Missing Persons and Other Essays

by Heinrich Böll, Leila Vennewitz (Translation)

English (translation)
Original German

Genres: Essays, Germany, Philosophy

281 pages, Hardcover

Published October 12, 1994

About the author

Der deutsche Schriftsteller und Übersetzer gilt als einer der bedeutendsten deutschen Autoren der Nachkriegszeit. Er schrieb Gedichte, Kurzgeschichten und Romane, von denen auch einige verfilmt wurden. Dabei setzte er sich kritisch mit der jungen Bundesrepublik auseinander. Zu seinen erfolgreichsten Werken zählen "Billard um halbzehn", "Ansichten eines Clowns" und "Gruppenbild mit Dame". Den Nobelpreis für Literatur bekam Heinrich Böll 1972; er war nach 43 Jahren der erste deutsche Schriftsteller, dem diese Auszeichnung zuteil wurde. 1974 erschien sein wohl populärstes Werk, "Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum". Durch sein politisches Engagement wirkte er, gemeinsam mit seinem Freund Lew Kopelew, auf die europäische Literatur der Nachkriegszeit. Darüber hinaus arbeitete Böll gemeinsam mit seiner Frau Annemarie als Herausgeber und Übersetzer englischsprachiger Werke ins Deutsche...

Heinrich Böll became a full-time writer at the age of 30. His first novel, Der Zug war pünktlich (The Train Was on Time), was published in 1949. Many other novels, short stories, radio plays, and essay collections followed. In 1972 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature "for his writing which through its combination of a broad perspective on his time and a sensitive skill in characterization has contributed to a renewal of German literature." He was the first German-born author to receive the Nobel Prize since Hermann Hesse in 1946. His work has been translated into more than 30 languages, and he is one of Germany's most widely read authors.

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a nice enough collection, if one is interested in Boll, although the selection spans many years, and the pieces are quite different in tone and purpose. The material is divided into three sections: Essaus, book reviews (mainly Alexander Solzhenitsyn), and "miscellany" (Boll's Nobel speech amongst other things). There are some gems amongst the essays, but the best section is probably the book reviews, with its sustained appraisal of Solzhenitsyn's work, written over the course of many years, as the Soviet author's works became available in the West.

For readers new to Heinrich Boll, I recommend his short stories or novels. Boll was one of the most socially committed European authors in the decades following the Second World War, and one of the few who wrote about life in Germany, as the nation struggled to rebuild itself.