Heinrich Böll

Heinrich Böll, son of a sculptor, was born in Cologne in 1917 and brought up in a liberal Catholic pacifist family. Although he wanted to study philology and literature, his failure to join the Nazi party made this impossible. In 1938 he was called up for compulsory labour service, digging ditches and doing forestry work. In 1939 he was called up for military service. He became an infantryman in the Wehrmacht, but never rose above the rank of lance corporal.

In early 1940 he was stationed in Bromberg [Polish Bydgoszcz] where he witnessed the mistreatment of local Poles by the SS; in June 1940 he was sent to France, then to Cologne to guard supply dumps and then to the Rhineland. In 1942 he was stationed on the Atlantic Wall. In 1943 he was ordered to the eastern front but injured by a mine before his train left France. When he had recovered Böll was sent to the Crimea where he was wounded in the leg and head. After convalescence he was sent to Romania where he was seriously wounded in the back. A combination of confusion, forged papers and genuine illness kept him out of the front line for a while, but eventually he deserted, rejoined his regiment with forged papers, deserted a second time, found a gun that would not fire and pretended to fight with a ragtag unit until he was captured by the Americans in April 1945.

Released from a PoW camp in September 1945 Böll enrolled at Cologne University but soon dropped out, became a woodworker, then went to work in the Cologne Statistical Office. Although he had started to write before the war, understandably this had ceased during his military service. Now he decided to try again. Post-war German writers were concerned with ‘rubble literature’ – with the despair of defeat, the moral and psychological damage of the war, the physical deprivation of the immediate post-war years, finding their own way out of Nazism, purifying the German language of Nazi influence and with refusing to be duped a second time. As Böll wrote:

It was difficult and hard, beginning to write in 1945, considering the depravity and untruthfulness of the German language at the time.[1]