After World War II, he read philology at the University of Bonn and became the assistant of Prof. Ernst Robert Curtius, an expert on Romance studies and literary theory.
He worked as literary critic for the weekly newspaper Die Zeit and for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
After he had left Suhrkamp after an argument over editors' participation rights in 1968, Boehlich wrote for the German magazine, Kursbuch.
His pamphlet Autodafé on literature and its socio-historical background was published as a poster supplement to the magazine in 1968 and became a standard item of wall decoration in students' living communities of the time.
Quote: From November 1979 until January 2001, he wrote a monthly political column for the – otherwise satirical – German magazine, Titanic.