Heinrich Böll

Heinrich Böll was born in Cologne in 1917 into a Catholic family of craftsmen with pacifist leanings, and as a young man he declined to join the Hitler Youth. After an apprenticeship with a bookseller and a brief start at university, he was conscripted into the Wehrmacht and spent six years as an infantryman in France, Romania, Hungary and the Soviet Union, wounded several times before being taken prisoner by American troops in 1945. He returned to a ruined Cologne, worked for a time in his family’s joinery and a municipal office, and then committed himself to writing.

His early stories and the novella The Train Was on Time (1949) belong to what Germans called Trümmerliteratur, the literature of the rubble: soldiers, widows and returnees for whom the war has not ended. Through the Gruppe 47 he found an audience, and in novels such as Billiards at Half-Past Nine and The Clown he widened his view to the Federal Republic itself, its economic miracle, its unexamined pasts and the comfortable accommodations of its church. His style stayed deliberately unadorned, his sympathies with the outsider, the obstinate and the humiliated.

Böll served as president of PEN International from 1971 to 1973 and received the Nobel Prize in 1972. Group Portrait with Lady (1971) and The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (1974), his anatomy of tabloid persecution during the years of left-wing terrorism, made him a lightning rod in public debate. He sheltered Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn after his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1974, and remained an engaged and often uncomfortable voice until his death in 1985.