Heinrich Böll’s The Bread of Those Early Years is a book you either “get” or don’t. When I first read it 25 years ago, I didn’t.
It’s West Germany in the early- or mid-1950s. Walter Fendrich, a mechanic of 23 or 24, has survived a gruelling apprenticeship in the hungry post-war years. Now everything has come right. He is making a good living servicing automatic washing machines bought by the prosperous beneficiaries of Germany’s economic miracle. He has saved some money and even has a car. But he is still obsessed by bread and haunted by memories of hunger. He is cynical, and he does not appear to greatly like himself; but he does not ask too many questions.
Then one Monday morning he goes to the station to pick up Hedwig, the daughter of a family friend who has come to study in the city. As soon as he sees her, there is a coup de foudre; he is filled with wonder, love and fear, and knows he is not the person he was that morning, and can never live the same way.
The Bread of Those Early Years is a short book; it’s really a novella, not a novel. Yet in the course of just 34,000-odd words, Böll has summed up the spirit of post-war West Germany as he saw it. He does this through a series of vignettes. Thus Fendrich remembers, as a young apprentice, going to a soup-kitchen run by nuns in a hospital. The nuns feed the starving, but must do so late at night so that the patients don’t know and can’t protest. The factory owner for whom he works uses the apprentices to recover items from bombed buildings – basically, to loot; and Fendrich remembers: “Many of the rooms we reached by long ladders had been completely intact... hooks with towels still hanging on them, glass shelves still holding lipstick and razor side by side, bathtubs still full of bath water where the suds had sunk to the bottom in chalky flakes, clear water with rubber toys still floating in it, toys played with by children before they suffocated in the cellar... I pulled the plug out of the bathtub, the water fell four floors down, and the rubber animals sank slowly to the chalky bottom of the tub.”
In the present, he goes to a cafe and sees the owner, who he knows, serving chocolates, delicately, with tongs. “I looked closer into those almond-shaped eyes and tried to imagine what she would have said had I come here seven years ago and asked for some bread – and I saw those eyes get narrower still, ...and I saw those charming, daintily spread fingers contract like claws, saw that soft, manicured hand grow wrinkled and yellow with greed, and I withdrew my own so abruptly that she was startled.”
To get the most out of The Bread of Those Early Years one has to understand Fendrich’s intensity of feeling after seeing Hedwig. He is thrilled and frightened; she has brought him alive, there is nothing he can do about it, and he can never again bury the memories of those awful early years. Neither can he ever again live the life he has hitherto led, driven by a ruthless fear of hunger and insecurity; suddenly there is something more. I think that’s what I didn’t “get” when I first read this. At that time, the book puzzled me, and I wondered how Böll had got his Nobel Prize; he must, I supposed, have written better books. Having reread it, I am not sure that books do come much better than this.