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| German Literature | Heinrich Böll
This
important novelist, winner of a Nobel Prize in Literature
in 1972, was born in Cologne. As soon as he finished his secondary
education, he was recruited as a soldier and served during
the entire Second World War. In 1947 he was set free form
a North American prisoner of war camp where he had lived since
the end of the war. He sold various stories, which allowed
him to survive while writing novels, plays, stories and essays,
which portrayed the horrors and grotesque aspects of the war,
the guilt and the emptiness of materialism.
Many
of his early writings were compiled in The Train Was on
Time (1949), which was followed up by novels such
as Adam, Where Art Thou? (1951), And Never Said
a Word (1953), The Unguarded House (1954) and
Billiards at Half-Past Nine (1959); as well as the
travel diary Irish Journal (1957) and the novels
on political satire End of a Mission (1966) and The
Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (1974), a critical look
at the connivance between journalistic firms and the judicial
and political powers, just when terrorist activities in Germany
were at their height, with the the failed attempts at
freeing the leaders of the Baader-Meinhof terrorist group.
Undoubtedly, his masterpiece is the ambitious portrait
of German life between World War I and the 70's, Group
Portrait with a Lady (1971).
