appearance of Group Portrait with Lady, Böll has indicated that he now wishes to return to the short story, with which he professes to have a special affinity.

TOMORROW AND YESTERDAY

GENESIS, TRANSLATIONS, INFLUENCES

The novel Haus ohne Huter (Tomorrow and Yesterday, 1957) appeared in serialization and shortly thereafter as a book in 1954. It was an immediate success and has been republished and reprinted several times in Germany. The novel has been translated into some sixteen languages. A degree of interpretation and misinterpretation is evident from the titles in other languages. In one translation, by Mervyn Savill (London, 1957), it is The Unguarded House, literally correct, but unpoetic, and in the other it is Tomorrow and Yesterday, by an anonymous translator (New York, 1957), poetic but inappropriate. In French it is Children of the Dead, in Dutch House Without Fathers, in Spanish House Without Love.

In 1954, Böll translated Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. Its main theme, like that of Tomorrow and Yesterday, is adolescence.

THEMES AND MOTIFS: SYMBOLISM

The major theme of the novel is Adolescence. The opening and closing episodes in the book are devoted to Martin Bach and Heinrich Brielach, the central characters, who are on the threshold of adulthood. As the story opens, Martin is in bed, about to go to sleep. He is thinking of comics, of Donald Duck and Hopalong Cassidy, and he derives pleasure from doing so. As the book closes, he is again about to fall asleep, but thinking of comics now seems dumb to him. He knows “that something was over: he did not know what, but something was over.” Instead of comics, he now muses over a quote from the Bible; “If Thou, Lord, should mark iniquities,” and a sentence from the catechism, “To what purpose are we on earth.”

The process of learning about the world is very different for the two boys. For Martin, it is primarily exposure to sexual knowledge and the question of sin. For Heinrich, who for years has been in charge of his family’s budget and at the age of five had been a black marketeer, adolescence holds out some hope for security. At the end of the book, he has been helped through a crisis of shame by Albert who, it seems, will be a father figure to him.

Carnal Knowledge

Sexual knowledge is one of the motifs conjunctive with adolescence. Böll uses it in leitmotif fashion. The aura of mystery, secrecy and sin it often holds for the adolescent is conveyed by the frequently repeated, and unvaried reference to the two boys Martin comes across in the bushes: They “had done something indecent: scarlet faces, open flies and the bitter odor of cut greens.” Furthermore, the taboo quality sex has for the uninitiated is brought out by Martin’s and Heinrich’s avoidance of vulgarisms for the sexual act. They refer to and think of it as “Vereinigung” (conjunction), a euphemism adults use, and the vulgar term for fornicating is simply “the word” for them.

The adolescence of Martin and Heinrich, both eleven-year-olds, is not a happy and normal affair. They experience it too young, and under extremely adverse conditions. Their fathers were killed in the war and as a result the boys lack guidance and security. Their world is not idyllic and their emotional state is generally one of anxiety. They live in a “house without guardians,” to translate the title in yet another way.

Exposure

The notion of extreme vulnerability, indicated especially by Heinrich’s fixed idea that he is walking over ice that is about to break, or by the slogan, dragged by the plane, “Are you prepared for the worst,” has several corollaries. The strongest of these motifs is:

Lack Of Fathers And Husbands

To the boys, their fathers cannot even serve to give them a personal father-concept. Their pictures show them too young to be their fathers and the husbands of their mothers. Their mothers have never recovered from the loss of their husbands. Martin’s mother, intelligent and stubborn, idolizes her dead husband to a point that he becomes simply irreplaceable. Heinrich’s mother also remains loyal to her dead husband in a self-destructive way. She insists on making decisions that drive her lovers away. The effect the fatherless family has on the boys differs in the two cases. Heinrich has to be the backbone of his family, consisting of his mother, his baby sister and Leo, his mother’s lover. He remembers several of his mother’s lovers, designated as “uncles,” the euphemistic parlance used in German in these situations. Heinrich, then, at the age of eleven, has to be the father in his family.

Martin is much more fortunate. His father’s best friend Albert lives in the same house with him. Albert is the most positive male figure in the novel. He definitely has the quality to be a father. However, Martin’s mother refuses to marry him. Although Albert helps Martin in his transition to adulthood, he lacks to Albert the primary requirement to be a full-fledged father. To both boys, a father is a father only if he is married to their mother. Albert’s role as a father-figure is further weakened by the basic structure of the household in which they live. It is decidedly matriarchal. Martin’s maternal grandmother dominates the family and frightens Martin much of the time.

Though there is order in the boy’s lives - they go to school, they are exposed to the traditional rules of deportment - the moral structure of their world is hollow, not only for them, but for their mothers as well. Böll strongly delineates the concept of the family, and society at large, as threatened in post-war Germany.

Empty Order

The major cause for the lack of...