Word: bolling
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...BOLL did not produce this Au. as a satire. Obsession with fact and quantification is a German neurosis, he indicates, and the image of Nazi Germany that this methodology produces is neither dry nor statistical. It is spirited and ironic, yielding intense descriptions of the Pain and occasional Beatitude of a collection of domestic victims of the war--of their collective Suffering. The Au.'s doggedness is of the same guilt-ridden stripe as the repetitive and brutal naturalism of Gunter Grass: that, if it is too simple to condemn Nazi Germany with bombastic self-righteousness, maybe we will...
There is, still, a dogmatism here: Boll's assumption that such persistent reporting will in a minute and factual way produce the truth. The gross destruction of the World War is enough, perhaps, to confirm as corollary the Au.'s more subtle conclusions that this war machine also injured, with the grindings of its internal gears, a sensitive and beautiful woman. Or maybe also his suggestion, that, because this woman was endowed sensually and spiritually with qualities that transcended the simple realism of, say, another citizen or soldier, she was thus somehow justified in her utter ignorance till early...
...business of judging people--and Heinrich Boll is--then you had better be precise. If you feel guilty for the war crimes of your Nazi countrymen, you won't work it out by heaping blame on the girl who wove wreathes for dead Party bosses or on the man who has lost an eye and a leg for Germany and filched gold teeth from American corpses for himself. You had better plot dates and crimes, X's and Y's, and allegations against counter-allegations, until you determine who, in the sum of suffering, has done what to whom...
...history of Leni Pfeiffer, who was in her early twenties during the war years and whose experiences of the late 1930s and 40s are bound up--she is a German citizen--with the progress of the Third Reich. There are plenty of witnesses to Leni's development, but Heinrich Boll would certainly have trusted none of them with the narration of Group Portrait With Lady, his book about Leni. The man he does empower, as persona, to find the facts about Leni is a late-middle-aged man who identifies himself as the Author, or the Au., and who, with...
...Boll's problem is that this faith in the fact-crazed reporter appears to fade in Boll's latest publication, The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum. Here again, a woman, but not even a woman whose whole life the reporter hopes to track down in 400 pages. Just five days!--from February 20 to February 24, 1974--just five days is all he wants to know about the life of Katharina Blum. Yet even this knowledge is impossible to extract, despite detailed police records and the personal testimony of the woman involved, a woman who, at the end of that...