[This is an excerpt from a longer essay on Böll's novels in these pages.]

“All of Böll’s novels are about the war,” William Vollmann says in his afterword to The Train Was On Time (1949). This is almost literally the case, yet “the war” includes not only World War Two but (especially) what led up to it in Germany and its consequences in the same country. In an epigraph to his first book of stories, published in the same year as The Train Was On Time, Böll quotes the philosopher Theodor Haecker, a great figure of Christian resistance to Nazism: “An international catastrophe can serve many purposes. Including making excuses to God. ‘Where were you, Adam?’ ‘I was in the World War.’”

There is nothing conventionally religious about Böll — there is very little that is conventional at all — but there is something biblical about his attacks on church and state. The Clown (1963) bears an epigraph from the Epistle to the Romans: “To whom he has not spoken of, they shall see: and they that have not heard shall understand.” Only those that seem to have no chance shall have a chance, it seems. But in Böll’s reading the strongest emphasis falls the other way, pointing at those who had every chance and grotesquely misused it. God is Böll’s name for the truth we long to hide from, as Adam hides in the garden after having eaten the fruit. The war, finally, is just the largest of many such excuses for evasion, and one of our chief problems is that we believe in our own excuses.