The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum

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The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum Or How Violence Can Develop and Where It Can Lead (Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum oder Wie Gewalt entstehen und wohin sie führen kann) is a 1974 novel by Heinrich Böll, filmed in 1975 by Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta..

The story deals with the sensationalism of tabloid news and the political climate of panic over Red Army Faction terrorism in the 1970s Federal Republic of Germany. The main character, Katharina Blum, is an innocent housekeeper whose life is ruined by an invasive tabloid reporter and a police investigation when the man with whom she has just fallen in love turns out to be a radical bank robber. Her eventual revenge on the tabloid reporter, which earns sympathy from the reader, ends the book. The book's fictional tabloid paper, Die ZEITUNG (The Newspaper), is modeled on the actual German Bild-Zeitung.

Contents

[edit] Film adaptation

A 1975 film adaptation of Böll's novel was directed by Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta. It starred Angela Winkler as Blum, Mario Adorf as Kommissar Beizmenne, Dieter Laser as Tötges, and Jürgen Prochnow as Ludwig. The film, unlike the novel, ends with a scene at Tötges' funeral, with his publisher delivering a hypocritical condemnation of the murder as an infringement on the freedom of the press. In interviews for the 2003 Criterion Collection DVD release of the film, Schlöndorff and other crew members repeatedly analogized the political climate of panic over terrorism in 1970s West Germany to the post-September 11, 2001 situation in the U.S., as an argument for the film's continued relevance.

[edit] List of Characters

[edit] Major characters

  • Katharina Blum - A divorced housekeeper.
  • Ludwig Götten - A suspected criminal on the lam.
  • Else Woltersheim - Katharina's godmother and friend, she throws a party on Weiberfastnacht ('Women's Carnival Night'), where Katharina and Ludwig meet.
  • Erwin Beizmenne - Detective Chief Kommissar in charge of the criminal procedure.
  • Werner Tötges - A magazine journalist that Katharina shoots.
  • Walter Moeding - Kommissar Beizmennes's assistant during the investigation in to Tötges death.

[edit] Minor characters

  • Peter Blum - Katharina's father, a construction worker who died when Katharina was six years old.
  • Maria Blum - Katharina's mother, who dies during the course of the story. Werner Tötges finds her just as she is about to undergo a procedure to remove her cancer and begins asking her questions about Katharina.
  • Kurt Blum - Katharina's brother. He is in jail.
  • Wilhelm Brettloh - A textile worker and Katharina's first husband. They were introduced by Katharina's brother.
  • Dr. Kluthen - Katharina works as his housekeeper for a year.
  • Dr. Trude Blorna and Dr. Hubert Blorna - The current employers of Katharina
    • Dr. Trude Blorna - An architecht, she was known in her college years as "Red Trude" because of her hair color.
    • Dr. Hubert Blorna - Trude's husband.
  • Peter Hach - Attorney and friend of Hubert Blorna.
  • Alois Sträubleder - Industrialist, a client of Hubert Blorna. He has a house in the country that Katharina uses to hide Götten.
  • Adolf Schönne - In the movie, he was shot after Tötges murder. In the book, his death is not clarified.
  • Konrad Beiters - Live-in partner of Else Woltersheim. Through him, Katharina obtains the gun she uses to shoot Tötges.

[edit] Detailed synopsis

The story begins with a simple statement of fact: four days after a Weiberfastnacht party, Katharina Blum shot a journalist in her home. But the story is much more than that. The man she shot was writing newspaper articles about her and her involvement with a wanted man. The journalist tracks down friends and family members, publishing increasingly wild stories about her that are nowhere near true. In the post World War II climate of West Germany, she becomes a target for many groups suspicious of her intentions. Her final act of shooting Tötges is seen as a catharsis and invokes the sympathy of the reader.

The story is written from a third-person perspective.

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

Four days after a Weiberfastnacht party where Katharina has met a man named Ludwig Götten, Katharina calls on Oberkommissar Moeding and confesses to killing a journalist for the fictional newspaper, the ZEITUNG.

The story then backtracks to the time when Katharina met Götten at a friend's party, to how she spent the night with him and how on the next morning, the police are knocking on her door and taking her down the police station to interrogate her. The man she met is a wanted bank robber and the police suspect she is helping him. Her story is quickly picked up by the local tabloid, the ZEITUNG, which sends a particularly dedicated journalist, Tötges, to investigate the story. Tötges investigates everything about her life, calling on all of Katharina's friends and family, including her ex-husband. He paints a picture of Katharina as a fervent accomplice of Götten, and as a communist run amuck in Germany.

Katharina decides the only reasonable thing to do is to get her story out. She agrees to give an interview to Tötges, believing it will clear everything up. But the story Tötges publishes is anything but what they talked about. Instead it talks about how "cold and calculating" she is and begins to cast suspicions on her father and brother. Katharina then decides she needs to know what kind of man Tötges really is, that he could so callously destroy her life. She only wants to look upon him, though she admits to taking a gun with her. She goes to the paper's headquarters and waits for him, but he never shows, and after two hours she goes home.

But Tötges follows her home, rings her doorbell and forces himself in and calls her "Blümchen" and "Blümelein" (patronising forms of her last name). He wonders why she looks so startled. He then proposes they "bumsen", a vulgar term for sex, roughly meaning "to bang". And Katharina thinks, "Bang? Why not?" lifts her gun out of her handbag and shoots him.

She then wanders the city for a few hours before driving to police headquarters and confessing to Moeding.

[edit] Books


Further Publications:

  • Werner Bellmann: Heinrich Böll. Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum. In: Erzählungen des 20. Jahrhunderts. Interpretationen. Bd. 2. Reclam, Stuttgart 1996. S. 183-204. ISBN 3-15-009463-1
  • Werner Bellmann / Christine Hummel: Heinrich Böll, Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum. Erläuterungen und Dokumente. Reclam, Stuttgart 1999. ISBN 3-15-016011-1
  • Werner Bellmann: Notizen zu Heinrich Bölls Erzählung "Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum". In: Wirkendes Wort 54 (2004) No. 2. S. 165-170.
  • Hanno Beth: Rufmord und Mord: die publizistische Dimension der Gewalt. Zu Heinrich Bölls Erzählung "Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum". In: Hanno Beth (Ed.): Heinrich Böll. Eine Einführung in das Gesamtwerk in Einzelinterpretationen. 2., überarb. Aufl. Königstein (Ts.) 1980. S. 69-95.
  • Klaus Jeziorkowski: Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum. In: Werner Bellmann (Ed.): Heinrich Böll. Romane und Erzählungen. Interpretationen. Reclam, Stuttgart 2000. S. 249-267.
  • Nigel Harris: "Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum": the problem of violence. In: Michael Butler (Ed.): The Narrative Fiction of Heinrich Böll. Social conscience and literary achievement. Cambridge 1994. S. 198-218.
  • Eberhard Scheiffele: Kritische Sprachanalyse in Heinrich Bölls "Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum". In: Basis. Jahrbuch für deutsche Gegenwartsliteratur 9 (1979) S. 169-187 und 268f.

[edit] Links

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