Heinrich Böll

Böll was born in Cologne to a Catholic cabinet-maker's family opposed to the Nazi regime, was conscripted into the Wehrmacht at the war's outset, and spent six years fighting and being wounded on fronts from France to the Eastern Front before an American POW camp. He returned to a ruined Cologne and became a founding voice of Trümmerliteratur, 'rubble literature,' the plain, disillusioned prose of writers making sense of Germany's wreckage, and joined the influential Group 47 circle.

He grew fiercely critical of West Germany's tabloid press, particularly the Bild newspaper, whose sensationalized coverage of terrorism suspects he felt destroyed innocent lives; police searched his own home after tabloids accused him of sympathizing with the Baader-Meinhof group, an experience that fed directly into The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (1974). He served as president of International PEN and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1972, the first West German laureate. He died near Bonn in 1985.