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!
boys coming liberated prisoner
I will never forget the moment when I was liberated by the American Army. I will never forget those very young boys coming up the hill, who had to take me a prisoner to liberate me.
begin classical labour permission studies study term
Because the completion of labour service was a precondition for permission to study at the university, I was able to begin my studies of Germanistics and Classical Philology during the summer term of 1939.
certain german marvel passages
My most interesting correspondence is with my translators. I marvel at their sensitivity over certain passages that just anyone, even if he knows German well, would not appreciate.
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.
allowed man perform
We must learn, and especially we Germans, that resistance is not only possible and allowed in dictatorships. There is resistance that man must perform every day.