Children are Civilians Too
by Heinrich Boll
translated by Leila Vennewitz
Penguin
1970, reprinted 1995
Originally printed in 1970, a couple years before he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Children are Civilians Too is a collection of German author Heinrich Boll's short stories published 1947-1950, with the majority from 50.
This collection fits 26 stories into about 190 pages. The earlier stories, especially, tend to be on the short side. There are a lot of 3-5 page entries, only a handful 10 or longer. Almost all of Boll's stories are told in the first person, really only a couple have a third-person narrator. For the most part, these are not stories where much happens externally. Instead we stick close to our main character while they complete a single task or experience a single emotion, usually a kind of acceptance of loss or disappointment.
Most of Boll's stories are about soldiers or veterans. They're not about combat, but about moments in between. There are several stories about soldiers enjoying a night out drinking while on leave; in one, "That Night We Were in Odessa," they're broke but pawn their possessions so they can get schnapps and sausage, a good last meal, because they expect to die the next day when they're redeployed.
We also see soldiers in field hospitals. In the title story, a man with a head wound buys baked goods from a Russian girl who sneaks on-base. In my favorite, "Stranger Bear Word to the Spartans We...," the injured soldier realizes he's being treated in his old high school, which he left less than a year earlier, his own handwriting is still on a chalkboard, copying out a classical quotation. In "Lohengrin's Death," it's a little boy who dies in the hospital, if a morphine overdose, after breaking his legs while trying to steal coal from a moving train.
Veterans after the war often want work or have a poorly-paid and low-status job. Or perhaps they hope in vain to see someone again, perhaps at a train yard. Even former bootleggers want straight jobs, and will take whatever task they can get. In the sole scifi story, "My Sad Face," an unemployed man is arrested and rigorously beaten, according to police regulations, for failing to look as happy as the law requires, in a futuristic totalitarian state.
I would say that these stories mostly speak to their specific time, and to Germans who had to reckon with the fact that their country, their public, had largely accepted the patriotic justifications for war, and gone into it willingly, eagerly, while the conditions for soldiers were awful.
Boll doesn't mention the Holocaust, and there's no real hint of the idea that it was wrong of Germany to inflict war on others. But he does pretty thoroughly dismantle any image of being a soldier as noble or romantic or heroic. Boll's soldiers are working men with a particularly shitty job they were told would be better. In some ways, it reminds me of Americans' attitude toward our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We can see now that our justifications were hollow, and that the wars were bad for 'the troops' they were supposedly fought in support of, but we mostly don't think about what we did to the Iraqi or Afghani people, what they suffered, how many of them died.
I think Boll is better known for some of his other writing, but "Stranger Bear Word to the Spartans We..." is very good. It's probably my second-favorite of his stories, after "Action Will be Taken!," which isn't in this collection.
This collection fits 26 stories into about 190 pages. The earlier stories, especially, tend to be on the short side. There are a lot of 3-5 page entries, only a handful 10 or longer. Almost all of Boll's stories are told in the first person, really only a couple have a third-person narrator. For the most part, these are not stories where much happens externally. Instead we stick close to our main character while they complete a single task or experience a single emotion, usually a kind of acceptance of loss or disappointment.
Most of Boll's stories are about soldiers or veterans. They're not about combat, but about moments in between. There are several stories about soldiers enjoying a night out drinking while on leave; in one, "That Night We Were in Odessa," they're broke but pawn their possessions so they can get schnapps and sausage, a good last meal, because they expect to die the next day when they're redeployed.
We also see soldiers in field hospitals. In the title story, a man with a head wound buys baked goods from a Russian girl who sneaks on-base. In my favorite, "Stranger Bear Word to the Spartans We...," the injured soldier realizes he's being treated in his old high school, which he left less than a year earlier, his own handwriting is still on a chalkboard, copying out a classical quotation. In "Lohengrin's Death," it's a little boy who dies in the hospital, if a morphine overdose, after breaking his legs while trying to steal coal from a moving train.
Veterans after the war often want work or have a poorly-paid and low-status job. Or perhaps they hope in vain to see someone again, perhaps at a train yard. Even former bootleggers want straight jobs, and will take whatever task they can get. In the sole scifi story, "My Sad Face," an unemployed man is arrested and rigorously beaten, according to police regulations, for failing to look as happy as the law requires, in a futuristic totalitarian state.
I would say that these stories mostly speak to their specific time, and to Germans who had to reckon with the fact that their country, their public, had largely accepted the patriotic justifications for war, and gone into it willingly, eagerly, while the conditions for soldiers were awful.
Boll doesn't mention the Holocaust, and there's no real hint of the idea that it was wrong of Germany to inflict war on others. But he does pretty thoroughly dismantle any image of being a soldier as noble or romantic or heroic. Boll's soldiers are working men with a particularly shitty job they were told would be better. In some ways, it reminds me of Americans' attitude toward our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We can see now that our justifications were hollow, and that the wars were bad for 'the troops' they were supposedly fought in support of, but we mostly don't think about what we did to the Iraqi or Afghani people, what they suffered, how many of them died.
I think Boll is better known for some of his other writing, but "Stranger Bear Word to the Spartans We..." is very good. It's probably my second-favorite of his stories, after "Action Will be Taken!," which isn't in this collection.
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