The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum by Heinrich Böll

First published:Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum: Oder, Wie Gewalt entstehen und wohin sie fuhren kann, 1974 (English translation, 1975)

Type of work: Social realism

Time of work: February 20, 1974, through February 24, 1974

Locale: An unnamed German city (probably West Berlin)

Principal Characters:

• Katharina Blum, the protagonist, a victim of the police and the press
• Werner Totges, a News reporter
• Ludwig Gotten, a suspected “terrorist” who becomes Katharina’s lover
• Hubert Blorna, a lawyer and one of Katharina’s employers
• Trude Blorna, “The Red”, his wife
• Alois Straubleder, a wealthy industrialist in pursuit of Katharina
• Else Woltersheim, a friend of Katharina
• Konrad Beiters, a former Nazi and Else’s lover
• Erwin Beizmenne, a police commissioner
• Peter Hach, the public prosecutor and the Blornas’ friend
• Walter Moeding, Beizmenne’s assistant

The Novel

The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum examines, as Heinrich Böll’s subtitle suggests, “how violence develops and where it can lead.” The novel, narrated in what purports to be responsible journalistic prose, begins by “objectively” describing Katharina Blum’s murder of Werner Totges, a reporter for the irresponsible News, and then attempting to account for that murder by exploring the four days between Katharina’s meeting with Ludwig Gotten, a suspected terrorist, and Totges’ murder. As a responsible journalist, the narrator carefully identifies the sources of his “report”: “doctored” transcripts of police interrogations and the testimony of Hubert Blorna, an attorney, and Peter Hach, the public prosecutor. In the course of his narrative, he also quotes extensively from stories in the News, which bears a strong resemblance to the Bild-Zeitung, a German mass-circulation tabloid with which Böll had feuded about journalistic practices.

After listing his sources and explaining his narrative method, the narrator presents the brutal “facts”: Four days after meeting Ludwig Gotten, Katharina killed Totges in her apartment and turned herself in to Walter Moeding, the crime commissioner. The balance of the novel concerns not the murder, the “lowest of all levels,” but the “higher planes” of motivation and meaning that transform a so-called political murder into an act of integrity.

The story begins with Katharina’s attendance at a carnival party at the home of her friend Else Woltersheim; there she meets Ludwig, the subject of police surveillance and, after dancing exclusively with him, takes him to her condominium, where they spend the night.

The next morning, the police storm her apartment and when they cannot find Ludwig, they interrogate her, search the apartment, and take her to the police station for further questioning. As she leaves with the police, a photographer from the News takes several pictures of her (the least flattering and most suggestive of her “criminality” is the one subsequently printed in the News), and the narrator uses the occasion to introduce the recurrent theme of collaboration between the press and the police.

After making her statement and being interrogated by the police, Katharina is escorted to her apartment by a sympathetic Moeding, who cautions her not to use the telephone (it has obviously been “bugged”) or to look at the news (or the News). His warning proves justified; her later conversation with Ludwig is tapped, and the News indicts and convicts her of being Ludwig’s mistress and accomplice, though Ludwig has not yet been convicted of a crime. By distorting Hubert Blorna’s answers to seemingly innocuous questions and by using innuendos about Katharina’s gentlemen visitors and the purchase price of her condominium, the News successfully converts Katharina’s virtues—her desire to protect Alois Straubleder, a wealthy industrialist, and her diligence and thrift—to vices.

When Katharina returns for more interrogation, the police commissioner, Erwin Beizmenne, confronts her with two tangential items gleaned from an exhaustive search of her apartment: inordinately large gasoline receipts, which she dismisses accurately but unconvincingly as having been the result of aimless driving, and an expensive ruby ring, which she refuses to identify (it is a gift from Straubleder, who is pursuing Katharina unsuccessfully). Beizmenne also interrogates Else Woltersheim and some of her guests at the Wednesday night party.

While there is no official police case against Katharina, police collaboration with the press provides an unofficial case against her. The News tries her in the press, convicts her, and, as Hubert’s wife, Trude Blorna, predicted,ruins her life.

Totges visits Katharina’s sick mother, manufactures damaging statements, and quite possibly causes the old woman’s death, which the News ironically blames on Katharina’s behavior. The unscrupulous and resourceful Totges also uses derogatory comments from Katharina’s loutish ex-husband to defame her further.

Because, as Katharina states, everyone reads the News, the events that follow the lurid newspaper accounts are predictable: She receives obscene calls and letters, some of which allude to her Communist views, and she is shunned by her neighbors. In response, Katharina proceeds, methodically, to smash the contents of her immaculate apartment, a symbol of her life which has now been invaded and destroyed by the press. The Blornas, her friends, also suffer from the News’s coverage of Katharina because they refuse to abandon her. Trude, known as “the Red” because of her hair, is referred to as “Trude the Red,” with Communist implications; Hubert, a lawyer for Straubleder’s companies, loses money, prestige, and position because he and Trude support Katharina and because Trude insults Straubleder.

The police, who have traced Ludwig’s call to Katharina, finish interrogating her and capture Ludwig at Straubleder’s resort home, where he has been hiding. (Katharina gave him the key that Straubleder had given her.) Nevertheless, Katharina becomes more composed. When she meets the Blornas in the afternoon, they unsuccessfully attempt to dissuade her from going through with her planned Sunday interview with Totges. Unfortunately for Totges, Katharina reads his Sunday News story, which blames Katharina for her mother’s death. The story triggers Katharina’s decision to get a gun and to find Totges. When she cannot find him, she returns to her apartment and waits. He enters, calls her “Blumikins,” and asks for a “bang”; she pulls out the pistol and repeatedly shoots him, ironically giving him the “bang” he has requested.

Böll’s novel, which begins with an “objective” murder, concludes appropriately with Katharina’s first-person subjective account of her emotions, attitudes, and motives at the time of the violent crime. The violence of Katharina’s act is not, however, the only violence suggested by Böll’s subtitle, though her violence certainly does have both personal and political repercussions. The “violence” to which Böll alludes also refers to Totges’ attack on Katharina, for his persecution of her effectively destroys her “honor” in almost a sexual sense: He “penetrates” the innocent Katharina psychologically and emotionally, and when he attempts to make his metaphorical rape literal, his violent action leads to his own destruction.

The Characters

In order to elicit the sympathies of his readers, Heinrich Böll presents Katharina Blum, his protagonist, as an innocent victim of press and police collaboration. She is the “nun,” linked through her name and superficial similarities to Saint Catherine of Alexandria, but she is a saint in a post-Christian world marked by secularism and materialism. The exemplar of her capitalistic society, she is the independent career woman whose industry, thrift, and independence are rewarded by the condominium that is the symbol of her economic success. She gains sympathy as a victim, but she also forfeits sympathy because she is an uncritical participant in the society that destroys her. Despite her incarceration, for example, she has plans for investing her accumulating capital in a restaurant; she seems to have learned little about the society that persecuted her because of her loyalty, independence, and political vulnerability (neither the “Christian”’ businessman Straubleder nor the former Nazi Konrad Beiters is attacked).

Although she seems—until she kills Totges—passive in the face of the relentless persecution, her passivity is, Böll suggests, caused by her faith in justice and in the system. Appropriately enough, her only “resistance” is semantic, for she shares the narrator’s emphasis on linguistic precision and what he calls “reportorial obligations.” Katharina insists that “gracious” rather than “nice” be used to describe the Blornas’ conduct, and she distinguishes between “advances” and “becoming amorous” when speaking of her ex-husband. Like the News reporter, the police do not share her linguistic sensitivity and are cavalier about the relationship between language and meaning.

To her persecutors, Katharina is a potential object of exploitation: Straubleder wants to exploit her sexually, Beizmenne wants to use her politically, and Totges wants to exploit her both journalistically and sexually. Their actions are brutal, violent, and insensitive; Straubleder repays her loyalty to him by stating that she stole the key, Beizmenne attacks her honor by referring to her relationship with Ludwig in graphically obscene terms, and Totges (his name derives from the German toten, meaning “to kill”) destroys her reputation before attempting to seduce her. In fact, he causes his own death through his deceitful manipulation of language; so successful is he in distorting Katharina’s image that he mistakes Katharina for his media creature and acts accordingly. Like Straubleder, he is an opportunistic capitalist intent on exploitation.

Katharina’s allies are simply no match for her adversaries. Ludwig is actually a thief, not a romantic terrorist allied with a revolutionary movement. The Blornas, who seem to belong to the capitalistic class allied to press and police, find that their position is quite tenuous, given their leftist orientation. Since they initially pose no real threat to the system, their “radical” views are accommodated, but when their intervention on Katharina’s behalf threatens Straubleder, they find that they are, like Katharina, expendable. They are social liberals who cannot confront their incompatibility with the system intellectually. (Böll may also be suggesting that they are not really incompatible with that system.)

Critical Context

The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum has its immediate origins in Böll’s own battles with the Bild-Zeitung, which he had censured for its irresponsible reporting on the Baader-Meinhof Group, the object in Germany of a national manhunt in 1971. Böll was attacked for his defense of the Group—he had really only defended justice—and harassed by the police. Another victim of the Bild-Zeitung was Professor Peter Bruckner, who was falsely accused of aiding the Group and was subsequently subjected to Katharina-like treatment by the media. Because Böll wrote the novel in response to governmental attacks on individual civil liberties, it is regarded as the most overtly political of his novels, and when it was successfully adapted to film by Volker Schlondorff and Margaretha von Trotta in 1975, it became his most controversial work.

Despite its topicality, The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum does resemble Böll’s other work; his criticism of governmental exercise of power has continued throughout his career. Having experienced National Socialism at first hand as a soldier in Adolf Hitler’s army, Böll, in writing about the present, is affected by the past, which he sees reflected in what he regards as contemporary Fascism, with its totalitarian emphasis on the rights of the state over the rights of the individual. Of Böll’s other novels, many concern the Fascist legacy in German life: Haus ohne Huter (1954; The Unguarded House, 1957; also as Tomorrow and Yesterday), Ansichten eines Clowns (1963; The Clown, 1965), and, most notably, Gruppenbild mit Dame (1971; Group Portrait with Lady, 1973), which traces, through its protagonist, events in Germany beginning in 1922. The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, however, has come to be regarded as his most successful novel.

Bibliography

Conrad, Robert C. Heinrich Böll, 1981.

Heinrich Böll: On His Death, 1985. Translated by Patricia Crampton.

Magretta, William R., and Joan Magretta. “Story and Discourse: Schlondorff and von Trotta’s The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1975),” in Modern European Filmmakers and the Art of Adaptation, 1981.

Williams, Rhys W. “Heinrich Böll and the Katharina Blum Debate,” in Critical Quarterly. XXI (1979), pp. 49-58.

Zipes, Jack. “The Political Dimensions of The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum,” in New German Critique. XII (1977), pp. 75-84.