{"id":15651,"date":"2017-12-22T08:41:08","date_gmt":"2017-12-22T12:41:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=15651"},"modified":"2017-12-22T08:41:08","modified_gmt":"2017-12-22T12:41:08","slug":"heinrich-boll","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/heinrich-boll\/","title":{"rendered":"HEINRICH B\u00d6LL"},"content":{"rendered":"

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B\u00f6ll \u2014 Nobel Prize in Literature in 1972 \u2014 would have turned 100 yesterday, & if the German papers are honoring him, though with rather distant & at times skeptical homages, internationally there doesn’t seem to be much noise about this centennial. A forgotten writer? He who was maybe the first contemporary prose writer I & my school mates enthused about, age 12\/13, in high school when we read a few short stories from\u00a0Wanderer, kommst du nach Spa<\/a><\/i>\u00a0in German lit class; he who a few years later, around 1968, was a defender & even collaborator of the radical students, us soixante-huitards<\/em> as we came to be called; he, in whose dacha in the Eiffel Alexander\u00a0Solzhenitsyn took refuge when he got out of the Soviet Union; he who was a friend to Paul Celan, the only one of the Gruppe 47 with whom Celan kept in touch & whom he visited in K\u00f6ln on several occasions.<\/p>\n

I must confess that my enthusiasm too was short-lived. The early short-stories, core examples of what came to be called\u00a0Tr\u00fcmmerliteratur<\/a><\/i> (rubble lit), were important for someone born just after WWII in a country that had been occupied by Germany in that they gave insight into how young (& older) Germans could be dragged into Nazism, how even non-nazis were dragged into the Wehrmacht & what their experiences in & right after the war were. I read a few more of the novels, but my interest waned (maybe because American lit began to take over for me?), though around 1960 I read and fell in love with his novel Billard um halb zehn<\/i> (Billiards at Half-past Nine<\/a><\/i>), a tale of three generations of Germans, builders & destroyers,\u00a0which I reread every few years all the way into the eighties. And since then nothing, except for a volume of correspondence between him, Celan and two other of the poet’s “Rheinland friends.” Checking my book shelves I find five B\u00f6ll titles. Only Billiards<\/em> is well-thumbed. No more appetite for B\u00f6ll’s prose. My fault? B\u00f6ll’s? Or just as time goes by? I don’t know \u2014 & it probably matters little. But just maybe, during these holidays I’ll take down one or the other of B\u00f6ll’s works & try to reread what was so important to me half a century ago. I’ll report here, if anything worth reporting comes of this. Here, below, the opening pages of Billiards<\/em>:<\/p>\n

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B\u00f6ll \u2014 Nobel Prize in Literature in 1972 \u2014 would have turned 100 yesterday, & if the German papers are honoring him, though with rather distant & at times skeptical homages, internationally there doesn’t...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64,1283,96],"tags":[1955],"class_list":["post-15651","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literature","category-novel","category-prose","tag-heinrich-boll"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15651","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15651"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15651\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15662,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15651\/revisions\/15662"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15651"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15651"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15651"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}