Biography
Heinrich Böll was born on 21 December 1917 in Cologne and began an apprenticeship as a bookseller in Bonn in 1937, which he abandoned after eleven months. He was drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1939 and taken prisoner by American forces in 1945. After the war he wrote alongside casual jobs and made his breakthrough at a 1951 meeting of Gruppe 47, which decisively advanced his literary career. With novels such as Billiards at Half-Past Nine (1959), The Clown (1963) and The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (1974), he became one of the most influential German post-war writers and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1972. Böll served as president of the German and international PEN Club from 1970 to 1974 and died on 16 July 1985 in Langenbroich.
On Stagelog
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