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Rating:
Wolfgang Borchert was not a prolific author, perhaps due to his short life: his works include a few short stories and the drama Draussen vor der Tür. The scarcity of his works is, however, inversely proportional to their quality, effectiveness, and aesthetics, set against the grim backdrop of post-National Socialism Germany (or rather, the Germanies). It is this profound reflection on the rubble of what was supposed to be the Third Reich, revitalized and restored by a purifying war bloodbath, that allows this author's sparse repertoire to be included in the realm of Trümmerliteratur (Literature of the Ruins), involving a large portion of the German post-war intelligentsia, including the Nobel Prize winner Heinrich Böll.
Il Pane (Das Brot), perhaps Borchert's most representative short story, tells the moving sacrifice of a wife, forced to give up her portion of bread for the love of her husband (without any reference, one understands the scarcity of the food, necessarily rationed, ed.) after the man, during the previous night, rose from sleep, driven by hunger pangs, and secretly went to the kitchen to secretly consume part of that edible misery. Caught in the act by the woman, he lied about his action, justifying his presence in the kitchen because he was "suspicious" of alleged "strange noises"; the martyr, immediately grasping the situation, received the final blow: to the sufferings imposed by the terrible socio-economic situation was added the grave lie of the husband, struck by the hypocritical selfishness of one who demystifies the human into a wolf.
The perfect, realistic, tragic, and introspective snapshot of post-1945 daily life: Das Brot knocks at the mind and heart of anyone capable of listening, understanding, assimilating, acting, and redeeming themselves.
A drama that illustrates its moral and material peculiarities in the essential and basic prose construction: sparse, broken periods, devoid of frills and correlations, a myriad of paratactic structures that effectively punctuate the negative mood, the counterpart of the short story. Even the environment, the protagonists themselves, everything is immersed in total anonymity: Borchert intentionally avoids naming the spouses (human metaphors of hundreds, thousands, millions of other similar situations), nor does he delineate the "geographical" context in detail.
An unknown married couple residing in an unknown city: the author thus summarizes the failed Third Reich, a few paragraphs ready to amplify the cry of the hungry people, to provide the scent of the ruins, to explain the absurdity of Hitlerian ferocity, to materialize the pain of those who do not resign to such misery and famine (material and spiritual). The hearth cools inexorably.
Without hesitation exalting the sacrifice of the woman who for the second time gives bread to her husband, Borchert tries to slightly open a fan of optimism, to ignite a faint light in the midst of darkness, to give a kind of "consolation" to the victims of legalized cruelty: only with frugality and the recovery of human rationality torn and lacerated by the bestiality of those forced to survive, will the people have the means to overcome this new, difficult test of determination and subsistence not always imposed by others.
To those who wish to delve deeper into Borchert's work, I recommend another title: Die Küchenuhr (The Kitchen Clock).
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