Heinrich Böll

Heinrich Böll
Heinrich Böll, 1981
Born	Heinrich Theodor Böll (1917-12-21)21 December 1917 Cologne, German Empire
Died	16 July 1985(1985-07-16) (aged 67) Langenbroich, North Rhine-Westphalia, West Germany
Nationality	German
Notable awards	Georg Büchner Prize 1967 Nobel Prize in Literature 1972
Signature

Georg Büchner Prize
1967

Heinrich Theodor Böll (German: [bœl]; 21 December 1917 – 16 July 1985) was 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.

Böll was born in Cologne, Germany, to a Catholic, pacifist family that later opposed the rise of Nazism. He refused to join the Hitler Youth during the 1930s. He was apprenticed to a bookseller before studying German at the University of Cologne. In 1942 he married Annemarie Cech with whom he was ultimately to have three sons; she later acted as his collaborator on a number of different translations of English and American literature into German that he produced over the years. Conscripted into the Wehrmacht, he served in France, Romania, Hungary and the Soviet Union, and was wounded four times (as well as contracting typhoid fever) before being captured by Americans 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, an experience which 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.