Biography of Heinrich Böll

Name: Heinrich Böll
Bith Date: December 21, 1917
Death Date: July 16, 1985
Place of Birth: Cologne, Germany
Nationality: German
Gender: Male
Occupations: writer, translator, essayist

Heinrich Böll

One of Germany's most popular and prolific authors, Heinrich Böll (1917-1985) gained international fame--winning the Nobel Prize in 1972--as a chronicler of the Federal German Republic (1949-1990). Critics have generally emphasized his strong ethical stance, which stemmed from his personal philosophy of Christian humanism and sympathy for the downtrodden.

Born in Cologne and raised by devout but liberal Roman Catholic parents, Böll embraced humanistic ideals early in life. As a schoolboy he stood up to peer pressure and refused to join the Hitler Youth. In 1939, however, he was drafted into the German infantry, serving throughout the war and suffering several wounds. Returning to Cologne after the war, he published his first short story in 1947. Critical and popular acclaim followed quickly, enabling Böll to devote his life to literature.

Böll's early works focus on the impact of Nazi rule on ordinary people, particularly soldiers like himself, affected by events beyond their control. In Der Zug war puenktlich (1949; The Train Was on Time), a haunting story of a soldier who foresees his own death while waiting to be transported to the eastern front, and Wo warst du, Adam? (1951; Adam, Where Art Thou?), he describes the horror and absurdity of war. As a writer, Böll reacted to the war with anger and condemnation. While revealing the complicity of respectable institutions, such as the Catholic church, in Hitler's political success in Germany, Böll points to the catastrophic consequences of Nazi policies. According to Wilhelm Johannes Schwarz, Böll's "predominant attitude to the war is disgust and vexation.... He tells only of its boredom, of filth and vermin, senselessness, and futile waste of time."

Postwar Germany is the setting of Boll's novels of the 1950s. Und sagte kein einziges Wort (1953; And Never Said a Word) relates a family man's difficulties in adjusting to civilian life. This novel received much critical attention and helped establish Böll's reputation as a master storyteller. Haus ohne Hueter (1954; The Unguarded House) is about the struggle for daily survival in a warn-torn city as experienced by two fatherless boys.

Böll's novels written in the 1950s and 1960s examine Germany's efforts to forge a new identity while exorcising the demons of its Nazi past. As in his earlier work, he approaches his subject from an individual's point of view. Always a perceptive and ironic oberver, Böll mercilessly uncovers the moral blindness, historical amnesia, rapacity, vulgar consumerism, and indifference to human values of a production-oriented society that adopts materialism as a means of forgetting its infernal past. In Ansichten eines Clowns (1963; The Clown), a frustrated performer exposes the hypocrisy of prosperous Germans, including his own family, who subordinate ethical principles to opportunistic concerns. Gruppenbild mit Dame (1971; Group Portrait with Lady), an ambitious work that received a mixed response from critics, is structured as a biography based on accounts by the protagonist's friends and acquaintances. Late works, such as Fuersorgliche Belagerung (1979; The Safety Net) and Frauen vor Flusslandschaft (1985; Women in a River Landscape), treat the complex political reality of the last decade of the Federal German Republic.

Critics have praised Boll for his ability to convey his feelings and ideas in simple, concise, and effective prose. Furthermore, some commentators view Böll's style as a conscious protest against the formal complexity of classical German literature, comparing his work to that of Ernest Hemingway, whom Böll himself cited as an influence. The directness and accessibility of Böll's prose especially comes to the fore in his witty portrayal of the absurdity of everyday life, as exemplified by his two short story collections, Wanderer, kommst du nach Spa (1950; Traveler, If You Come to the Spa) and 18 Stories (1966).

Although aware of his importance, critics have hesitated to bestow unqualified praise on Böll. As Robert C. Conard concluded: "Böll has never received universal critical acceptance, not even from those who find his stories some of the best written in the middle decades of the century. That sentimentalism and idealism dominate his work and that he cannot always adequately execute his intentions are the charges most often heard. Minor weaknesses in Böll's work, however, seem not to affect his popularity with a discriminating public. Already he stands in the company of two of his favorite writers: Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. Like them, he has produced eminently readable work imbued with moral power."

When German writer Heinrich Böll died on July 16, 1985, the world press frequently repeated the summation that he represented the conscience of his nation. This definition of Böll as a moralist was not a new formulation; it had originated, in fact, with literary critics who derided him as nothing more than a moral trumpeter. But even as the exprssion took on more positive meaning, Böll particularly disliked the epithet because this purely ethical assessment of his work, he thought, hindered appreciation of his art. Furthermore, Böll believed that a nation whose conscience was found primarily in its writers instead of in its politicians, its religious leaders, or its people was already a lost land.

Nonetheless, since the end of World War II when Böll's writings first began to appear, critics and ordinary readers alike had sensed in his language a powerful moral imperative. Whatever the genre novel, story, satire, play, poem, or essay--the dominant force of the work was always the author's Christian ethics. Böll became one of the most important literary phenomena of the postwar era because his writings, regardless of their subject matter, clearly revealed where he stood as author. He was against war, militarism, and all hypocrisy in politics, religion, and human relations. He excoriated the opportunism of Nazis who became overnight democrats after 1945 and he refused to let Germans forget their recent past. He railed against the Catholic church, of which he was a member, for its cooperation in German rearmament and its role in the restoration of German capitalism. He pointed out repeatedly in the 1950s and 1960s the dangers of the cold war. In the 1960s and 1970s he supported Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik (a program to come to terms with West Germany's Communist neighbors); Böll campaigned for Brandt in the 1972 election--as did other writers like Guenter Grass and Siegfried Lenz. In the 1980s his practical idealism led him to support the newly formed Green party, a pro-environmental, anti-nuclear group critical of capitalist policies. He was consistently active in the peace movement throughout the postwar era and in the 1980s demonstrated against the deployment of Pershing II's and cruise missiles on German soil.

The Eastern bloc praised Böll for his anti-militarism and his anti- fascism and lauded him as a model proletarian writer. In all the Eastern European countries he was read and admired. He was a best-selling author in East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and especially in the Soviet Union, where sales of his books totaled roughly three million copies during his lifetime. In the West, Böll's death was reported on the first page of most major newspapers. The New York Times quoted the words of his Nobel Prize citation, praising him for his contribution "to the renewal of German literature." In France, Liberation gave three full pages to Böll's death, and Monde, comparing him to Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, praised his morality as an artist, his respect for language, and his responsibility as a writer.

Christian Linder argues correctly in his Boersenblatt article that to understand Böll one must understand his youth. Born in the middle of World War I, Böll claimed his earliest memory was of being held in his mother's arms and watching out the family's apartment window while Hindenburg's defeated army marched through Cologne in 1919. By 1923 the inflation caused by Germany's defeat had ravaged the German population worse than the war had done. Böll remembered his father, a master furniture maker, going to the bank to get money in a cart to pay the employees in the family workshop. The money had to be spent immediately because it would be without purchasing power the next day. Böll never forgot the misery brought to his family, friends, and neighbors by the inflation of the 1920s. The stock market crash of 1929 brought the depression and the unemployment of the 1930s, which caused even more suffering. The economic uncertainties of that period also helped fire the flames of hatred in the recently formed National Socialist Party, and Böll witnessed the first Nazi marches through the streets of Cologne and saw how Nazi terror made the once peaceful streets unsafe for ordinary citizens.

Böll's family, like everyone else he knew, lost what financial security they had and with it their faith in an economic-political system that had failed twice in a decade. The fear of social turmoil became part of the psyche of every German. Economic insecurity, the concern for the next meal and a place to stay became the daily worry of a generation. To survive these times when hard work and the occupational skills of Böll's father were not enough, the Bölls relied on family solidarity, mutual help, and religious faith for survival.

Although the setting for Böll's stories became Germany after World War II, the formative experiences of these earlier times essentially determined his oeuvre. The security of love, the values of food and drink, the luxury of a cigarette (things often taken for granted in an affluent world, especially in prosperous, modern West Germany) pervade his work. Never far from the surface of Böll's stories is his distrust of prosperity because he knew that wealth could disappear over night and that it was often the enemy of familial cohesiveness and the foe of social unity when it began to divide people into haves and have-nots.

In 1937, when Böll completed his secondary education, he went to Bonn to begin an apprenticeship to a book dealer. But his training was interrupted during the winter of 1938-1939 by induction into the labor service. After completion of this semimilitary obligation, he enrolled briefly as a student at the University of Cologne where he intended to study philology. But before he could really call himself a student, three months before the Second World War started, he was drafted into the army. In the course of the next six years he served as an infantryman on the western front in France and on the eastern front in Russia and in other Eastern European countries as the German army retreated before the Russian forces. During these six years Böll was wounded four times and reached the rank of corporal. Although it was customary for soldiers with his education to be officers, his hatred of the war and army life prevented him from cooperating with the military. At the risk of court-martial and summary execution, he frequently forged papers to see his family or, after his marriage to Annemarie Cech in 1942, to visit his wife in the Rhineland. In April of 1945 Böll was taken prisoner by American troops and interred in Allied POW camps until September of 1945. After his release, he immediately returned to Cologne, which lay eighty percent in ruins, to begin his life as a writer. Having chosen his vocation at the age of seventeen, he had written novels and poems before the war; some of these early works remain in the Böll Archive in Cologne.

The conditions for Böll, as for many Germans, when he returned home were reminiscent of the struggles for food and shelter after World War I; now, however, the problems included not only earning money for rent but finding an apartment still standing, not only buying food but finding food at all, not only paying for heat but finding fuel of any kind. In these first years after the war Böll's wife earned most of the family income as a teacher of English while he took only random jobs; even his reenrollment in the university was merely a strategy to obtain a legal ration card without employment so that he could dedicate the majority of his time to writing.

In these early years, Böll, like other postwar German writers, had to struggle with finding a new German literary language. Under the Nazis German had become polluted by fascist ideology, and the German literary tradition that had served Böll's older contemporaries belonging to the generation of Thomas Mann no longer seemed valid in a post-Auschwitz age. Böll was fortunate in that he found his own style early, one appropriate for his ideas and suitable to the content of his stories. That style can be described as a kind of Hemingwayesque minimalism--simple words in simple sentences--conveying a plainness appropriate to the Germany of 1945, a time when the expression of truth, to be believable again, had to possess the certainty and simplicity of a mathematical statement, like 2 + 2 = 4. The opening lines of any of the stories written before 1950 illustrate the style. "Damals in Odessa" ("That Time We Were in Odessa") starts with seven words: "In Odessa it was very cold then." The story concludes: "It was cold in Odessa, the weather was beautifully clear, and we boarded the plane; and as it rose, we knew suddenly that we would never return, never...." Between the terse opening sentence and the final lines, the story tells of soldiers eating and drinking to forget their fears before going to die. In the history of German literature Böll's sober language has the place accorded a Shaker chair in the history of American furniture.

In 1947 these first stories began to appear in various periodicals. They were collected in 1950 as Wanderer, kommst du nach Spa (Traveller, If You Come to Spa). In 1983 twenty-two more of these early stories were discovered in the Böll Archive in Cologne and published in the collection Die Verwundung und andere fruehe Erzaehlungen (The Casualty). Of these early stories the twenty-five in Traveller, If You Come to Spa can be found in Children Are Civilians Too, while those in Die Verwundung have only recently been made available in English. The subject matter of these works is the war and the return of soldiers to a homeland morally impoverished and physically destroyed. Containing none of the heroism and gallantry of popular war literature written during the Weimar Republic, Böll's earliest narratives feature men who die without honor for an inhuman cause. Despite the stark realism of war Böll did not dwell on battle scenes; he more often depicted the boredom of military life and fear of death. In these tales the only haven from despair is love, discovered in momentary encounters between soldiers and women on the periphery of the war.

Two novellas, Der Zug war puenktlich (The Train Was on Time) and Das Vermaechtnis (A Soldier's Legacy), and the episodic novel, Wo warst du, Adam?(And Where Were You, Adam?), represent Böll's longer treatment of the war. While they differ from one another in structure, they, like the shorter works, share a fatalism that death is bigger than life and proclaim a Christian optimism that heavenly consolation is greater than suffering. Thus the war narratives acknowledge that God is still in his heaven, although all is not right with the world.

Böll's epigraph for And Where Were You, Adam? (which he took from Antoine de Saint-Exupery's Flight to Arras) can stand as a motto for all his war stories from this period: "When I was younger, I took part in real adventures: establishing postal air routes across the Sahara and South America. But war is no true adventure; it is only a substitute for adventure. War is a disease just like typhus." In an essay collected in The Second World War in Fiction, Alan Bance claims that this apolitical perspective on the war was typical of German literature in the 1940s and 1950s. He even sees a kind of "realism" in this political vagueness because, as he says, "war is not conducive to clear thinking." In Böll's case the unanalytic response to the war (seeing international conflict as a natural illness) was compounded by his feeling of being a lucky survivor, for only one of four German men in his age group returned from battle. His sense of destiny forced Böll to deal subjectively rather than objectively with the suffering of the Hitler years.

This narrow perspective manifests itself in Böll's simplistic division of characters into two groups: victims and executioners, with the victims often being the Germans themselves. A dichotomous view of World War II is understandable and even accurate for someone who was himself an anti-fascist and a sufferer of twelve years of oppression. Still, the result of the dichotomy is that the war stories cannot reveal truly what the war was about because the limited categories of suffering innocents and brutal henchmen are too unrefined to do the job. This kind of dualism, as Walker Sokel calls it in his In Sachen Böll essay, is characteristic of Böll's work in this period but disappears from the later stories as they become more sophisticated in their characterizations. Guenter Wirth's indictment, in Heinrich Böll, of the early war stories as "timeless irrationalism" is to the point because certainly war is not like typhus or any other sickness that has biological causes. War is not nature's making; it is made by people who have political and economic interests.

In the stories treating conditions following the war, satire became Böll's main weapon in his chastisement of Germany. Certain of these works, such as Nicht nur zur Weihnachtszeit ("Christmas Every Day"),"Dr. Murkes gesammeltes Schweigen" ("Dr. Murke's Collected Silences"), and "Der Wegwerfer" ("The Thrower Away"), have become classics of postwar German literature. A humorous, bizarre fantasy characterizes these satires of developing West German society. In "Christmas Every Day" a tyrannical old aunt demands daily holidays to avoid confronting the guilt of the Hitler years. In "Dr. Murke's Collected Silences" a Ph.D. in psychology, working for a radio station, tries to preserve his sanity by collecting on tape snips of dead air cut from cultural programs. In "The Thrower Away" a fanatical time-study expert makes a place for himself in the business world by systematically destroying junk mail, the surplus production of the advertising industry. Böll's success in this genre, the satirical short story, has led critics such as Erhard Friedrichsmeyer, James Henderson Reid, and Walter Jens to conclude that Böll's acutest artistic sense was his eye for satire. These stories have garnered high critical acclaim because they take to task the shortcomings of all Western democracies even though they are grounded in West German economic and political reality. One recognizes, too, that Böll's satire hits the mark equally as well in the Eastern bloc, where culture is an industry, production often leads to waste, and people avoid confronting the unpleasant past.

Böll's sense of satire is also the high point of many of his novels and raises them in some cases to great literature and in others saves them from the doldrums. For example, in Ansichten eines Clowns (The Clown), the scene of the penniless clown pantomiming his blindness during the visit of his millionaire industrialist father contains the essence of the novel's political content, and in Entfernung von der Truppe ("Absent without Leave"), the narrator's account of his latrine duty in World War II reveals his total alienation from society. In Ende einer Dienstfahrt (End of a Mission ) Böll's choice of a pedantic, objective, understated tone confers on the novel the main feature of its readability; the dry reporting of the events of a trial of a father and son accused of burning an army jeep discloses how the courts and the press keep political protest under control. And Böll's last novel, Frauen vor Flusslandschaft: Roman in Dialogen und Selbstgespraechen, published just after his death in 1985, reaches its high point in a long interior monologue by a disenchanted intellectual whose job requires him to write speeches for a corrupt and stupid Christian Democratic minister. Here the monologue summarizes the novel's political intent by revealing the politician's incompetence and moral emptiness as well as the intellectual's sellout of his ideals.

Beginning with the novel Und sagte kein einziges Wort (And Never Said a Word ), Böll developed a new method for dealing with contemporary reality. He began choosing themes, drawing characters, and selecting events tied directly to current developments in Germany. For this reason, his collected works provide a history of the Federal Republic and thereby justify Fritz J. Raddatz's Zeit description of the writer as "the Balzac of the Second Republic." Read chronologically, the books treat every significant phase in West German history from the nation's establishment in 1949 to the mid-1980s, including the period of hunger after the war, the restoration of capitalism, the process of rearmament, the achievement of prosperity, the terrorist responses to social and political inequities produced by the economic recovery, and the soul-searching of the 1980s. Treating all these aspects of West German history not as isolated phenomena of the postwar era, but in light of the Hitler years and German history since the turn of the century, Böll's canon not only helped to establish West German literature after the war but also provides a political and social understanding of German development in this century.

In Böll's work ordinary people become objects of social forces, often victims of the decisions of others. In Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum; oder, wie Gewahlt enstehen und wohin sie fuehren kann (The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum: How Violence Develops and Where It Can Lead), which takes place during four days of carnival in Cologne, Böll showed how an unpolitical, law-abiding young woman could be turned into a vengeful murderer by society's toleration of social injustice. The protagonist, Katharina, becomes a "dangerous" person because she finds herself a victim of character assassination perpetrated by those institutions most responsible for a just democratic society: the press, the police, the law.

The philosophical position implied in Böll's assumption that a person is a product of social forces may be called Marxist, except that it is thoroughly religious, lacks Marxist optimism, and never suggests social change through political organization. Social solutions are not found in Böll's work. Implied, however, is the belief that if people in power practiced more compassion in the execution of their offices, society would be more just. In general, a certain sadness about the human condition prevails in Böll's work, even though a mild optimism flourishes within narrow limits. His protagonists always make important decisions regarding their own lives. They are not completely passive; they do not yield to or accept injustice. Their decisions affirm their individual human dignity and assert a militant humanism. Although their actions may not effect significant social change but merely permit them to live with their consciences, their decisiveness symbolically opposes an unjust world and thereby suggests that social awareness and conscious opposition are the way to a better future. The story of Katharina Blum's vengeance neither recommends nor condones murder, but merely illustrates the simple truth that injustice, when tolerated, is often the cause of social violence.

When the Swedish Academy awarded Böll the Nobel Prize in 1972, it singled out the novel Gruppenbild mit Dame (Group Portrait with Lady) for special praise, calling that work the summation of Böll's oeuvre. Although the writer continued to publish novels, stories, poems, plays, and essays regularly after 1971, Group Portrait with Lady is still regarded as the work that most fully represents the whole of Böll's canon. The book recapitulates his major themes and provides their most masterful formulation.

Böll stated his intention for the novel in an Akzente interview with Dieter Wellershoff: "I tried to describe or to write the story of a German woman in her late forties who had taken upon herself the burden of history from 1922-1970." In this story of Leni Gruyten-Pfeiffer, her family, and friends, Böll challenged the norms of West German society with a model of radical socialism and religious humanism. The protagonist Leni synthesizes in her person seeming contradictions. Although she is a simple person, she confounds any attempt at simple explanation. She is a materialist who delights in the senses but also a mystic who penetrates the mystery of the virgin birth, an innocent in her heart and a tramp in the eyes of society, a communist by intuition and an embodiment of the fascist ideal of "the German girl." In her, her Russian lover Boris, and their son Lev, Böll created a holy family that proclaims an undogmatic Christian socialism as a gospel for modern times.

Around Leni are grouped more than 125 characters representing all classes of society and various nations: communists and capitalists, industrialists and proletarians, fascists and anti-fascists, Jews and Moslems, Turks and Germans, rich and poor, saints and sinners the whole spectrum of German society from 1922-1970. To hold the various levels of the story together and to keep Leni in the center of the novel, the work employs two narrative techniques. In the first half of the novel an unnamed narrator scrupulously relates the events of Leni's life. This half of the book consists of the narrator's meticulous research on Leni and his comments on the accuracy and validity of his findings. Leni's story proceeds chronologically from her birth to March 2, 1945, the day in which a nine-hour Allied raid on Cologne effectively brought the war to an end for the people of that city. After this event, midway through the novel, the narrator relinquishes his role as narrator to assume a role as a member of Leni's circle of friends, and to become an actor in the events of the book. At this point various characters tell their life stories from the day of the terrible bombing to 1970. Since these people have contact with Leni their stories also reveal from various perspectives Leni's own life during this twenty-five year period. Again Böll found a structure that allowed him to come to terms with recent German history and postwar developments.

Group Portrait with Lady, is, indeed, the summation of Böll's writing, for it crystalizes the radical message that runs through all of his work since And Never Said a Word:Christianity and capitalism are incompatible with each other; their long standing marriage survives only because organized religion continually surrenders its humanistic values to the demands of economics and politics.

Historical Context

The Life and Times of Heinrich Böll (1917-1985)
At the time of Böll's birth:
Woodrow Wilson was president of the United States
United States declared war on Germany
World Book encyclopedia published its first edition
Passenger train wreck in Modane, France, killed 543 people and injured hundreds
At the time of Böll's death:
Ronald Reagan was president of the United States
Anne Tyler published The Accidental Tourist
Live Aid, a marathon rock concert in Philadelphia, raised $70 million for starving Africans
Cincinnati Reds ballplayer Pete Rose broke Ty Cobb's record of 4,191 career hits
Spain and Portugal joined the European Common Market
The times:
1914-1965: Modernist Period of English Literature
1939-1945: World War II
1950-1953: Korean War
1957-1975: Vietnam War
1965-: Postmodernist Period of English Literature
Böll's contemporaries:
Andrew Wyeth (1917-) American painter
John F. Kennedy (1917-1963) U.S. president
Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-) American writer
Ray Charles (1918-) American rhythm and blues musician
Margot Fonteyn (1919-1991) English ballerine
Isaac Asimov (1920-1992) Russian-born writer
Selected world events:
1919: Adolf Hitler joined the German Workers' Party
1926: Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises published
1937: German airship Hindenburg exploded at Lakehurst, New Jersey
1945: Germany surrendered to Allied forces
1955: Jonas Salk's polio vaccine used for the first time in the United States
1961: Joseph Heller published Catch-22
1970: French war hero and president Charles de Gaulle died
1982: Thomas Keneally's Schindler's Ark published