Boll became an important public figure in Germanymuch against his will: when a poll was conducted in the 1970s to determine the ten most influential people in West Germany, Boll was mentioned in fourth place, after the politicians Helmut Schmidt, Willy Brandt, and Franz Josef Strauß as the man who "represents our conscience."
Heinrich Theodor Boll was born in Cologne on 21 December 1917, to Victor Boll and his second wife, Marie Hermanns Boll, during the worst famine year of World War I. Boll had two older brothers and three older sisters. His mother was an energetic, domineering woman from a long line of Catholic farmers and brewers. His father's family, Catholics who had preferred emigration to the state religion of Henry VIII, had come centuries earlier from the British Isles. Victor Boll had moved to Cologne from Essen in 1896, at the age of twenty-six, to "move up" socially and, together with an associate, to start his own business as a carpenter and wood sculptor; he worked ambitiously for fifty years, much like Heinrich Fahmel in Heinrich Boll's novel Billard um halb zehn (1959; translated as Billiards at Half-past Nine, 1961).
This is a free page. This page contains 195 words. This
biography contains 7,801 words (approx. 26 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our Heinrich Böll Access Pass.
