“Across the Bridge” by Heinrich Bol

“Across the Bridge” by Heinrich Boll is about a man named Grabowski who works as a messenger for Gun Dog and Retriever Association, taking the train into the headquarters three days a week. On this train ride he notices and almost becomes obsessed with a house that he passes where a woman is cleaning day after day, seemingly unchanging her pattern of chores.  The allusion to Gun Dog and Retriever Association is to the Third Reich. Grabowski speaks in hindsight about working there and says he’d pass by the house on his way to work “before the war”, suggesting that it was before World War two. By speaking ten years later, after the war, it can be assumed that he no longer works for the company, suggesting that with the failure of the war, the company failed and ultimately, so did Hitler’s Third Reich. Boll was in opposition to the war so it would make sense that he paints the company in a somewhat negative light. However, this is not entirely true for he portrays the manager as first menacing but then quite compassionate, suggesting how Hitler appeared to his followers.

            The rigid schedule of the woman, presumably the mother, could symbolize the orderly ways of the Nazi Party. Grabowski is perplexed as to why this woman cleans as she does, for it is seemingly pointless. The trains also run on a strict schedule, everyone seems very punctual. This punctual-ness could mimic the Nazi  Party’s sense of order and formation.

            Grabowski returns ten years later to see that nothing’s changed except that the woman cleaning is not the presumable mother, but the daughter  all grown up. She still seems miserable, suggesting life has not much improved since before the war.

            However, discrediting any interpretation, Boll begins  his short story with: “the story I want to tell you has no particular point to it, and maybe it isn’t really a story at all” (15).