Heinrich Böll – taking note from Achill

Sir, – As Frank McNally observes ("Heinrich's Hundred – An Irishman's Diary about Nobel winner and Hibernophile Heinrich Böll", An Irishman's Diary, April 29th), Heinrich Böll's Irisches Tagebuch (Irish Journal) has had extraordinary publishing success in Germany. That was already the case within a few years of its first publication in 1957. The 1961 paperback edition was reprinted twice in six months, taking the total printed to over 100,000 in that short time.

I read the book as a school student in Germany for a year (1962-63) and my classmates asked me what I thought of it. I made some critical remarks and they urged me to write them down. I did, handed them over, and thought no more of it.

Then, in May 1963, a postcard arrived for me from Ireland. It had the postmark Dugort, and it came from Heinrich Böll, who was then, as often, in Achill. My friends had managed to get my comments on the book to him.

I must have said something about finding exaggeration in Böll’s account, because he opened with a quote from Chesterton, “Exaggeration is the definition of art”.

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The spidery handwriting was difficult to read and, having kept the card in my copy of the book, I still cannot decipher it entirely. But I can see that Böll insisted on his Journal as a work of art and of imagination, rather than something equivalent to a photograph, or other form of realism.

Defending his poetic licence, he stated: "I have seen whom I have seen". But he still took issue with a 17-year-old schoolboy on a detail about ferry routes between Britain and Ireland on which I must have challenged him. – Yours, etc,

BRIAN TRENCH,

Glasnevin, Dublin 11.