Heinrich Böll writes about people living in the present. The last twenty years in European history have been prodigal with raw material for the realistic novelist. Many an author has been under the inward compulsion of writing it all out of his system; often compellingly, though at other times one has the impression that the process of creation may have been more useful to the writer than to the reader. For Böll the war was an experience of horror and waste on an immense scale. What came before 1939 belongs to a past before the deluge, and plays only a small part in his imaginative world. After the war comes the peace; Böll recalls the chaos and starvation amid the ruined towns, the advent of the currency-reform, bringing neon lights and shop-windows for all, and hot sausages and coffee too, if one can spare a mark...