These are names, and they are days – marked on a school basement wall. People killed; people who died from difficult conditions. It is like a wall calendar, a bleak and mournful count of the submerged. Useful to nourish, to keep alive a distressing short-term memory of the small community forced into the basement. The elder who died first in the big room. The name, the day. And the others who gradually go away. It is not a funerary stele, it is not a tombstone. It is a “memento”, which makes that very fragile, accidental boundary that separates the drowned and the saved more visible and more desperate. It separates them and at the same time unites them: the absent and the survivors, or survivors, because in the hell of war to survive is a challenge to fate, an impossible cabal, it is the tension of every fiber of being.
Among the few German writers who immediately and repeatedly measured themselves with the horror of the ruins of war, there is Heinrich Böll. In a book entitled “House without a guardian”, he tells of the houses in which, once peace is reached, orphans and widows are left. “War is always good – he writes – for a screenplay, because behind it is the fact par excellence: death, which draws the story towards itself, tends it like the skin of a drum, which thunders at the slightest touch of the finger “. And he lets us see a child in a dark room, waiting: he hopes that in a dream his father who died in the war will join him. The land where his father lay, the child Martin imagines as “an inky darkness” that swallowed his body,
it kept him entangled like fresh sticky asphalt, held him so tight he wouldn’t let him come in his dreams. All she could imagine was the face of her crying father, but in a dream she could not even see him in tears.