When Heinrich Böll died on 16 July 1985 he was one of the best-known and best-regarded German writers of the postwar era, winner of the 1972 Nobel Prize for Literature as well as Germany’s own prestigious Georg Büchner Prize in 1967, whose works were translated into some 30 languages.

Heinrich Böll in 1981. (Image Bundesarchiv, B 145 Bild-F062164-0004 / Hoffmann, Harald / CC-BY-SA, via Wikimedia Commons)

However, popularity, critical acclaim and even a Nobel Prize in a writer’s own lifetime are no guarantee of enduring fame. Fast forward to 2010, and no less a figure than Germany’s ‘Pope of Literature’, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, despite warm personal memories of Böll and an acknowledgement of his importance, pronounced his poetry and plays “worthless” and most of his novels “a disappointment” in an interview with the newspaper Die Welt. This was part of a general consensus among German critics and journalists that Böll was now largely forgotten; when a large part of his archive was destroyed in the collapse of the Stadtarchiv in Cologne in 2009 it seemed almost symbolic of the author’s own posthumous fate.

This 30th anniversary of Böll’s death is a good moment to revisit him, not least given the death earlier this year of Günter Grass, with whom Böll was often linked during his lifetime. Although very different writers, they moved in the same literary and political circles, and their works show the same concern with confronting Germany’s past and holding up a critical mirror to the country’s present. 

For Böll, of course, the German present did not extend to the fall of the Berlin Wall and reunification. This seems to be one of the reasons for loss of interest in his work, which is seen by some contemporary writers, critics and teachers as firmly rooted in the Federal Republic of the 1950s, 60s and 70s, and no longer relevant to the very different world of the 21st-century ‘Berlin Republic’.

British schools' editions of some of Böll’s works. Böll was  a staple of the A level German curriculum in the 1970s and 80s, but is less read and studied in Britian today.

Despite the specific social and historical setting, however, many of Böll’s underlying themes do have contemporary relevance. For example, he often evokes the sense of a spiritual void and lack of humanity in a materially successful society. A short story like ‘Es wird etwas geschehen’, where the frantically busy staff of a company are forever discussing what they will achieve while never truly achieving  anything, could be a satire on today’s business methods and management-speak.  In ‘Doktor Murkes gesammeltes Schweigen’ (described by Reich-Ranicki as “perhaps his best work”), a radio editor collects and listens to recordings of silence as a contrast to the self-important yet often trivial programmes which his station broadcasts – and silence in the face of a self-important and trivial media is an even rarer commodity today.

Böll’s most famous novel, Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum, also has contemporary echoes. Inspired both by German press coverage of the Baader-Meinhof Gang and by the hounding of Böll himself as an apologist for terrorism after he published an essay criticising the tabloid Bild-Zeitung in particular, it tells how Katharina Blum’s life and reputation are ruined after she spends the night with a petty criminal and helps him to evade the police. The press falsely depicts the man as a ruthless bank-robber, murderer and potential terrorist, and Katharina as his cold, calculating and promiscuous accomplice. Statements in her defence are twisted against her, friends and family are pursued, strangers send hate mail, and eventually Katharina is driven to shoot the journalist who has led the witch-hunt against her. In a modern version Katharina would be lynched on social media as well as in print, but that is the only difference.

Even if not all of Böll’s work has stood the test of time so well, he deserves  also to be remembered as a humanitarian who supported dissident writers and political prisoners and spoke up for what he considered to be right. In the words of the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, a Green political foundation named in his honour:

he embodied that rare combination of political awareness, artistic creativity, and moral integrity which remains a model for future generations. The courage to stand up for one's beliefs; encouragement to meddle in public affairs; and unconditional activism in support of dignity and human rights. (https://www.boell.de/en/content/heinrich-boell)

Not a bad legacy.

Susan Reed, Lead Curator Germanic Collections

References:

Heinrich Böll, Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum (Cologne, 1974) X.989/36213

Heinrich Böll, Doktor Murkes gesammeltes Schweigen, und andere Satiren (Cologne, 1958) X.989/70833 (collection includes ‘Es wird etwas geschehen’)