The Unsaid Says Much

"The Unsaid Says Much" is a review of Absent Without Leave, a collection of two novellas by Heinrich Böll, translated from the German by Leila Vennewitz. Vonnegut is identified as being at work on "Dresden Left, Slaughterhouse Five", described as "a commentary on his experience a presioner in Dresden during World War II". It was printed in the New York Times Book Review on September 12, 1965.

Summary

Heinrich Böll, 1981

The two stories are unconnected except for the narrators both being German men of military age during World War II. Since Böll leaves many "blanks and holes... as a modern sculptor does", readers must fill them in with their own views of Germans and the war. While this approach could have failed, Vonnegut believes Böll "makes it work like a dream". The second story, "Enter and Exit" ("Als der Krieg ausbrach—Als der Krieg zu Ende war" in the German), is fairly straight forward, about the first and last days of the days of the war, the reader forced to "[d]o what you will with the missing six years" that took place in between.

The first story, the English title also providing the title of the book ("Entfernung von der Truppe" in the original), at first comes off as "a royal pain, a mannered, pretentious, patronizing, junky sort... of work" which tends to avoid giving useful or interesting information about the narrator or the story. Only later did Vonnegut realize that such gaps were there because the narrator himself dare not remember these events, leaving the reader to speculate. Like "Enter and Exit", the story relies on large realms of "nothing" as part of its style. Vonnegut approves of this, especially since no one "really need[s] to go over the nauseatingly familiar details of World War II yet again", an era that itself could easily be a "blank" of history at this point. Based on the few clues, Vonnegut guesses that the narrator attempted to get out of serving in the army, was humiliated and punished for it, and decided to do what everyone else was doing. His lesson to the youth seems to be that "the alternative to dishonor is frequently death".