Sometimes You Want To Whimper Like a Child
Description
The book is a compilation of three war diaries written by Heinrich Böll, a foot soldier in compulsory military service during World War II, who would go on to become a Nobel Prize Laureate in Literature and a committed pacifist. Written directly from the war front and often in the midst of crossfire, the diaries are reproduced in their original size along with the corresponding translation directly below, historical and contextual annotations by the author’s son, smaller factual notes and corrections, simplified maps, personal photos and documents as well as a timeline on the right edge of the spread so that the reader can navigate through this journey in different ways.
The geometric all-type structure of the cover contrasts with the endpapers that are blow-ups of Böll’s hand-writing, particularly of entries in which he feverously writes the name of his wife Anne-Marie with longing and despair.
