The Train Was on Time by Heinrich Boll

1972 Nobel prize winner Heinrich Boll’s first novel, published 1949 (in English 1956), and re-published 2019 as part of Penguin’s European Writers series.

Over the last few years, there has been a great deal of literature published, fiction and non-fiction alike, that centres on individual personal experiences of the Second World War of ordinary persons.  A subset of this ‘trend’ has focused on this from a German perspective, often written by non-German authors.  Examples would include; A Meal in Winter,2013, by Hubert Mingarelli and The Undertaking, 2014, by Audrey Magee.

In Germany, immediately post-war, there were novels published whose purpose was to attempt some sort of coming to terms with the country’s Nazi past and the ordinary Germans caught up in events.  (The Tin Drum, by Nobel laureate Gunter Grass, the novel by which many others on the subject are judged was published much later in 1959.)

Notably, there was the bestselling, Alone in Berlin, 1947, re-published in 2016; and Heinrich Boll’s,1949, The Train Was on Time.

In the latter, it is the autumn of 1943, and a young German private, Andreas, at the end of his leave has boarded a troop train bound for the Eastern Front.  The short novel is related in the first-person and the focus is on the narrator’s conviction that he is to die in five days’ time.  Given the situation; a soldier, already a veteran, heading off to a front line, one would expect to have a certain fatalistic viewpoint.  In Andreas’ case, he has come to the conclusion that he’d much prefer to live and this obsessive notion that his demise is, somehow, preordained, is consuming his every waking thought.

Except, he keeps getting distracted.  His bodily physical necessities, the need for sleep and sustenance, and the psyches weakness for companionship and reminiscence.  The other soldiers he’s crammed in with, impose themselves on him in various ways.  Sometimes with moments of Kafka-esque, Heller-esque (as in Catch 22) and Orwellian irony; as for instance, in this bit of overheard conversation:

‘Practically speaking,’ said a North German voice behind him, ‘practically speaking we’ve already won the war!’

‘Hm,’ came another voice.

‘As if the Fuhrer could lose a war!’ said a third voice. ‘It’s crazy to say such a thing anyway: winning a war!  Anyone who talks about winning a war must already be considering the possibility of losing one.  Once we start a war, that war is won.’

But, even with these ‘distractions’, his thoughts keep returning to his approaching demise; and the train keeps rolling eastwards.

In this existential nightmare (substitute Sartre’s room in Huis Clos with a ‘hell-bound’ train) there is the sense that beyond a soldier’s realistic fear of death is the story’s standing-in for a fundamental truth of the human condition.  We are all aware of the fact of our ultimate demise, our being on that train inexorably travelling on to that moment.  Perhaps, unlike Andreas’ pessimistic five-day forecast, we reckon on a considerably greater number of days, but ultimately…

Is this all rather dark and depressing?  Well, yes, but, in spite of the bleakness, there is something worthwhile and profound in its anti-war ‘gallows humour’ irony.  Something akin to Erich Marias Remarque’s 1929, All Quiet on the Western Front.

Paul reaching for the butterfly…

Published in the UK in Paperback by Penguin at £8.99 and in the USA by Melville House at $14.95