Heinrich Theodor Böll (; German: [ˈhaɪnʁɪç ˈteːodoːɐ̯ ˈbœl] ; 21 December 1917 – 16 July 1985) was a German writer. Considered one of Germany's foremost post–World War II writers, Böll received the Georg Büchner Prize (1967) and the Nobel Prize for Literature (1972).
Böll was born in Cologne, Germany, to a Roman Catholic and pacifist family that later opposed the rise of Nazism. Böll refused to join the Hitler Youth during the 1930s. He was apprenticed to a bookseller before studying German studies and classics at the University of Cologne.
Conscripted into the Wehrmacht, he served in Poland, France, Romania, Hungary and the Soviet Union. In 1942, Böll married Annemarie Cech, with whom he had three sons; she later collaborated with him on a number of different translations into German of English-language literature. During his war service, Böll was wounded four times and contracted typhoid. He was captured by US Army soldiers in April 1945 and sent to a prisoner-of-war camp.
After the war, he returned to Cologne and began working in his family's cabinet shop and, for one year, worked in a municipal statistical bureau, a job he did not enjoy and which he left in order to take the risk of becoming a writer instead.
Böll became a full-time writer at the age of 30. His first novel, Der Zug war pünktlich (The Train Was on Time), was published in 1949. He was invited to the 1949 meeting of the Group 47 circle of German authors and his work was deemed to be the best presented in 1951. Many other novels, short stories, radio plays, and essay collections followed.
Awards, honours and appointments
Böll was extremely successful and was lauded on a number of occasions. In 1953 he was awarded the Culture Prize of German Industry, the Southern German Radio Prize and the German Critics' Prize. In 1954 he received the prize of the Tribune de Paris. In 1955 he was given the French prize for the best foreign novel. In 1958 he won the Eduard von der Heydt prize of the city of Wuppertal and the prize of the Bayerische Akademie der Schönen Künste (Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts). In 1959 he was given the Great Art Prize of the State of North-Rhine-Westphalia and the Literature Prize of the city of Cologne, and was elected to the Academy of Science and the Arts in Mainz.
In 1960 he became a member of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts and gained the Charles Veillon Prize.
In 1967 he was given the Georg Büchner Prize.
In 1972 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature "for his writing which through its combination of a broad perspective on his time and a sensitive skill in characterization has contributed to a renewal of German literature".
He was given a number of honorary awards up to his death, such as the membership of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1974, and the Ossietzky Medal of 1974 (the latter for his defence of and contribution to global human rights).
Böll was President of PEN International, the worldwide association of writers, from 1971 to 1973.
Böll was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1983 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1984.
His work has been translated into more than 30 languages, and he remains one of Germany's most widely read authors. His best-known works are Billiards at Half-past Nine (1959), And Never Said a Word (1953), The Bread of Those Early Years (1955), The Clown (1963), Group Portrait with Lady (1971), The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (1974), and The Safety Net (1979).
Despite his work's variety of themes and content, certain patterns recur: much of his work describes intimate and personal life struggling to sustain itself against the wider background of war, terrorism, political divisions, and profound economic and social transition. Many of his books have stubborn and eccentrically individualistic protagonists who oppose the mechanisms of the state or of public institutions.
Böll was a devoted pacifist because of his war experiences. All of his writing and novels during the postwar years had to do with the war and making sure it never happened again. He encapsulated it in the phrase "never war again".
In his autobiography, Böll wrote that at the high school he attended when growing up under Nazi rule, an anti-Nazi teacher paid special attention to the Roman satirist Juvenal: "Mr. Bauer realized how topical Juvenal was, how he dealt at length with such phenomena as arbitrary government, tyranny, corruption, the degradation of public morals, the decline of the Republican ideal and the terrorizing acts of the Praetorian Guards. [...] In a secondhand bookshop I found an 1838 translation of Juvenal with an extensive commentary, twice the length of the translated text itself, written at the height of the Romantic period. Though its price was more than I could really afford, I bought it. I read all of it very intensely, as if it was a detective novel. It was one of the few books to which I persistently held on throughout the war [WWII] and beyond, even when most of my other books were lost or sold on the black market".
The 1963 publication of The Clown was met with polemics in the press for its negative portrayal of the Catholic Church and the CDU party. Böll was devoted to Catholicism but also deeply critical of aspects of it, especially in its most conservative incarnations. In particular, he was unable to forget the Concordat of July 1933 between the Vatican and the Nazis, signed by the future Pope Pius XII, which helped confer international legitimacy on the regime early in its development.