Reading Implication: Moral Injury in Heinrich Böll’s Billard um halb zehn and Vasilii Grossman’s Vse techet

Abstract

This essay demonstrates the usefulness of ‘moral injury’ as a prism for comparative literary research, particularly between the post-National Socialist German and post-Stalinist Russian contexts. I outline a tendency in the study of post-atrocity fiction to focus on psychoanalytically defined notions of trauma. Subsequently, I explain how moral injury, which denotes the damaging psychological ramifications of transgressing one’s moral code, offers a productive lens for considering the literary thematization of morally ambiguous experiences that do not comfortably fit into the categories of victim and perpetrator, a position recently labelled the ‘implicated subject’ by Michael Rothberg. Comparing the West German author Heinrich Böll’s novel Billard um halb zehn and the Soviet writer Vasilii Grossman’s Vse techet, I show how these texts emphasize the importance of individually reckoning with one’s implication in historical violence as a matter of personal integrity. I propose that developing strategies for ‘reading implication’ such as moral injury can foster ethical forms of transnational comparison.