This book is an excellent mind game. Boll uses many subtle tools to focus blame on the entire German populace for the events of World War II. One of the major devices used contrasting irony. Boll places occurrences of totally different perspective next to each other in order to draw out the idiocy of the German soldier. One of the examples I can remember deals with the relationships throughout the book. Every time a soldier wants to have a relationship with a female (a very ordered and structured type of arrangement) there is always some sort of disorderly thing going on in the background part of the story. The soldiers never question the war, but always takes the failed relationship at face value.

One other subtle and enjoyable aspect of the novel is the way Boll interconnects all occurrences. Throughout the novel objects appear in multiple places. One may think that it is just coincidence. Looking deeper it is more than that. A table gets a cigarette burn on it early in the novel. Several chapters later the exact table (Boll points out the cigarette burn) shows up in different locations even after it has been destroyed. This is only one example of many that make the book an enjoyable novel to read.

I do have to admit that the story is slow going at first, but don't give up on it. It is full of subtle irony, and subtle blame of responsibility that takes close reading and following of the story.

Bob Flaherty
Senior at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
Terre Haute, Indiana

I speak no German and am just a casual poetry reader. But I find the translations in this edition have the same ring as the old version I read ages ago. It therefore tells me, who cannot judge the capability of any of the translators, that somehow Heine is consistently translatable and would require a real bad translator to be mangled.

This particular book (ISBN 0-460-87865-4) has a brief and informative introduction by T. J. Reed, setting out the biographical, cultural, and historical times of the poet. It has a 10-page chronology of his life and times. It has NO index of titles and first lines, nor has it any scholarly footnotes explaining variants and allusions and other stuffs that are useful only for those who pretend not to live in musty libraries. In other words, the book's accessories are designed to provide only just enough information to increase your understanding and enjoyment of the real meat inside.

My favorite line in the middle of this book, on the first page of Chapter 6, is about an incident which is considered notorious. "For not only did Heine engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed man, but he made use of other weapons in a way that was, to say the least, far from sportsmanlike." (p. 150). This is about a polemic which "was the ultimate result of a series of stupidities," (p. 150) and I found a translation of Heine's book in which "the satirical ruthlessness of which he was capable" (p. 152) was perfectly clear to me, and I could understand how someone in Freud's position might appreciate this kind of humor. I even like it, myself.