Lifeless Living

TOMORROW AND YESTERDAY (250 pp.)--Heinrlch Boll--Criterion ($2.50).

Periodically, eleven-year-old Martin Bach is catechized by his grandmother. "Your father fell in action, didn't he?" "Yes." "What does it mean--fell in action?" "Killed in the war. Shot." "Where?" "Near Kalinovka." . . . "What is the name of the man responsible for your father's death?" "Gaseler." "Repeat the name." "Gaseler." "Once more." "Gaseler." "Do you know what it means to deprive a child of his father?" "Yes."

Martin knows--and so does his best friend Heinrich, whose father was also killed on the Eastern front. It meant that Father was replaced by an "uncle." Sometimes the uncles are nice, like Martin's Uncle Albert, who shares the same house as Martin's mother, but not her bed. Sometimes they are crabbed and cruel, like Heinrich's Uncle Leo, the last of a long succession of uncles who moved in with his mother, stayed a while, and moved out.

Cued Films. To Martin and Heinrich, small boys in a Rhineland city, the war is like a persistent, annoying noise heard from a distance. The war means the NAZIS--whom Uncle Albert called terrible, but who are described by their schoolteachers as NOT so BAD. It means the rubble of the city that was being swiftly replaced by angular, modern buildings. Martin and Heinrich would just as soon forget the war, and so would their elders, bowed by a dead weight of memory and guilt. Martin's mother Nella, a blonde beauty who looks "exactly like the women pictured in the Nazi books about race--only not so boring." drifts through the years giving and going to dull parties. It seems to her that she is endlessly playing in an endless movie. People answer the phone the way actors do in second-rate films; they smoke, quarrel, make love or small talk, sit and stand and posture just as if a director were cueing every scene.

When she meets the hated Gaseler, the Nazi who was responsible for her husband's death at Kalinovka, Nella has a moment of wild hope that reality has at last broken through the interminable bad movie of life. But the film grinds on, the director calls for the cinema dramatics of the great confrontation scene, and Nella can find neither hatred nor pity in her heart --only boredom with this ridiculous villain. But Grandma, who does not realize she is merely a character actress, demands vengeance. Uncle Albert, as exhausted by heroics as Nella, seeks out Gaseler and knocks him down. "Cut!" cries the invisible director.

Typo Trick. This fourth U.S.-published novel by Heinrich Boll (Adam, Where Art Thou? The Train Was on Time), best of Germany's postwar novelists, needs all his skill to emerge convincingly from a clumsy translation. A typographical trick of frequently capitalizing phrases and sentences, sometimes to convey the thoughts of children, sometimes for no discernible reason.

EVENTUALLY BECOMES ANNOYING. But at its persuasive best. Author Boll's book sounds a cry of giant despair. He is not writing of today's Germany but of the country as it was in the decade following the war--a country that managed to survive Nazi savagery and Allied destruction, being reborn not in hope but in selfish mediocrity; a society where guilty memories are screened behind lifeless living and where the intellectual tone is set by chattering pedants of the adaptable sort who are able to flourish equally under Naziism or democracy. The fact that today Germany in many ways presents a far more hopeful face to the world does not change the poignancy of Novelist Boll's haunting recollections.

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