Billiards at Half Past Nine by Heinrich Boll, Translated from the German by Patrick Bowles
London: John Calder (A Jupiter Book), 1965 (First publication in English 1961, First published 1959)
Many years ago, probably because he was a Nobel Prize winner and I was a priggish young man, I attempted to read Heinrich Boll's Group Portrait with Lady several times, but never got beyond the first chapter. I found it very hard to concentrate on the writing: I seem to recall it being very dense and wordy, with nothing for the reader to "hang their hat" on. Reading Billiards at Half Past Nine was a pleasure, although the writing I think is similar. Perhaps I have matured....
Heinrich Boll and Gunter Grass are, in English-language circles, probably the two best known writers to come out of post-war Germany: part of Group 47, Boll and Grass have focussed much of their writing on the effects of the war on Germany, trying to deal with the horror, and the lasting guilt, shame and anger that came from that catastrophe.
Billiards at Half Past Nine is the story of the Faehmel family - Heinrich, his son Robert, and Robert's son Joseph. All are architects, and they have been scarred by both the First and Second World Wars in many ways. Heinrich is a man who created himself from nothing, with a keen sense of where he wanted to go, who he wanted to marry, and how he wanted his career to progress. He wins the commission to build St. Anthony's Abbey, which sets him on the road to success, and he marries Johanna, a solicitor's daughter. Unfortunately for them, they lose two of their children to disease. Johanna in particular is disgusted by the militarism of Germany, and is horrified that her young son dies with the name Hindenburg on his lips. Boll sees both the Kaiser and Hindenburg as the progenitors of the Nazi horror. In the book he talks of those who have taken the "Buffalo Sacrament" as opposed to those who are "Lambs". One of their other sons, Otto, becomes a Nazi ("having tasted of the Buffalo Sacrament"), a shell of the boy they knew, and is killed on the Russian Front. Boll has Heinrich muse on how one can be less connected to a blood relative than to another person, in his case to his son's wife Edith.
Robert, Heinrich's son, begins his story at school, where his friend Schrella is bullied by most of the rest of the class, including Nettlinger, and the teacher known as "Old Wobbly". These last two become Nazi functionaries, and after another student, Ferdi, attempts to assassinate Wobbly and is captured, all those implicated in the attempt are punished. Ferdi is executed, Schrella's father disappears, Schrella and Robert (who both helped Ferdi), are tortured and flee the country, and the boy who passed notes to Robert's family about his fate is also done away with. This is the pivotal moment in Robert's life. After Johanna pulls in a favour from Nettlinger, and Robert comes back home (Schrella does not), he is drafted into the pioneer corps, where he becomes an expert in demolition. And demolish he does, as much as he can, in a kind of revenge against society and what it had done to his friends and himself. This becomes worse after his wife Edith (Schrella's sister) is killed in an air raid. In a final act of hatred against everything, he blows up St. Anthony's Abbey in the final days of the War. This is his great secret that he keeps with him, as he continues on in his very structured life as a Quantity Surveyor and Engineer, sticking to a strict regimen that includes playing billiards with one of the hotel-workers at the Prince Heinrich Hotel every morning.
The novel is built around the voices of Heinrich, Robert, Joseph, and Johanna, with interspersions from Leonore (secretary to Robert), Joschen (Concierge at the Prince Heinrich), and Hugo (the hotel boy that Robert plays billiards with). Much of the action is rendered as flashbacks, and in fact the novel takes place over the space of a couple of days, climaxing in Heinrich's eightieth birthday. Heinrich, in his old age, has come to accept that his life in many ways has been a sham, and when his wife comes out of the asylum she has been living in since the death of Otto with the intent to assassinate Old Wobbly, he concurs with the (failed) attempt. We learn that Joseph's girlfriend Marianne, witnessed her father, a Nazi functionary, commit suicide and saw her mother hang her younger brother before she was saved from a similar fate. Joseph has been working on the commission to rebuild the Abbey, where he discovers Robert's secret, which drives Joseph to abandon his career. Heinrich too has put the pieces together, fully understanding what it was that drove Robert to commit such a deed.
Boll shows us, with the continued success of Nettlinger and Wobbly, that while the Nazi regime has fallen, those in power are to a great extent still in power. While they may no longer have you killed for the "smallest gesture", they still drink champagne and smoke Cuban cigars. Boll has little time for the politics of post-war Germany, portraying both sides as equally corrupt. Robert's attempts to destroy the old order by literally destroying buildings is doomed to fail, and he ends the novel on a more positive note, adopting the hotel boy Hugo as his son.
The attentive reader can gain much information about the state-of-mind in post-war Germany from this novel. It is a well-written, closely intertwined set of stories about the rise and fall of Germany in the twentieth century, through the lens of one family. Certainly a good piece of literature.
A postscript on the edition I was reading - Jupiter Books, an imprint of John Calder was "introduced to bring the best of twentieth-century literature, authors and titles of world reputation, to a larger reading public at prices only slightly higher than those of mass-market paperbacks." With it's severe and sparse design, I wasn't completely surprised to see that the book was actually printed by the Karl Marx Werk at Possneck in what was then East Germany. I'm not sure if this accounts for the occasional misprint that I found in my book, but it is interesting to see the authors on the Jupiter list - Beckett, Ionesco, Duras, Borges amongst others. A forgotten piece of publishing history?
No comments:
Post a Comment