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Book reviews for "Schirmbeck,_Heinrich_Wilhelm" sorted by average review score:

Heinrich Boll, Teller of Tales
Published in Hardcover by Ungar Pub Co (1968)
Author: Wilhelm Schwarz
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What was Schwarz' motive here?
Wilhelm Johannes Schwarz, Heinrich Boll: Teller of Tales (Frederick Ungar, 1969)

"It is certainly too early," Schwarz begins his conspectus, "to assign Heinrich Boll his definitive place in German literature." The Nobel committee obviously thought differently three years after the publication of this slim overview of Boll's work to date; Boll won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1972, based largely on the work he'd published up to 1969. Schwarz says that Boll's novels are overrated at the beginning of the book. That's the best kind of overrated there is, one thinks.

Teller of Tales is not so much a critical study as it is a survey. Rather than delve deeply into any aspect of the short stories and novels of Heinrich Boll, Schwarz seems content to draw parallels between certain types of characters in Boll's novels. Each chapter except the first (Survey) and the last (Conspectus) focuses on a type of character who crops up in multiple Boll publications: the artist, the Catholic, etc. While this is certainly good information to have for one who's working his way through Boll's books, it would have been nice to see an extra hundred pages or so in this volume (which is only 116 pp. sans endnotes, preface, etc.) devoted to giving us more of what, in Schwarz' opinion, Boll was really on about. Instead, Schwarz repeatedly falls back on the claim of the survey writer that such things are "beyond the limits of [the] study." This, combined with Schwarz' parade of disparaging remarks throughout the survey (the "overrated" comment above, the sentence "Whenever he ventures into other techniques [e.g., the ambitious symbolism of Billiards at Half-Past Nine or the metaphysical dream language of The Bread of Our Early Years] his style appears labored and less than fully convincing." In the preface, and other such comments throughout the first twenty pages of the book), one gets the distinct impression that Schwarz' ulterior motive here was to damn Boll with faint praise. There is certainly something to be said for calling Boll to task for the plodding pace of Billiards or the rather deus-ex-machina ending of The Train Was on Time, but with only one or two exceptions Schwarz ignores that which makes Boll such a brilliant writer when he's on his game--his ability to make a reader not care about these things by being able to get his point across so clearly and competently. One must, of course, make an allotment for the possibility that Schwarz simply missed the point repeatedly, but that seems somewhat disingenuous when Schwarz talks again and again about Boll's depictions of life in general after the war. In fact, he devotes a whole chapter to the Homecomer (what today we would think of as DPs). How much of the point could he really have missed? It's also true that this was published five years before Boll's magnum opus, The Lost Honor of Katherina Blum (and one thinks the Nobel committee must have been singularly pleased to see an author they'd given the award to only two years previous pull his finest novel out of a hat!), and perhaps Blum puts more of Boll's stylistic kinks and message-bearing ability into perspective in the earlier novels.

It's a decent place to start for the aspiring Boll critic who wants to see what directions he has to choose when writing a dissertation or a critical article. However, this certainly never approaches the utility for the layman contained in such critical studies as Reddick's The Danzig Trilogy of Gunter Grass (a necessity for getting the full power of Grass' great work) or David Paul Henry's The Early Development of the Hermeneutic of Karl Barth (a necessity for getting anything about Barth at all). As such, it's probably best left until after the layman has read a good stack of Boll novels. ** ½


Aesthetic Homosociality in Wackenroder and Tieck (Studies in Modern German Literature, Vol. 94)
Published in Hardcover by Peter Lang Publishing (2000)
Author: Kevin F. Yee
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Afrikaanse essays
Published in Unknown Binding by Voortrekkerpers [i.e. Perskor] ()
Author: Wilhelm Karl Heinrich Du Plessis
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Über den Zusammenhang des Spinozismus mit der Cartesianischen Philosophie : ein philos. Versuch
Published in Unknown Binding by Scientia-Verlag ()
Author: Heinrich Christoph Wilhelm Sigwart
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Briefe an Emil Du Bois-Reymond
Published in Unknown Binding by Akad. Druck- u. Verlagsanst. ()
Author: Ernst Wilhelm von Brücke
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Confessions and Fantasies
Published in Hardcover by Pennsylvania State University Press (1971)
Author: Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder
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Das Homer-Zimmer für den Herzog von Oldenburg : ein klassizistisches Bildprogramm des "Goethe-Tischbein"
Published in Unknown Binding by Landesmuseum ()
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Das Pastoratsrenten-Buch des Pfarrers Heinrich Wilhelm Emminghaus zu Hagen : 1666-1718
Published in Unknown Binding by Stadtarchiv ; Kleine Hellweg-Bèucherei [in Komm.] ()
Author: Heinrich Wilhelm Emminghaus
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Das Volksbuch vom armen Heinrich : Studien zur Rezeption Hartmanns von Aue im 19. Jahrhundert und zur Wirkungsgeschichte der Übersetzung Wilhelm Grimms
Published in Unknown Binding by E. Schmidt ()
Author: Ursula Rautenberg
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The Cheese Bible
Published in Hardcover by Penguin Studio (1998)
Authors: Christian Teubner, Heinrich Mair-Walburg, Heinrich Mair-Waldburg, and Friedrich-Wilhelm Ehlert
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