And Where Were You, Adam

By Heinrich Böll

Book Overview

Hitler's once great army is broken and demoralized, the end of the war is imminent--but still soldiers are rounded up like criminals and sent to the front, Jews are 'evacuated, 'guns are fired, shells explode. In this novel Boll paints war as a series of idiocies, senseless accidents, and bizarre coincidences related only through death.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0810111640
• ISBN13: 9780810111646
• Release Date: November 1994
• Publisher: Northwestern University Press
• Length: 156 Pages
• Weight: 0.46 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.1" x 7.8"

Customer Reviews

Death by accident

This impressive little book has 9 stories that are loosely connected. Main character is a German soldier called Feinhals and the stories mostly deal with the latter days of the war in Hungary and how the Germans cope. There's a lot of death and disaster, mostly through stupid accidents. A stray bomb unfortunately detonates, a woman is shot because she sings beautifully but is a blond, catholic jew (which is incomprehensible for one soldier). Feinhals himself also reaches a bitter end, much like in "Das Boot". Good book, also good to read about the German side of the second world war, and B?ll was a soldier on the eastern front himself.