As with The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (1974), which I reviewed here, Böll uses irony extensively. Anna Funder in her Introduction refers to Böll's preoccupation with subservience to authority as the root of totalitarianism, but makes no mention of Andreas's numerous references to praying for the Jews. The Train Was on Time was first published in 1949 as Germany was trying to come to terms with the Holocaust, when people all over the world were reeling in horror at the knowledge that trains transported millions of Jews to their deaths. Those trains were 'on time' too, and the irony of this nightmare journey is that whereas the soldier Andreas knows he is destined for death on the battlefield, the Jews being deported from all over Europe did not know their fate. Significantly — considering the pervasive postwar denials about what was known at the time — this character Andreas knows about the fate of the Jews and that he should pray for them. Other than Böll being a Catholic himself, I am not sure if there is any significance in Andreas being Catholic rather than Protestant. Perhaps someone else can enlighten me.

On the first page of The Train Was On Time, Böll alerts the reader to the importance of language, in what seems to be a rather strange paragraph:

Now and again what appears to be a casually spoken word will suddenly acquire a cabalistic significance. It becomes charged and strangely swift, races ahead of the speaker, is destined to throw open a chamber in the uncertain confines of the future and to return to him with the deadly accuracy of a boomerang. Out of the small talk of unreflecting speech, usually from among those halting, colourless goodbyes exchanged beside trains on their way to death, it falls back on the speaker like a leaden wave, and he becomes aware of the force, both frightening and intoxicating, of the workings of fate. To lovers and soldiers, to men marked for death and to those filled with the cosmic force of life, this power is sometimes given, without warning; a sudden revelation is conferred on them, a bounty and a burden... and the word sinks down inside them. (p1-2)

For Andreas, it's as he boards the train that the word 'soon' enters him like a bullet and almost imperceptibly penetrating flesh, tissues, cells, nerves, until at some point it caught, like a barbed hook... His fate dawns on him as he tries to calculate where and when his ultimate destination might be and he is suddenly overwhelmed by the shock of fear. He realises he will never again see that station, his friend, or even a man he'd abused.

Reminiscent of the way Jews were packed into trains so tightly that some of them were crushed to death en route, Andreas and his fellow soldiers are squeezed into the carriage for their journey. Andreas sits down on his pack because there's nowhere else to put it, and...

... tried to arrange his legs as comfortably as possible: he stretched the left one carefully past the face of one sleeping soldier, and placed the other one across a piece of luggage that was shielding the back of another.

In another irony, they jam the door shut with their bodies so that others may not enter, an allusion to the way that the Jews were locked and bolted into the carriages from the outside so that they could not get out.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2023/12/23/the-train-was-on-time-1949-by-heinrich-boll-... ( )

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An accomplished debut novel published in 1949. A young German soldier has a premonition that he will shortly die, somewhere soon. Somewhere during the next few days of his journey. We observe his thinking, his reminiscing and his activities as the train moves along the tracks. ( )

It's all about fear of death going to war and calculating when it might happen. Absorbing and frightening.

http://kaggsysbookishramblings.wordpress.com/2014/07/01/recent-reads-the-train-w... ( )