''The Train Was on Time'' (german: Der Zug war pünktlich) is a novella by German author

Heinrich Böll Heinrich Theodor Böll (; 21 December 1917 – 16 July 1985) was a German writer. Considered one of Germany's foremost post-World War II writers, Böll is a recipient of the Georg Büchner Prize (1967) and the Nobel Prize for Literature (1972). ...

. Published by Friedrich Middelhauve Verlag in Cologne in 1949, the book is about a German soldier, Andreas, taking a train to

Przemyśl Przemyśl (; yi, פשעמישל, Pshemishl; uk, Перемишль, Peremyshl; german: Premissel) is a city in southeastern Poland with 58,721 inhabitants, as of December 2021. In 1999, it became part of the Subcarpathian Voivodeship; it was pr ...

in Poland. It was translated into English by

Leila Vennewitz Leila Vennewitz (19128 August 2007) was a Canadian-English translator of German literature. She was born Leila Croot in Hampshire, England and grew up in Portsmouth. Her brother was the surgeon Sir John Croot. She studied at the Sorbonne in Paris ...

. The story addresses the experience of German soldiers during the

Second World War World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

on the Eastern Front, where fighting was particularly vicious and unforgiving. Böll had explored the same issue in ''

A Soldier's Legacy ''A Soldier's Legacy'' (german: Das Vermächtnis) is a novel by German author Heinrich Böll, published in 1982 (translator: Leila Vennewitz). Written in 1948, the narrator writes about his dead friend Schelling, revealing his murder by the hate ...

'', which was written in 1948 but published later. ''The Train Was on Time'' was his first published novel.

Theodore Ziolkowski Theodore Ziolkowski (September 30, 1932 – December 5, 2020) was a scholar in the fields of German studies and comparative literature. He coined the term " fifth gospel genre". Early life Theodore J. Ziolkowski was born on September 30, 1932 i ...

called it "an artistic ''tour de force''. __TOC__

Synopsis

"Why don't you get on?" a chaplain asked him when the train arrived. "Get on?" asked the soldier, amazed. "Why, I might want to hurl myself under the wheels, I might want to desert ... eh? What's the hurry? I might go crazy, I've a perfect right to, I've a perfect right to go crazy. I don't want to die, that's what's so horrible—that I don't want to die." On his way to the war front, he meets two other Germans with whom he starts a dialogue and a short-term friendship; he also meets Olina, a Polish prostitute, who has been working for the anti-fascist partisans but who has become disillusioned with such activity, seeing it as begetting yet further cycles of violence and aggression rather than leading to a proper way out of the bellicosity of the situation. During their trip we learn much about horrors soldiers endure in the war, and the effect it leaves on a person. Andreas has a particularly passive (some might say stoic) attitude to his involvement in the conflict, and the inevitability of death (and the question of fate) hangs over the narrative in a tragic fashion. It is arguable that the only real choices in the novel, presented in its opening gambits, involve the place and manner of Andreas's death in the war, rather than the possibility of its evasion. This tragic fate seems to be circumvented to some extent when Andreas meets Olina and they plan an escape to the

Carpathian mountains The Carpathian Mountains or Carpathians () are a range of mountains forming an arc across Central Europe. Roughly long, it is the third-longest European mountain range after the Urals at and the Scandinavian Mountains at . The range stretches ...

, but the eventual fate cannot (it appears) be overlooked. In this sense, connections can be made between the work and the structure of ancient Greek tragedies such as the story of

Oedipus Oedipus (, ; grc-gre, Οἰδίπους "swollen foot") was a mythical Greek king of Thebes. A tragic hero in Greek mythology, Oedipus accidentally fulfilled a prophecy that he would end up killing his father and marrying his mother, thereby ...

; as with Oedipus, actions taken in an effort to avert the foreordained fate only bring it about. In this short novel Böll attempted to follow the development of battle-induced

posttraumatic stress disorder Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a mental and behavioral disorder that can develop because of exposure to a traumatic event, such as sexual assault, warfare, traffic collisions, child abuse, domestic violence, or other threats on ...

. There is also a religious dimension to the novel, given Andreas's friendship with a priest called Paul. Just before the fateful ending, Andreas muses "O God, my time has passed and what have I done with it? I have never done anything worth doing. I must pray, pray for all." The book was translated into English by

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Train Was on Time, The 1949 German novels Novels by Heinrich Böll Novels set on trains Novels set during World War II

Synopsis

See also

References