The Collected Stories of Heinrich Böll by Heinrich Böll

Author:Heinrich Böll
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781612190129
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2011-12-06T00:00:00+00:00

THE SEVENTH TRUNK

For thirty-two years I have been trying to finish writing a story, the beginning of which I read in the Bockelmunden Parish News but the promised continuation of which I never got to see, since, for unknown reasons (probably political—it was in 1933) this modest publication ceased to appear. The name of the author of this story is engraved on my memory: he was called Jacob Maria Hermes, and for thirty-two years I have tried in vain to find other writings by him; no encyclopedia, no authors’ society index, not even the Bockelmunden parish register, still extant, lists his name, and it looks as though I must finally accept the fact that the name of Jacob Maria Hermes was a pseudonym. The last editor of the Bockelmunden Parish News was Vice-Principal Ferdinand Schmitz (retired), but by the time I had finally tracked him down I was unduly delayed by prewar, wartime, and postwar events, and when at last in 1947 I trod my native soil again, I found that Ferdinand Schmitz had just died at the age of eighty-eight.

I freely admit that I invited myself to his funeral, not only to do final honor to a man under whose editorship at least half of the most masterly short story I had ever read had been published; and not only because I hoped to find out more about Jacob Maria Hermes from his relatives—but also because in 1947 attendance at a country funeral meant the promise of a decent meal. Bockelmunden is a pretty village: old trees, shady slopes, half-timbered farmhouses. On this summer’s day, tables had been set up in the yard of one of the farms, there was home-slaughtered meat from the Schmitz family storerooms, there was beer, cabbage, fruit, later on cakes and coffee—all served by two pretty waitresses from Nellessen’s inn; the church choir sang the hymn that is de rigueur on the occasion of schoolteachers’ funerals, “With wisdom and honor hast thou mastered the school.” Trumpets sounded, club banners were unfurled (illegally, for this was still prohibited at that time); when the jokes grew broader, the atmosphere—as it is so nicely put—became more relaxed, I sat down beside each person there and asked them all in turn if they knew anything about the editorial estate of the deceased. The answers were unanimous and shattering: in five, six, or seven cartons (the information varied only as to quantity), the entire archives, the entire correspondence of the Bockelmunden Parish News had been burned during the final days of the war “as a result of enemy action.”

Having eaten my fill and drunk a little too much, yet without obtaining any precise information on Jacob Maria Hermes, I returned home with that sense of disappointment familiar to anyone who has ever tried to catch two butterflies with one net but has only managed to catch the vastly inferior butterfly while the other, the gorgeous shimmering one, flew away.

Nothing daunted, I tried for the next eighteen years to do

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