I will never forget the moment when I was liberated by the American Army. I will never forget those very young boys coming up the hill, who had to take me a prisoner to liberate me.
From Heinrich Boll
Between 1950 and 1951, I worked as a temporary employee in the Cologne Bureau of Statistics. From summer 1951 on, I have lived as a freelance writer with a fixed postal address in Cologne but with a continually shifting place of work.
On a visit to Cologne in March 1945, after a heavy bombing, I met hundreds and hundreds of deserters who were squatting in the rubble, many in the deep cellars left from Roman times. They had been hiding there after the retreat from France.
No one will ever know how many novels, poems, analyses, confessions, sufferings and joys have been piled up on this continent called Love, without it ever having turned out to be totally investigated.
The Nazi period could have happened only in Germany because the German education of obedience to any law and order was the main problem.
Many writers are radical. I am not, because of my age and because of my terrible fear of demagogy.
As early as December 1945, I accompanied my wife and a few relatives in their return from evacuation in the countryside to Cologne, where over the years we settled down in a destroyed house.
It's true and it's easily said that language is material, and something does materialise as one writes.
Literature has its own life, even in a dictatorship like the Soviet Union.
Humor is really one of the hardest things to define, very hard. And it's very ambiguous. You have it, or you don't. You can't attain it.
3 perspectives
2 perspectives
1 perspectives