The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum
by Heinrich Böll
Summary
Katharina Blum, a precise and private young housekeeper, meets a man named Ludwig Götten at a carnival party in an unnamed German city and spends the night with him at her own apartment, only to wake to a police raid: Götten is wanted in connection with a bank robbery and a killing, and he has already slipped away. Katharina will not say how. A tabloid reporter named Tötges, writing for a paper Böll calls only Die Zeitung, a stand in for West Germany's real mass market Bild, turns one night's acquaintance into a public scandal, reporting Katharina as Götten's lover and accomplice, a suspected communist sympathizer and worse. He hounds her employers, the Blornas, and her elderly, ailing mother, whose health worsens sharply after his visit and who dies not long afterward. The precise, generous woman Katharina actually is disappears completely under the version the paper builds and sells to its readers.
Katharina arranges what looks like an interview with Tötges in her own apartment. By her own later account, he arrives expecting a story and instead propositions her, and she shoots him. Böll narrates almost none of this directly. The novel is assembled as a flat, official style report, built from police transcripts, newspaper clippings and witness statements, a device that lets the documentary format itself carry an accusation the prose never states outright. Katharina wanders the city for hours before turning herself in, and gives her confession to Chief Inspector Moeding without either of them needing to raise a voice. A short epilogue reveals that Götten himself had committed no crime beyond deserting the army, so both the murder suspect and the promiscuous accomplice the tabloid invented turn out to rest on almost nothing at all.
Reading it means watching a coldly procedural style of narration produce something closer to outrage than any confessional first person account could manage, since the report format keeps insisting on its own objectivity right up to the moment a reader sees how completely that objectivity has been staged. It is a short novel and suits a reader who wants an argument still worth having about how a private life becomes a public trial, since a newspaper has not stopped doing that since 1974.
Historical Context & Significance
The Swedish Academy gave Heinrich Böll the 1972 Nobel Prize in Literature for writing which, through its combination of a broad perspective on his time and a sensitive skill in characterization, has contributed to a renewal of German literature. The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum did not exist yet when the Academy made that award; Böll wrote it two years later, in 1974, out of his own running fight with the West German tabloid press, after an article he wrote criticizing Bild's coverage of the Baader Meinhof group was retitled against his wishes and used to brand him a sympathizer of political violence.
Böll served as president of PEN International in the early 1970s, and when Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974, he took refuge at Böll's own cottage in the Eifel. Reception in Germany split along the same line the novel satirizes: some conservative papers renewed the charge of terrorist sympathy, while the book and Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta's 1975 film adaptation found a wide readership willing to take its argument about media power seriously.