Of
Heribert Prantl
In his acceptance speech, Heinrich Böll said he had marched through a “dense forest of German index fingers.” And “many index fingers were sharply charged”. That was half a century ago: Fifty years ago, the writer Heinrich Böll was the first German to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature since the end of the Nazi Empire. A great deal has changed in the decades since, but the forest of sharply charged index fingers still exists. You can see and feel them when there is a dispute about arms deliveries to Ukraine; when even more weapons are demanded – and when, with different emphases, the talk is of winning and losing.