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- July 29, 1985MILESTONES
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- DIED. Heinrich Boll, 67, Nobel-prize winning (1972) West
- German author whose gentle but relentless attacks on tyranny of
- all kinds informed the short stories, essays and 18 novels that
- brought him acclaim and popularity in the East bloc as well as
- the West and provided unfailing moral guideposts for his
- countrymen; of complications of arteriosclerosis; in
- Hurtgenwald, West Germany. Brought up in a deeply religious
- Roman Catholic family resistant to Nazism, he served six years
- as a Wehrmacht conscript on both fronts. He emerged as a
- pacifist and foe of all establishments, governmental, religious
- and bureaucratic, and began writing novels of protest against
- war The Train was on Time, 1949; Adam, Where Art Thou, 1951),
- then went on to describe and deride the materialistic,
- dehumanizing postwar society in such works as Billiards at
- Half-Past Nine (1959), The Clown (1963), and Group Portrait with
- Lady (1971). A crusader for the freedom of writers everywhere
- especially under Communism, Boll was considered Germany's most
- influential writer since Thomas Mann, and in conscious
- evocations of his predecessor he was often called "the
- conscience of the nation."
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