Nobel Literature Laureate Heinrich Boell Dies at 67

Heinrich Boell, postwar Germany’s first “angry young man” whose novels attacked war, Fascism and the Roman Catholic Church, died today. He was 67.

His publishers said the 1972 Nobel Prize winner had been released from a Cologne hospital this morning and died shortly afterward at his home in the Eifel Mountains. They declined to give the cause of death.

Boell, the first German to win the Nobel for literature since Thomas Mann, persistently shot barbs at the Establishment in his more than 40 novels, short stories and radio plays.

His best-known novels are “Billiards at Half Past Nine,” “The Clown” and “The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum,” which critics suggested reflected the lives of the notorious Baader-Meinhof urban guerrilla band.

Some of Boell’s most poignant writing evolved from his firsthand experiences in World War II, including three years as an American prisoner of war.

Born Dec. 21, 1917, in Cologne, the youngest of eight children of a sculptor and cabinetmaker, Boell was considered by many critics as the republic’s conscience.

His works were anti-war, anti-Fascist, anti-clerical and anti-materialistic, and he leveled his sharpest criticism at the Roman Catholic Church, although he remained a practicing Catholic.

Eventually, Boell had to share the literary spotlight with Gunter Grass, who once complained that in Boell’s books, “the girl and boy disappear behind the bushes, to reappear a few moments later with flushed faces.”