Before the reader is one of the first works of Heinrich Böll and at the same time one of his last publications during his lifetime. Her fate was so paradoxical. Started in the fall of '47 and finished in the spring of '48, the story "Testament" was sent out to several publishing houses, of which there were surprisingly many in impoverished but liberated Germany. True, a couple of months later, after the confiscation monetary reform carried out in the Western occupation zones in the summer of 1948, almost all of these publishing houses went bankrupt overnight. By that time, Böll had already completed his other war work, “The Train Arrived on Time” (by the way, its original title was “From Lvov to Chernivtsi”), and was working hard on the novel “Where Have You Been, Adam?” and took little interest in the fate of the lost manuscript. When in several years later, discovered in one of the publishing archives, it nevertheless returned to the author, who considered that it was too late to publish it - both time and Böll’s own work had already overtaken it. Such decisions almost always do the author credit, testifying to his exactingness and high demands on yourself. And yet, as the fate of the story “Testament” shows, sometimes they are wrong. When in the early eighties, Böll’s youngest son, together with a group of enthusiastic friends, started a small “alternative” publishing house “Lamouf”, the writer gave his disgraced story there, which was published in 1982. The leitmotif of almost all reviews was amazement: critics refused to understand how such a thing could be kept under wraps for thirty-five years. Our reader, who has been familiar with Böll’s art for a long time and thoroughly, without difficulty, he will notice that in this debut work, with considerable grace, many motives of the writer’s future work are outlined and, so to speak, anticipated, and some have already been embodied with extraordinary artistic power. And first of all, this concerns the depiction of war, its terrible trench truth. Here it should be noted that Böll was never particularly keen on depicting his front-line past. The hero of one of his war stories admits that he likes guns, “even when they fire.” This “even” is Böll’s entire attitude towards the war: the more interesting it is to him, the further away he is from himself, from his homicidal essence. However, in 1947, yesterday’s front-line soldier, who had just returned from American captivity, apparently not only considered it his duty, but also longed to tell about unjust war, which he had to go through all the way, from bell to bell, and tell in detail, accurately and specifically what he himself experienced. The scenes of the baptism of fire described in the final episodes of “The Testament,” in my opinion, belong to the best pages of Bell’s prose in general. But the main thing in the story is not the confrontation between the fronts, but, as always with Böll, the eternal - both in military and in peaceful life - the confrontation between truth and lies, conscience and opportunism, “the communion of the lamb” and the “communion of the buffalo.” And, perhaps, it is precisely this recognition of poetics and moral conflicts that is the main charm of the story: perceiving it as if in reverse perspective, through the experience of all of Böll’s later work, the reader rejoices in the fact that even in this debut work the author has already managed to fully find himself yourself.