Heinrich Böll received the Nobel Prize, but nevertheless acknowledged without envy that Ingeborg Bachmann was the more important poet

Dazzling in a gray suit: Hardly any German writer was harder to sum up than the left-wing Catholic Heinrich Böll. He wrote novels full of clouded philanthropy and sympathized with the Red Army Faction (RAF). Elfriede Jelinek called him a "normality terrorist." There's some truth to that, except that Böll's way of being normal scared hardly anyone, least of all his pen pal Ingeborg Bachmann. The good man from Cologne was there for her when crises or career questions arose. A companion, only nine years older, but fatherly.

It's one of the unusually subtle thrills of the literary world to now be able to read the correspondence between two people between whom there were no misunderstandings. They understood each other and, with the help of each other, learned to understand themselves better. "What do we make of our lives?" is the title of their now published correspondence.

The then 25-year-old Austrian author and Heinrich Böll, already a critical figure, first became better acquainted at the Group 47 conference in Niendorf on the Baltic Sea in 1952. Ingeborg Bachmann read to the assembled greats of German literature with an increasingly shaky voice. She would later recall being "choked with excitement." What was being read was barely comprehensible, "some gentlemen commented on it."

A few months later, the two met again at Group 47. Bachmann wrote her first letter to Böll. "It's good to know you exist," she wrote. A sign of friendship, before anything like friendship could even develop, but this sentence would remain valid until their mutual knowledge of each other ended with the writer's tragic death in October 1973.

Ingeborg Bachmann's subtle complaints about the life of a writer come from Vienna or her hometown of Klagenfurt. They describe the need to earn money through journalistic work or to find a publisher for new projects. Later, the letters are posted in Rome, the writer's place of refuge and fate.

From the very beginning, Heinrich Böll stood by Bachmann. He tried to secure commissions for her from German broadcasters and was helpful when the question arose as to whether Böll's own publishing house, Kiepenheuer & Witsch, or Piper, should become the young author's publishing home. In the letters between the two dissimilar people, private matters are addressed in the most discreet way, and in its omissions, the letters read almost like a novel in their own right.

When Böll, a family man, complains about the financial hardship he has brought upon himself by building a voluminous house in Cologne-Müngersdorf, it is something different from the situation of his young colleague. Even a necessary doctor's visit can dashed hopes of a new summer dress. Ingeborg Bachmann's pneumatic love life, which oscillates between sighs of relief and anxiety, is also something different from Heinrich Böll's domestic stability. His wife, Annemarie, and their three sons are part of a symbiotic relationship that occasionally becomes a traveling companion.

They spend weeks in the Irish coastal landscape of Keel or announce their arrival in Rome: "If it's not difficult, we'd probably be best off renting two or three rooms (with a kitchen or the right to use the kitchen) near the Villa Massimo." Ingeborg Bachmann organized these things for the Böll family at a time when her own relationship with Max Frisch was going through a difficult period. They also met together, but the seismograms of love hardly appear in the author's letters. Paul Celan is mentioned a few times, but that's about it.

It may well be that the correspondence with Heinrich Böll was an island of predictability for Ingeborg Bachmann, a solid foundation of empathy. Here, she expresses herself freely; there are no pitfalls of the unsaid. Heinrich Böll is a master of modesty. Even when he calls his girlfriend "my dear, dear child," this is not patriarchal hubris, but the language of a romanticism just barely possible in a Catholic-bourgeois way.

After a year and a half of correspondence, Heinrich Böll even wrote: "Dear Inge, it is terrible for me to think that I could suddenly die without ever having seen you again. This idea may be foolish, and it is certainly selfish, but it haunts me, and I ask you to please remain within my reach, never to be of unknown whereabouts."

Bachmann and Böll were always familiar with each other. At least in a metaphorical sense. They knew where the other stood. As people, as writers. Their works could hardly have been more different. While the older Bachmann has great admiration for the younger and understands without envy that there are increasingly more "Bachmannians" in the world, as Böll once wrote, the opposite picture remains slightly clouded.

In a review of Böll's "The Train Was on Time," begun by Ingeborg Bachmann but ultimately abandoned, aesthetic questions become questions about the physiognomy of humanity. The author, it is stated, has "retained a strong, by no means extraordinary heart." He argues "with the heart's inadequate weapons: forgiveness, compassion, bravery, and an attempt at love."

Without a doubt, Heinrich Böll's correspondence with Ingeborg Bachmann represents a special attempt at love, one that we don't know how much courage and self-restraint it cost this letter writer. Böll never makes a fuss about himself, his literary career, or his rise to a German institution.

His counterpart isn't transfigured into a mystery either. When "Der Spiegel" asked Nobel Prize winner Böll for an obituary for Ingeborg Bachmann in October 1973, their correspondence had already become sparse, and it contained a perspicacious remark about the writer's public image: "That the iconization of a living person can conceal a gradual killing should be particularly evident in her case."

"What do we make of our lives?" The correspondence between Ingeborg Bachmann and Heinrich Böll. Letters. Publishers Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Suhrkamp and Piper, Cologne, Berlin, Munich 2025. 488 pp., Fr. 59.90.