Böll became an important public figure in Germany--much against his will: when a poll was conducted in the 1970s to determine the ten most influential people in West Germany, Böll 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 Böll was born in Cologne on 21 December 1917, to Victor Böll and his second wife, Marie Hermanns Böll, during the worst famine year of World War I. Böll 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 Böll 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 Fähmel in Heinrich Böll's novel Billard um halb zehn (1959; translated as Billiards at Half-past Nine, 1961). Victor Böll was a sensitive, nervous man who liked to tell stories to his sons.
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