Heinrich Böll(1917 — 1985)
Heinrich Böll
Allemagne
6 min read
German writer, a major figure of post-war literature. His work, marked by a moral critique of West German society and the memory of Nazism, earned him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1972.
Frequently asked questions
Key Facts
- Born in 1917 in Cologne into a Catholic family of craftsmen
- Conscripted into the Wehrmacht during the Second World War (1939-1945), an experience central to his work
- Member of Group 47, the literary circle of young post-war German writers
- Published “The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum” in 1974, a critique of the tabloid press
- Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1972; died in 1985
Works & Achievements
His first published story: a young soldier senses his own death as he heads to the Eastern Front. A foundational work of post-war literature.
A novel made up of episodes on the absurdity and horror of war as seen by ordinary men.
An account of post-war Germany seen through the eyes of two children whose fathers were killed in combat.
The saga of a Cologne family across half a century, confronting Nazism and its aftermath.
The bitter monologue of a fallen artist, a critique of the social and Catholic hypocrisy of West Germany.
A vast novelistic fresco cited by the Nobel Academy; the portrait of a free-spirited woman moving through German history.
A novel denouncing the tabloid press that destroys the reputation of an innocent woman. A huge success, adapted for the screen.
Crowning his entire body of work, praised for its renewal of German literature and its moral scope.
Anecdotes
Conscripted into the Wehrmacht in 1939, Heinrich Böll fought on several fronts, was wounded four times, and ended up a prisoner of the Americans in 1945. His entire body of work bears the mark of this war he loathed, so much so that he often said he wrote “against” it.
After 1945, Böll dug through the ruins of Cologne, his native city devastated by bombing. From this experience was born what came to be called “rubble literature” (Trümmerliteratur): rather than being ashamed of it, he proudly claimed the name in a 1952 essay.
In 1972, Böll received the Nobel Prize in Literature, becoming the first West German honored since the war. Many saw it as a sign of reconciliation: the voice of a Germany that dared to look its Nazi past in the face.
In 1974, when the dissident writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Soviet Union, it was at Böll's country house that he found refuge during his first days in the West. Böll defended the persecuted on both sides of the Iron Curtain.
Viciously attacked by the major tabloid Bild for having called for a fair trial for alleged terrorists, Böll turned the experience into a novel: *The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum* (1974), a scathing critique of the sensationalist press.
Primary Sources
It was already dark when I arrived in Bonn.
How violence develops and where it can lead.
Stranger, go tell the Spartans… — a line scratched on a school blackboard by a young dying soldier, an echo of the epitaph of Thermopylae.
Böll embraces the disparaging term “literature of rubble” as a badge of honour: the writer must show the world as it is, ruins included.
Key Places
Böll's native city, on the Rhine. Destroyed by bombing, it is the setting of many of his novels and the source of his “rubble literature.”
Capital of West Germany, where Böll trained as a bookseller and studied. The setting of *The Clown* and of the political life he observed with severity.
Island off the west coast of Ireland where Böll owned a cottage. A writing retreat far from Germany, it is where he wrote his *Irish Journal*.
The city where Böll received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1972 and delivered his acceptance speech.
Village in the Eifel region where Böll had his country house and where he died in 1985. He notably hosted Solzhenitsyn there in 1974.
