Communicating Arts - Main Web Site"Meddling is the only way to stay relevant," says Heinrich Böll. [1]
Many, many years ago, I had read a short story by Heinrich Böll titled "Murke's Collected Silences" and I never forgot it.
To cite and read it again, I found I had to order a whole collection of the author's work: The Stories of Heinrich Böll. Leila Vennewitz, Translator. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1995.
The publication history of the volume, in German assembly, dates back to 1981, with the publication of the novellas within the work dating back to 1965, then a fair flurry in 18 Stories in 1966, including "Murke's Collected Silences," and activity again in 1970 and 1981.
In a certain fashion, Heinrich Böll may be perceived as having been writing about the German soldier's experience, a central theme in the works encountered, through World War II while very much witness to America's Vietnam War era. As such, his stories march through the dim absurdities of conflict, drawing fully on the oddness so apparent to artists and prevelant in war photography, reporting, and writing--i.e., the way so many things aren't supposed to work and then do much to our delight, sometimes, and horror more often.
In 1972, Heinrich Böll won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
The Heinrich Böll Foundation North America [2], an affiliate of the German Green Party, describes the author as "a passionate advocate for persecuted fellow writers, civil rights activists and political prisoners."
If memory serves, and I believe it does here, readers may have found in Böll's fiction the reflection of the fast matured, progressive, and secular causes that came out of the Vietnam Era--anti-war, pro-environment, equal rights for minorities, women's liberation.
More than an author as cultural filigre, however, operates or resonates in his stories.
Long embedded in my psyche: the snipping out of windbag "Bur-Malottke's" many radio lectures the term "God" and splicing into its place, a more cautious, "That higher Being Whom we revere."
Murke in "Murke's Collected Silences" is the technician responsible for recording the new phrase in all the inflections required and slipping it into old lectures on "The Nature of Art." Relevant to the latest in the world's more fashionable conflict zones--I suspect there may be that much vanity and equal lack of sense in any--the disassociated philosopher's struggle to ascribe the origins of conflict to God or nature mirrors quite Bur-Malottke's dilemma regarding his own capitulation to convention, which lauds "God", and reverting to his earlier, more honest thoughts, at least to himself, in which he had hedged his bets.
Murke doesn't much care either way--"God" or "That higher Being Whom we revere"--and consequently has much fun with the job.
At the end of his day, Murke saves the pauses, the dead air on tape (hard to do with today's digital recording, eh), and gathers that into a loop of "silences", a thing so seldom heard amid so much impassioned speech.
In the metaphysics of a certain literary hardcore, books find their readers, not the other way around.
For those following the war news across the globe, in near real time, no less, Böll's work should find you--and you find "Murke's Collected Silences" along with "Adventures of a Haversack" (in which said sack visits more war zones and enjoys a longer and possibly more significant life than any of its owners), "Christmas Not Just Once a Year", which I take, perhaps upside-down, as the ultimate nonsense story about appeasing an impossibly demanding character.
Of the war stories, all travel between light and sorrow, finding in absurd conditions, accidents of fate, and plainly odd outcomes much the same world rotating toward us day on day that rolled away beneath the scrutiny of Heinrich Böll's literary oversight and vision.
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1. Front page, Heinrich Boll Foundation.
2. The Stories of Heinrich Boll. Leila Vennewitz, Translator. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1995.
Correspondence: James S. Oppenheim
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