Heinrich Böll (1917-1985), image source
The German writer, Heinrich Böll, was born in Cologne 100 years ago today. He was conscripted into the German army before the outbreak of the Second World War. After the war, he returned to Cologne and took up the studies that he had begun before the war - Germanistics and Classical Philology. He then started to write short stories and his first book, The Train Was On Time, was published in 1949.
He is well known in Ireland because of his influential Irisches Tagebuch [Irish Journal]. The book focused on his time on Achill Island, off the west coast of Ireland in the 1950s. Böll created an image of Ireland in the book that many of his fellow Germans took as their image of Ireland. I have not read it yet, but am looking forward to reading it at some stage to see an Ireland that is no longer visible.
Böll won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1972. You can read his biographical sketch on the Nobel Prize website. There is also an interesting piece on the Goethe Institut website about Heinrich Böll and Ireland.
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