Heinrich Boll
Heinrich Boll
Heinrich Theodor Böllwas one of Germany's foremost post-World War II writers. Böll was awarded the Georg Büchner Prize in 1967 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1972...
NationalityGerman
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth21 December 1917
CityCologne, Germany
CountryGermany
depressing humorous awful
Humor is really one of the hardest things to define, very hard. And it's very ambiguous. You have it or you don't. You can't attain it. There are terrible forms of professional humor, the humorists' humor. That can be awful. It depresses me because it is artificial. You can't always be humorous, but a professional humorist must. That is a sad phenomenon.
seriousness earnestness
Oh, that ludicrous virile earnestness!
joys love totally turned
No one will ever know how many novels, poems, analyses, confessions, sufferings and joys have been piled up on this continent called Love, without it ever having turned out to be totally investigated.
cologne heavy left met retreat roman visit
On a visit to Cologne in March 1945, after a heavy bombing, I met hundreds and hundreds of deserters who were squatting in the rubble, many in the deep cellars left from Roman times. They had been hiding there after the retreat from France.