The Train Was on Time by Hendrick Boll centers around Andreas, a German soldier who was sent to fight in the Eastern front nearing the end of World War 2. During his travels, Andreas thoughts and his eavesdropping of conversations between other German soldiers in the train car give insight to certain processes that were occurring during the war. The dialogues in the story give us information on Nazi Germany and how it followed the themes of total war such as using mass propaganda, racial ideology and mass mobilization.
One of the first instances of German propaganda in the novel begins with Andreas overhearing a debate between four German soldiers on the state of the war. To some of the soldiers, Germany has already won the war, or still have a chance in winning the war on the eastern front against the Russians, for instance, one of the soldier states “As if the Fuhrer could lose a war!”. These men continue to
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Andreas speaks about the songs as something that you sing to yourself without noticing or even wanting to, he states that these songs are “drilled into them to kill their thoughts” (59). The lyrics in these songs connect to Germany ideology and propaganda, the lyrics of these songs talk about the future expansion of German dominance worldwide (62). Andreas remembers previous encounters in other locations regarding the welfare of the Jewish and the mentally ill, which went against the Nazi belief of a national community (38,42). They have either been killed or put into a concentration camp but even when being on the German army, feels remorse towards the Jewish people even when he knows that the rest of the people in the train with him would arrest and or kill him if they knew his feelings towards them due to the thinking that the Jewish people, during World War 1 were one of the reasons that the Germans lost the