The Stories of Heinrich Boll<i> by Heinrich Boll; translated by Leila Vennewitz (Knopf: $25; 688 pp.) </i>

When Heinrich Boll was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1972--the first German to be so honored since Thomas Mann in 1929--it was widely recognized that the prize had gone to an uncommonly saintly man, and that it was perhaps his moral qualities, as much as literary excellence, that had determined the committee’s choice.

Boll, who had been raised as a pacifist in prewar Nazi Germany, served on both the Western and Eastern fronts during World War II, and was wounded four times. He emerged from his ordeal an impassioned opponent of war and violence in all their forms. He later became deeply disappointed that Germany, to his way of thinking, had experienced no spiritual reawakening to parallel the much trumpeted “economic miracle” of the postwar years, and he was well known for his opposition to emergent German nationalism. He was suspicious of the rich and favored the poor, and he espoused any number of unpopular causes, including the right of Germany’s left-wing terrorists to have a proper hearing. He was Germany’s conscience, and when he died in July last year, the expressions of personal regret in the obituaries were unusually heartfelt and sincere.

Boll’s literary reputation outside his homeland has rested till now mainly on his novels, notably “Billiards at Half Past Nine,” “The Clown,” and “Group Portrait With Lady.” Although two volumes of his stories have appeared in English already, they are much less well known, and it must have seemed like a wonderful idea for his American publisher, Knopf, to produce its own memorial to Boll in the shape of these collected stories. Here are 62 short stories and five novellas, including 15 never before published in English, in fluent versions by the veteran translator, Leila Vennewitz. Together they span almost four decades.

The first and most vivid impression one carries away from an extended reading of them is just how central his experiences in World War II were to Boll’s formation as a writer. The wartime German army was his gulag, and he never got over his obsession with the trauma it inflicted on him, and with its ruinous impact on Germany and on Europe. At least three-quarters of these stories deal directly or indirectly with the consequences of the war, and its threatening presence broods over every page of this substantial volume.

A perfect example is the celebrated early novella “And Where Were You, Adam?”; for 100 pages, it follows the hapless fortunes of a group of German officers and men as they fight a rearguard action on the chaotic Eastern front. Boll’s panoramic method and low-key realism unflinchingly portray both the sweat of the trenches and the horrors of the gas chambers. There are no heroes in this story, in either the true or literary senses of the word, and strangely enough, no villains. All are seen to be victims of an impersonal and implacable war machine, cranked up by a mad and invisible Fuehrer.

In “The Train Was on Time,” Boll restates this theme through a narrative of the experiences of a young private soldier, Andreas, as he travels from Paris to Lvov to fight on the Eastern front. On boarding the train, Andreas has a premonition that he is going to die the moment he gets off at the other end, and the story traces his doom-laden friendship with two comrades on the train, their joint despair over the ruin of their lives, and a last drunken spree in a Polish brothel before they are all killed by a Russian shell.

The mood of these long stories (and of many of the shorter ones too) is quite powerful. If it is the mark of a major writer to create a recognizable world of his own, Boll undoubtedly qualifies. His war-torn Europe is a world of wanton brutality and destructiveness. His heroes are decent, sometimes noble, but invariably defeated idealists; they yearn for the warmth of simple, human relationships, but are caught up in a merciless, impersonal process that frustrates and ultimately destroys them.

Much of their time, between bouts of combat at the front, is spent at railroad stations or on trains. “All streets lead to stations, and from stations you go off to war,” is Boll’s bleak comment in the aptly named “Between Trains in X.” When not fighting or traveling, they are drinking themselves into oblivion or blowing their wages in brothels. “Every soldier demands the solace of instant forgetfulness,” says the narrator in “A Soldier’s Legacy.” “Let this be your explanation for the apparently inexplicable and . . . shockingly direct link between soldiers and prostitutes. The prostitute supplies instant gratification.” And if sex and drink fail, there is always tobacco. Barely a male is to be found in these stories without either a pipe or a cigarette clenched between his teeth, or who isn’t yearning for a smoke as insistently as for food and drink.

The vision is instantly recognizable as a variant of the sorrowful and compassionate vision that informs Boll’s novels. But for this reader at least, the virtues of most of these stories stop there. Boll is a neo-realist, who achieves his effects by the relentless accumulation of detail, and who relies heavily on his ability to create mood and atmosphere. The problem is that far too many of his stories, even the long ones, have very little more to offer. They are like notebook entries or slices of life, with no proper beginning, not much discernible point, and no end.

Revealing in this respect is the way in which so many of them are brought to an end by an exploding bomb or a shell, or by sudden and violent death. Chekhov once lamented his inability to end a play without a pistol shot, but Chekhov recognized and overcame his disability, whereas Boll seems never to have done so. Even the best of these stories, such as “Reunion With Drung,” “Stranger, Bear Word to the Spartans We . . .” and “A Soldier’s Legacy,” terminate in this artificial way, while those that don’t, simply grind to a halt, with no apparent reason for doing so.

There is also a distressing streak of sentimentality in these stories. Too many of their heroes are neurasthenic and chaste young men who fall hopelessly in love (usually at first sight) with beautiful but unattainable young women. Their love is seldom requited or consummated; if it is, as in the case of Andreas in “The Train Was on Time,” it is cut short by the war. In this story, the young woman is even a chaste prostitute, and the setting a brothel, a cliche that Boll is unable to animate with the slightest hint of conviction.

It would appear from this collection that Boll’s talent was largely unsuited to the genre of the short story, and that he needed more space to succeed. It is useful, of course, to have the stories of a Nobel Prize winner collected in one place (though this volume would benefit from being about half its present length), but it will not result in any revision of Boll’s literary reputation. To understand why he won his prize, readers are still advised to turn to the novels.