The Bread of Those Early Years

Fascinating short novel by the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 1972. The protagonist is a young repairman in Germany just after WWII. A young man driven by fear of failure and a hunger. Disconnected and somewhat disoriented, he goes through the motions of interpersonal relationships but seems more an observer outside himself who cannot accept the results of his choices.

Hunger is not an experience the modern West has much experience of. In this short and very intense novella, written in 1955, Heinrich Boll describes the desperate circumstances of post-war German society in appalling detail: the father who sells his prized first editions to send money to his son to buy bread; the widowed husband who arrives in hospital to retrieve his wife's belongings only to go berserk when he can't find a tin of corned beef he is convinced she couldn't have eaten. In a final, mean act, she has.Walter, the narrator, is a young apprentice in a ruined German city, most likely Boll's home city of Cologne. With the fierce moral gaze typical of Boll, Walter judges everyone he comes into contact with in terms of their willingness to give up some of their bread, a universally prized commodity in a country on the edge of starvation. Meanness is the norm, especially among those who are already beginning to thrive, such as Walter's employer, Wickweber. Into this life of increasing opportunities and base motivations comes Hedwig, a girl from Walter's home town who has travelled to the city to train as a teacher. Walter's father has asked him to meet her at the station and find her a room. She is nothing like his childhood memory of her. In prose which powerfully conveys his sense of being thunderstruck, Walter describes falling suddenly in love as something fateful and terrifying, which makes him see clearly the counterfeit life he would otherwise have gone on leading. Like bread, love is the mark of a person's humanity, and for Boll, those few who are willing to give it are at least still redeemable.In a mere 80 pages, a portrait of extraordinary detail is drawn of a desperate society already giving way to a complacency that will become perhaps the overriding civic emotion in the contemporary West. As a love story, this novella's lack of sentimentality, its emotional urgency, suggests that, for all the verbiage that is printed about modern relationships, our public discourse is able to shed about as much light on love as it can on hunger.