Heinrich Böll
Heinrich Boll (December 21, 1917 in Cologne - July 16, 1985 in Langenbroich the Eifel, south of Bonn) was a German writer. He was the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1972.
Life
Boll was born in Cologne. His family were strong Catholics and pacifists.
He went to school from 1922 to 1937. After his abitur, he started a training to become a bookseller. He did not go to the Hitler Youth, but he had to join the German army in the World War II. In 1939, he started to study German literature in Cologne, but he had to break for his army service.
In 1945 he became prisoner of war by the Americans. The Americans wanted to educate the German people to became a democracy. So they encouraged prisoners with talent to write. Boll and some other young writers founded the group 47.
Boll wrote a lot of social critical literature. His main themes were the repression in the way of life by conservative catholic forces and the unsolved problem of old Nazis in the society.
In the 1970s, he criticized the losing of civil laws by the fight against terrorism (of the RAF, Red Army Faction, a left-winged political terror group in the 1970s in West Germany). For that reason, the Bild-Zeitung, an very conservative yellow press newspaper, started a campaign against him.
In the late 1970s, he started to look for Human Rights in the Eastern Block, where some friends of his lived, too. He helped the Soviet dissidents Alexander Solshenizyn and Lev Kopelev.
In the 1980s, he worked for the peace movement. He protested against the nuclear armament in West Germany.
He went back to the Roman Catholic Church, which he left 1976 by protests, before he died.
Heinrich Boll Foundation
The Green Party of Germany gave its foundation the name of Boll, Heinrich-Boll-Stiftung. The goals of the foundation are for countries to work together, civil laws and democratic and ecological thinking.
Selected bibliography
Der Zug war punktlich (The Train Was on Time), 1949
Das Vermachtnis (A Soldier's Legacy), written 1948-1949; publ. 1981
Wanderer, kommst du nach Spa (Stranger, Bear Word to the Spartans), 1950
Die schwarzen Schafe (Black Sheep), 1951
Nicht nur zur Weihnachtszeit (Christmas Not Just Once a Year), 1951
Wo warst du, Adam? (And Where Were You, Adam?), 1951
Der Engel schwieg (The Silent Angel), written 1949-1951; publ. 1992
Und sagte kein einziges Wort (And Never Said a Word), 1953
Haus ohne Huter (House without Guardians), 1954
Das Brot der fruhen Jahre (The Bread of Those Early Years), 1955
Irisches Tagebuch (Irish Journal), 1957
Die Spurlosen (Missing Persons), 1957
Doktor Murkes gesammeltes Schweigen (Dr. Murke's Collected Silence), 1958
Billard um halb zehn (Billiards at Half-Past Nine), 1959
Ein Schluck Erde, 1962
Ansichten eines Clowns (The Clown), 1963
Entfernung von der Truppe (Absent Without Leave), 1964
Ende einer Dienstfahrt (End of a Mission), 1966
Gruppenbild mit Dame (Group Portrait with Lady), 1971
Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum (The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum), 1974
Fursorgliche Belagerung (The Safety Net), 1979
Was soll aus dem Jungen bloss werden? (What's to Become of the Boy?), 1981
Vermintes Gelande, 1982
Die Verwundung (The Casualty), early tales, publ. 1983
Frauen vor Flusslandschaft (Women in a River Landscape), 1985 (publ. posthumously)
Translations
More than seventy translations of Annemarie and Heinrich Boll are listed in the bibliography published in 1995 by Werner Bellmann: poetical works of Brendan Behan, Eilis Dillon, O. Henry, Paul Horgan, Bernard Malamud, J. D. Salinger, George Bernard Shaw et al.
Secondary literature
Bernd Balzer: Das literarische Werk Heinrich Bolls. Kommentare und Interpretationen. dtv, Munchen 1997.
Werner Bellmann (Ed.): Das Werk Heinrich Bolls. Bibliographie mit Studien zum Fruhwerk. Westdeutscher Verlag, Opladen 1995.
Werner Bellmann (Ed.): Heinrich Boll, Romane und Erzahlungen. Interpretationen. Reclam, Stuttgart 2000.
Michael Butler (Ed.): The Narrative Fiction of Heinrich Boll. Social conscience and literary achievement. Cambridge 1994.
J.H. Reid: Heinrich Boll. A German for His Time. Berg Publishers Ltd., Oxford 1988.
Klaus Schroter: Heinrich Boll. Rowohlt-Verlag, Reinbek 1987.
Jochen Vogt: Heinrich Boll. 2. Aufl. Beck, Munchen 1987.
Heinrich Vormweg: Der andere Deutsche. Heinrich Boll. Eine Biographie. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Koln 2002.
Other websites
Heinrich-Boll-Foundation
Cologne Library Heinrich Boll Archive
The Heinrich Boll Page
Nobel Archive: Boll, 1972
http://www.heinrich-boell.de/ - German homepage
1917 births
1985 deaths
German military personnel of World War II
German Roman Catholics
Writers from Cologne
German Nobel Prize winners