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“... Heinrich Böll​ was born in 1917, awarded the Nobel Prize in 1972 (the first German writer thus honoured since Thomas Mann in 1929 – Hermann Hesse having adopted Swiss citizenship, and Nelly Sachs Swedish) and died in 1985. He was an early instance, an avatar, of the writer as right thinker, as influencer, like Rushdie, like Solzhenitsyn, like Pasolini: his was the public leftish decent voice of Germany, or rather, of West Germany ...”

“... When Heinrich Böll died, last year, we had come to respect him as a Roman Catholic pacifist, a Nobel Prizeman speaking measured words to young idealists. We may have forgotten the work of his youth, the two post-war novels based on his experience of service with the German Army in Russia. The 22 stories in The Casualty were written in the immediately post-war period, 1946 to 1952, so that they are ‘old’ stories, but satisfyingly youthful, physically aware of particulars, not seeking generalisations, hot-tempered, desperate and ashamed ...”

“... nailed down, sending huge quantities of loot back to their families. One of them was the writer Heinrich Böll, whose letters home were published in 2001. As cited by Aly, Böll’s six years in the Wehrmacht appear to have been one long shopping spree. Because of special rates of exchange, he was able to buy ...”

“... transcends the programmatic bent of her fiction. Which is exactly what you can’t say about Heinrich Böll. His journalistic sense of public life has always threatened to circumscribe his rendition of the way people actually live, and The Safety Net confirms the fact. It is organised all too carefully around a ‘theme’, ready made for ...”

“... His generalisations about Jewish trouble-makers would apply almost equally well to a Catholic like Heinrich Böll, a Marxist like Brecht or a feminist like Christa Wolf. Moreover, at the very time when he was emphasising the significance of Jewish trouble-makers, his own stance was becoming increasingly conformist. Dissent, in short, should not be ...”

“... This is Heinrich Böll’s apprentice novel, written between 1949 and 1951. Since Friedrich Middelhauve, who published his stories, was unwilling to bring out the novel, Böll put it by and with professional economy used passages from it in later books. For that reason it wasn’t published in his lifetime but has come out now, to mark what would have been his 75th birthday ...”

“... 1970s, when, like Axel Springer’s other papers, it showcased Germany at its arrogant worst, and Heinrich Böll wrote novels in which young people’s lives were blighted by the attentions of its reporters. During the Cold War, Bild was reliably right-wing but it has long since been trying to capture the centre ground. It has made peace with its enemies ...”

“... this marvellous book of Cobb’s has a spiritual father, then it is not a Frenchman but a German: Heinrich Böll. And the novel of Böll’s which counted was, very plainly, Der Zug war pünktlich – The train was on time – that unforgettable story of a troop train full of German soldiers returning from ...”

“... Drouin’s could register as a significant victory for beleaguered human reason. The time of Heinrich Böll’s Women in a River Landscape is quieter, shabbier, less lurid, but also a possessed and a political time. ‘I only caught a glimpse of him,’ a woman says of a former high-ranking Nazi: ‘white-haired, distinguished, lots of Old World ...”

“... long seemed bigger than the award, as if he had already won it – say, in 1972, when it went to Heinrich Böll. Or perhaps in its wisdom the Nobel Committee had it earmarked for him years ago, this last Nobel of the bad old century. Indeed, the latter half of the century in Germany has been his century, for how many writers have seen their private ...”

“... three splinter communist parties and compiled a list of “radical” quotations from people like Heinrich Böll and Gunter Grass, whom they accused of encouraging the violence by standing out against authority.’ Ms Moorehead concludes that the ‘conditions of poverty, oppression and alienation that caused the terrorists to kidnap, assassinate and ...”

“... that stifles his idealism. Koeppen’s writing went against the grain in style as well as content. Heinrich Böll, the other major writer of the 1950s who criticised the Federal Republic (though later, and not as mercilessly), used more traditional methods to tell more traditional tales that were far more popular with the German public. Koeppen revived ...”

“... of cars inscribed with ‘FIU’ (for the Free International University, which Beuys founded with Heinrich Böll and others), two dried plants and the words ‘thirteen shovels’. It’s debatable whether these are drawings at all; they are certainly of a different order of obscurity to the earlier drawings of animals and women. But the same might be ...”

“... all about des Gedankens Blässe – the pale cast of thought. Others played on the same theme. For Heinrich Heine the Germans reigned supreme only ‘in the realm of dreams’; Marx sneered that they had only thought what other peoples had done. These contemporary cadences were surely in the mind of a modern historian, Rolf Engelsing, when he suggested that ...”

“... but the prophecy of the final question is eloquent and looks forward to the title of a Heinrich Böll novel: Where were you, Adam? Where were we when the unfriendliness got out of control? ‘Is there no grace, no credit,’ Brecht writes in a 1921 diary entry, ‘is there no one who does not believe in our sins, who thinks better of us than ...”