Heinrich Böll

Achill Island, the westernmost tip of Ireland, was a retreat and source of inspiration for Heinrich Böll. He immortalized it in his Irish Journal, and the local people thank him to this day with an annual Memorial Weekend. 

This essayistic anachronism imagines Böll's novella The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1974) as if it were unfolding in contemporary times in an era of populism and rising conservatism, in which female sexuality is still richly milked as a sensational cover for abuse of patriarchal power.

The editors of the recently published anthology of non-fiction writings by Heinrich Böll, in Hebrew, share thoughts and comments about the celebrated author and Nobel Prize laureate. Adina Stern and Hanan Elstein also reflect on the process of their work, and explain why they believe that Böll’s work is highly relevant to contemporary Israeli society.

With his story "Teeth", Gareth McNamara, a 16-year old student of Scoil Damhnait Secondary School on Achill Island, Co Mayo, was the overall winner of the 2009 Heinrich Böll Essay Competition in 2009.

After the collapse of the Historical Archive of Cologne we spoke with René Böll, son and representative of the heirs of Heinrich Böll about the consequences for the estate.

The Heinrich Böll house at Langenbroich, a former residence of the Böll family, offers workspace for artists who are unable to work creativly - be it for reasons of censorship, civil unrest, or because of their economic situation.

Heinrich Böll was a man who did not miss much, and whose short fiction, his Kurzgeschichten and his Erzählungen, are snapshots, colourful vignettes of the life and the people and the peculiar German world of his generation. But there were a few subjects that he was fixated upon. The latter would include trains and train stations, war and "the war", and then cigarettes.