December 21, 2003
Heinrich Böll
21 December 1917 ~ 16 July 1985
Let’s stop joking, that joke was worn out in any case, after Verdun. They were the last knights—killed in battle, too many knights, too many lovers, all at once—too many well-brought-up young people. Have you ever thought of how much pedagogical sweat was wasted in the space of a few months? All in vain. How was it none of you ever had the idea of setting up a machine gun at the entrance of the trade schools and colleges, right after the exams, and shoot dead all those radiant successful graduates? You think that’s exaggerated? Well, let me say that the truth is pure exaggeration. I danced with the graduates of 1905, 1906, and 1907. They wore their caps, they drank their beer and I drank with them at their student parties—but more than half the students of those three years fell at Verdun.
Billard um halb zehn / Billiards at Half-Past Nine, English translation by Patrick Bowles (1959; Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1961).
Heinrich
Böll Foundation
An
Essay on the Reason of Poetry, Nobel Lecture, 2 May 1973