Heinrich Böll

Heinrich Böll: The Conscience He Refused to Be

In 1977, forty police officers searched the home of West Germany's Nobel laureate, acting on an anonymous tip that falsely named his son as an accomplice in the kidnapping of the industrialist Hanns Martin Schleyer. Three years earlier the tabloid *Bild* had reported a police search of his house before the search actually took place. Heinrich Böll's offence was an essay arguing that Ulrike Meinhof, of all people, was entitled to due process of law. Germany liked to call him the conscience of the nation. It also treated him as a suspect.

Cologne, 1917

He was born Heinrich Theodor Böll on 21 December 1917 in Cologne, the son of Viktor Böll, a sculptor and cabinet-maker. The household was Roman Catholic, pacifist, and opposed to the Nazis — and Böll, alone among most of his contemporaries, refused to join the Hitler Youth in the 1930s.

He went through elementary school from 1924 to 1928 and the Kaiser-Wilhelm classical secondary school from 1928 to 1937, then began an apprenticeship as a bookseller. The apprenticeship did not last, because in the summer of 1939 the army took him.

Six Years in the Wehrmacht

Böll served for the duration. He was in France in 1940, in replacement units after recovering from typhus in 1941–42, on the English Channel coast in 1942–43, and in Eastern Europe from 1943 to 1944; across the whole span he served in Poland, Romania, Hungary and the Soviet Union, and was wounded four times. American forces captured him in the spring of 1945 and interned him until October.

This is the fact that organises everything afterwards. Böll was not a resister and never claimed to be. He was an ordinary conscript in a criminal army who came home in December 1945 to a flattened city and had to decide what a German sentence was now for.

Literature of the Rubble

He rebuilt his destroyed house and started writing. Short stories appeared from 1946, and the novella *Der Zug war pünktlich* — *The Train Was on Time* — in 1949. He worked at the Cologne Bureau of Statistics from 1950 to 1951 before going freelance for good, and he joined Gruppe 47, the circle that would dominate West German letters for a generation, around the turn of the decade.

The label attached to that first wave was *Trümmerliteratur*: the literature of the rubble. Its principle was linguistic as much as moral. The ornate, elevated German of the preceding twelve years had been thoroughly compromised by the uses it had been put to, so the rubble writers stripped it back to a flat, plain, unliterary register and wrote about small people in ruined cities. Böll became its most durable practitioner. He married Annemarie Cech in 1942; she gave him, in the Nobel Foundation's phrase, a critical awareness for language, and they had three sons born in postwar Cologne.

The Novels, and Ireland

The major books arrived steadily: *And Never Said a Word* (1953), *The Bread of Those Early Years* (1955), *Billiards at Half-past Nine* (1959), *The Clown* (1963), *Group Portrait with Lady* (1971), *The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum* (1974) and *The Safety Net* (1979). *The Clown* caused a national row for its portrait of the Church and of the governing Christian Democrats — Böll being a devout Catholic who was ferociously critical of the institution, above all of the 1933 Concordat between the Vatican and the Nazi state. In 1976 he left the Church, as he put it, without falling away from the faith.

He also kept a second home on Achill Island, off the Irish west coast, and wrote *Irish Journal* (1957) about it. Annemarie translated Behan, Synge and Flann O'Brien into German. The cottage has been a writers' residency since 1992.

Nobel, PEN, and Solzhenitsyn

He won the Georg Büchner Prize in 1967 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1972, cited for work that, "through its combination of a broad perspective on his time and a sensitive skill in characterization," had contributed to the renewal of German literature. He was president of West German PEN and then of International PEN from 1971 to 1973.

He used the standing. He had recommended Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn for the Nobel; when Solzhenitsyn received it in 1970 he quoted Böll's work to the reception committee, and when the USSR expelled him, he took shelter first at Böll's cottage in the Eifel.

The Spiritual Father of the Violence

In 1972 Böll wrote an article attacking *Bild* for fabricated journalism. *Der Spiegel* retitled it against his wishes, and the retitling detonated. In his *Spiegel* piece "Sixty Million against Six" he argued for legal protections and dialogue rather than a press campaign against the Baader-Meinhof group. The conservative media promptly christened him the spiritual father of the violence. The false *Bild* report of a search of his home followed on 7 February 1974; the forty officers followed in 1977; the Christian Democrats blacklisted him afterwards.

Why Heinrich Is Called a Genius

The quality is moral stamina expressed as plainness. Böll came out of six years in the Wehrmacht — four wounds, typhus, an internment camp — into a country that urgently wanted to discuss something else, and declined to let it. His answer was technical as well as ethical: since elevated German had been compromised by the regime's uses of it, he wrote flat, unadorned prose about small people in ruined cities. That was a deliberate aesthetic, not a limitation, and the Nobel citation named what it achieved — a broad perspective on his time joined to a sensitive skill in characterisation, renewing a national literature.

The second act is rarer than the first. A laureate need not spend his prestige; Böll spent his continuously — sheltering Solzhenitsyn, running International PEN, insisting in 1972 that even Ulrike Meinhof was owed due process. The bill arrived as a smear campaign, two police searches and a party blacklist. He did not retract.

The counter-case is fair. Böll was not a formal innovator; beside Grass or Uwe Johnson his novels are conventionally built, and their moral architecture can be too tidy. He is read less outside Germany than his standing implies. And he rejected the "conscience of the nation" title himself, correctly: it describes a public office, not a literary achievement. The defensible claim is that a plain style held honestly for forty years against a country's wish to forget is itself a first-order achievement, one that writers of greater technical gift did not manage.

Legacy

He died on 16 July 1985 at Langenbroich, aged sixty-seven. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages, and he remains among the most widely read German authors of the century. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1974, the American Philosophical Society in 1983 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1984, and received the Ossietzky Medal in 1974. The Heinrich Böll Foundation preserves his memory, and the Heinrich Böll Archive in Cologne holds his papers, though a great deal was damaged when the building housing it collapsed in 2009. The conscience he disclaimed outlived him anyway.