The Moral Magician

CHILDREN ARE CIVILIANS TOO by Heinrich Boll. 189 pages. McGraw-Hill. $5.95.

It is a rare event when a first collection of short stories can seem as important as a novel. Usually the vision is too fragmented, the style too eclectic, the sense of art mixed with purposes still unaccomplished. Yet between 1947 and 1951, when Heinrich Boll first published these stories in Germany, some critics saw him as the natural heir to the stately mantle of Thomas Mann. Boll had endured World War II. His emergence afterward as a mature writer was encouraging proof that the war had not destroyed German literature entirely. In his writing, almost alone in the early postwar years, Boll wrestled with the question of Germany's guilt and corruption. Bitter irony marked his work, but also extraordinary grace and compassion. His subsequent novels, particularly Billiards at Half-Past Nine (1959) and The Clown (1963), enhanced his reputation--along with the much younger Giinter Grass--as Germany's most profoundly committed writer.

Most of Boll's early stories, now published in English for the first time, concern soldiers and civilians confronting war and its immediate aftermath. They deal with the experiences of soldiers that now seem literarily familiar: drinking together before death; discovering love with an unknown girl; revealing the news of a husband's death to a woman who has taken up with another man; suddenly discovering that one's arms have been blown off. Yet Boll's realism, touched with irony and occasional moments of lyricism, has preserved freshness of emotion. "I was alone in this town," one lost soldier recalls, "the sky hovering overhead like a soundless dirigible that was about to crash." Instead of settling to a level of cliche,

Boll's brief glimpses, even of Nazi soldiers struggling to retain essential humanity, acquire a lasting and humane relevance for any country and any war.

But Boll has another voice. "This is a sad country without sadness," he wrote in the magazine Der Monat in 1965, describing postwar Germany. He explores that paradox with Kafkaesque laughter in a story about an argument between a veteran who has lost a leg and an impatient bureaucrat who denies the soldier a higher pension. "I think that you grossly underestimate my leg," the veteran remarks. Then he wryly proceeds to relate how, if he hadn't lost his leg, he would have run away and not warned some officers of an impending attack. And that has actually cost the government huge amounts of pension money for the very officers he consequently saved.

Boll's victims include an orphaned boy allowed to die because a doctor is off selling drugs to the black market, a veteran who becomes the human outline for a knife thrower and finds the "courage born of despair," a derelict in a Communist country who is arrested for breaking the law by wearing a sad face. These are the legion of the lost unable to cope with either the wartime guilt or the moral vacuum created partly by the astounding material success of Germany's postwar economy.

Through his art Boll hopes to attain, as he describes the expression of one of his characters, "something between obsession and detachment, something magical." The magic succeeds for heartening reasons. Boll puts narrative above experimentation. His "neorealism" cares more for compassion than savage attack. His moral vision deals with the guilt in the technically innocent. Above all, Boll continues to be loftily serious about an age that many writers have given up as mad.

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