Böll's War: Catholic Inner Emigration, Apocalyptic Dystopia, and ‘Stunde Null’

Abstract

Heinrich Böll's stature in the canon of West German postwar literature grew out of his association with the so‐called cultural ‘Stunde Null’. Recent scholarship has questioned this commonplace paradigm, which suggests problematic distinctions between literature written before and after 1945 and inside and outside of the Third Reich. The posthumous publication of Böll's prewar juvenilia and wartime correspondence allows for new perspectives on his literary formation. This article demonstrates Böll's intellectual dependence on pan‐European interwar Catholic culture, in particular key German writers who became Christian ‘inner emigrants’ in the Third Reich. The motifs of this body of thought course through his wartime correspondence, so much so that his early postwar work deserves classification both as ‘Trümmerliteratur’ and as a continuation of the inner emigration. This continuity between Böll's pre‐ and post‐1945 thought contributes not just to our re‐reading of his oeuvre but also to a revision in inner emigration studies. The term deserves extension to include both writers who wrote against the grain of Nazi literary politics and their readers, with whom they formed a coherent interpretive community. Out of this shared discourse, Böll crafts a narrative of survival, foreseeing a kind of perpetual inner emigration in a dystopian and apostate postwar Germany.