SOURCE: "At the Fringes of the Miracle," in The Saturday Review, New York, Vol. XLIX, No. 50, December 10, 1966, pp. 50, 55.

Potoker is an American educator and critic. In the following favorable review, he examines themes common in BÖll 's short fiction.

Heinrich Böll, whose prose is remarkable for its vitality, lucidity, and color, now enjoys a reputation, well and scrupulously earned, as one of contemporary Europe's most influential writers. Achieving international recognition in the immediate postwar years, Böll was hailed as the analyst—indeed, the laughing vivisectionist—of the German generation that promoted and somehow accommodated Hitler. With an integrity that must have been painful to sustain, he scrutinized Germany's so-called "undigested past," in the process rendering it clear but by no means more digestible. In his probe of the modern German condition he uncovered the quirks that lay, like noxious organisms, beneath Germany's values and social...