This farcical comedy by Heinrich Böll can be looked at from two perspectives. The first is as a Christmas satire. After years of austere Christmases during World War II, the wife of a German businessman becomes hysterical when the tree for the traditional lavish family Christmas of 1946 is taken down. To prevent her being institutionalized, her family agree to re-celebrate Christmas Eve every day of the year. They go to ridiculous lengths to do this, destroying family unity in the process. Themes: family, tradition, mental illness, alienation, dehumanization, commercialization and loss of the spiritual meaning of Christmas, facing reality.
A second interpretation of the story is as a satire about the way people deal with the past: reminiscing about and trying to re-live the good times, and conveniently forgetting the bad. More specifically, the story is seen as criticism of the German people’s refusal at the time (1951) to acknowledge the brutality and devastation caused by the Nazi regime, and the fact that there was no immediate prospect of going back to their country’s prosperous days before the war. The ultimate fragmentation of Aunt Milla’s family can be seen as symbolic of the potential damage to German society if it hadn’t come to terms with these issues. Additional themes: war, selective amnesia.
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