ABSTRACT
Heinrich Boll’s interest in religious questions did not end with the decade of the 1950s. In fact, his attitudes hardened subsequently as the 1963 novel Ansichten eines Clowns shows. This contains particularly scathing attacks on the Catholic Church, especially over questions of sexual morality. In 1966 a sequel to the original letter appeared, this time for a non-Catholic and specifically addressed to Gunter Wallraff. However Boll’s personal religious attitudes may have evolved and however much he may have despaired of German Catholicism, it nevertheless remains the case that he always retained Christian terminology and ideals. The ideal of mercy, raised in connection with Ulrike Meinhof in 1972, was again to the fore twelve years later in a verse reaction to the sentences of life imprisonment passed on the former terrorist Peter-Jurgen Boock, despite his rejection of his former confederates.
