Milestones

DIED. Heinrich Boell, 67, Nobel-prize-winning (1972) West German author whose gentle but relentless attacks on tyranny of all kinds informed the short stories, essays and 18 novels that brought him acclaim and popularity in the East bloc as well as the West and provided unfailing moral guideposts for his countrymen; of complications of arteriosclerosis; in Huertgenwald, West Germany. Brought up in a deeply religious Roman Catholic family resistant to Nazism, he served six years as a Wehrmacht conscript on both fronts. He emerged as a pacifist and foe of all establishments, governmental, religious and bureaucratic, and began writing novels of protest against war (The Train Was on Time, 1949; Adam, Where Art Thou, 1951), then went on to describe and deride the materialistic, dehumanizing postwar society in such works as Billiards at Half-Past Nine (1959), The Clown (1963) and Group Portrait with Lady (1971). A crusader for the freedom of writers everywhere, especially under Communism, Boell was considered Germany's most influential writer since Thomas Mann, and in conscious evocation of his predecessor he was often called "the conscience of the nation."

DIED. Diego Giacometti, 82, Swiss furniture designer and sculptor; of a heart attack; in Paris. His early artistic life took its direction from his more famous sculptor brother Alberto, for whom he was collaborator, critic and model. In their 40 years together, Diego was responsible for the casting and patinating, or surface finishing, of Alberto's attenuated figures. After his older brother's death in 1966, Diego's creative talent emerged in a menagerie of whimsical animals and birds and in rustic yet beautifully proportioned furniture and lamps that built his reputation as a master in his own right.

DIED. Leslie C. Arends, 89, staunchly conservative Republican Congressman from the farm country of central Illinois for 40 years, the past 31 (1943-74) as whip, or deputy party leader, of the G.O.P.; in Naples, Fla. Arends was an unsung but consummate parliamentary tactician who could be counted on to hold Republican Representatives in line with his enthusiastic party loyalty tempered by good humor and unblustering honesty.

DIED. Susanne K. Langer, 89, American philosopher who synthesized the thinking of several disciplines into an influential new theory of human mentality; in Old Lyme, Conn. Her seminal work, Philosophy in a New Key (1942), shows how symbol making is the basic function of the human mind and rejects the dichotomy between thought, as expressed in language, and feelings, which require some other sort of symbolic portrayal, like art. In Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, her three-volume masterwork published between 1967 and 1982, she conceives of feelings as the vital process of the mind and argues that "intellect is a high form of feeling."