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.
Heinrich Boll
The war is not planned. I don't believe that any responsible person plans it. But it's thought as possible.
Many writers are radical. I am not, because of my age and because of my terrible fear of demagogy.
The Nazi period could have happened only in Germany because the German education of obedience to any law and order was the main problem.
I was born December 21, 1917, in Cologne, on the Rhine, the son of the sculptor and cabinet-maker, Viktor Boell, and his wife, Maria, nee Hermanns.
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.
Politicians, ideologists, theologians and philosophers try time and again to provide solutions with nothing remaining: prefab solved problems.
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.
Literature has its own life, even in a dictatorship like the Soviet Union.
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.
I long for the time of no more departures. It has something to do with age, probably.
My most interesting correspondence is with my translators. I marvel at their sensitivity over certain passages that just anyone, even if he knows German well, would not appreciate.
Because the completion of labour service was a precondition for permission to study at the university, I was able to begin my studies of Germanistics and Classical Philology during the summer term of 1939.
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.
It's true and it's easily said that language is material, and something does materialise as one writes.
For me, at least, much of the German I see and hear sounds stranger than Swedish, a language of which I unfortunately understand very little.
Medals don't suit me. I'm not that kind of guy.
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.
We must learn, and especially we Germans, that resistance is not only possible and allowed in dictatorships. There is resistance that man must perform every day.
