Category: German Literature

Writing Catastrophe – Max Frisch’s Man in the Holocene

More and more we will have to ask ourselves how we might respond to natural disasters in our stories, the kind of stories they might lead us to write. What is the significance of a catastrophe? This is almost a literary question, insofar as it concerns the interplay of meanings and appearances. Man in the Holocene, a novella by the Swiss writer, Max Frisch, provides an example of how we might begin approaching the topic. Ostensibly the record of a widower’s isolation in a Swiss valley cut off by bad weather, it is really a short but intense look at humanity’s attempts to live inside a world where their power and lives are limited.

A recent widower, Herr Geiser finds himself stuck in his house in a valley in Ticino as bad weather cuts off the town from the outside world. Soon even the power goes and he has to stick to matches and canned goods. He entertains himself by building things out of crisp bread and reading. His mind is not that of a young man, however, and he has to take notes by hand to remember what he reads. A little later, he decides instead to use scissors to cut out sections from books and stick them to the wall. Next, he makes an attempt to flee on foot to a neighbouring valley, but returns home. His note-mania continues as his mind declines, with whole diagrams plastered onto the walls, and shortly thereafter the story ends.

Narration

One of the first things I noticed about the novella, which I read in the original German, is the strange narratorial voice. Readers are not close to Herr Geiser at all: to give two examples, we do not learn his first name, and through impersonal and passive constructions (“es” (it), “man” (one)) or phrases like “it is not thinkable” Man in the Holocene builds up a feeling of being almost a work of science or technology, rather than a story. It is as if we are observing some creature at the zoo, except that here the creature is an old man, shuffling about. As a result, we come to see Herr Geiser not as an individual so much as a representative of Man in general (to refer back to the novella’s title) just as the creatures we see at the zoo are supposed to embody their whole species.

We don’t like to think of ourselves as animals, let alone as automata – I certainly do not, at any rate. But Man in the Holocene does much to force us down this route through its most distinctive formal trait – the cuttings that Herr Geiser sticks to the wall.

Cuttings

These are a fascinating novelistic technique and worth dwelling on. When I say cutouts, I mean just that – real cutouts are plastered across the text. They are drawn primarily from history books and encyclopaedias, with a little of the Bible thrown in for good measure, and all are presented in their original formatting. (I never want to read Fraktur, the “German” typeface, ever again, no matter how beautiful it is to look at when you do not actually need to make sense of it.)

Herr Geiser is a man of facts, unlike his wife, who was a reader of fiction. Man in the Holocene presents Herr Geiser attempting to make sense of the world via these facts. When he reads, he reads to expand his knowledge, hence the note-taking which expands into making cuttings. This process of gaining knowledge for the process of understanding, even control over his environment, makes Herr Geiser again rather representative of humanity’s recent Enlightenment destiny as a whole. Furthermore, this entire process of meaning-making is noted explicitly in one extract as something distinctively human – in other words, Herr Geiser’s actions make him more human, even though I said above it had the opposite effect.

One reason for this is because there is more to texts than the motivation behind covering the wall with them – there is also what they say. Generally speaking, like a text by W.G. Sebald, we have a sense as we read Man in the Holocene of accumulating catastrophe. As we learn about Ticino, we read about the countless catastrophes befalling its people, through rock slides and floods and war. Mostly, these are natural catastrophes, which highlight humankind’s powerlessness in the face of nature. We also learn about flora and fauna native to the world, and as Herr Geiser explores his interest in geology we learn about dinosaurs and prehistoric times. 

A sense of scale is one thing that rather makes us seem like animals. Because we are a speck in comparison with geologic time, the significance of our significances seems like nothing of the sort. “Man appears in the Holocene” is a more accurate translation of Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän – in other words, we were nothing but ashes in all the years before then, and perhaps just as fated to short lifetimes as the dinosaurs. Indeed, reading about the Tyrannosaurus Rex in particular, it’s hard to avoid making the comparison in our heads that we too are an apex predator, yet just as fragile when we consider the power of nature. Another theme of the cuttings is that we shape nature to live in it, but little good does it do for us when faced with entire valleys slipping away.

This is not the main thing, however. Herr Geiser also cuts out diagrams of dinosaurs, but the final diagram in the book is that of a human being. This kind of echoing reduces us, in spite of our investigating the world, into a creature to be investigated and no different from the dinosaurs on the pages before. Our meaning-making, in particular via religion, is also challenged through the primacy the text places upon scientific work. The Bible might demonstrate humanity’s development, but not if the sections extracted (Noah’s Ark, Creation) are contradicted by the other extracts. Instead, this makes human reasoning look further flawed.

It does not help either that by the end of the book Herr Geiser has essentially lost his mind – there’s an obvious narrative irony in the way that all these attempts to understand the world and the catastrophes befalling it bring Herr Geiser no closer to escaping or mastering them. Note-taking does not make the world take note. This is most explicit, and quite funny, in one of the novella’s central sections, where Herr Geiser endeavours, in vain, to remove a salamander that has ended up in his bathroom. After a few pages of struggling, suddenly readers instead read several extracts about the biology of salamanders – the implication seems to be that Herr Geiser believes that by understanding them a little better, he might be considered the real victor in their duel. It is, of course, not so.

In short, these cuttings are an ambiguous contribution to the novella’s network of meanings. On the one hand, they celebrate humanity as this meaning-deriving creature, driven by knowledge. On the other, they show its animal heritance, frailty and smallness. Generally speaking, they also do something else important – they force readers to put the extracts in relation to the rest of the text and interpret them for ourselves, thus increasing our participation beyond passive reading. We can even say that we join Herr Geiser even if we do not get close to him as a human – we become representatives of the “human being” too.

A Social Animal

Herr Geiser’s wife Elsbeth has died, I presume, shortly before the novella begins. The idea of human beings as social animals is one which I realise is also an important part of how the story builds its network of ideas. Herr Geiser is alone, with only his cat for company. He does visit a local inn at one point, but is largely asocial, before becoming actively antisocial as the novella draws to a close. He reads, but his reading seems pointless, especially when he finds he forgets it all. At the same time, he’s actually dependent on others, though he does not acknowledge it – to give an example, a neighbour brings him soup, without which I doubt he would be able to feed himself.

Frisch’s ideas of gender are a smidgen dated, I have noticed, but the function of Elsbeth’s memory within the text, I think, is to demonstrate how incomplete Herr Geiser’s life is when he is alone. His wife, who we learn reads fiction, symbolises an emotional interaction with the world just as Herr Geiser, through his encyclopaedia mania, symbolises a technological engagement with the world.

Neither, on its own, is sufficient for a fully human life. Man in the Holocene demonstrates how poor Herr Geiser’s single life is by showing how, alone, he declines. (Dementia develops faster in people with less regular social interaction). This is a further irony, because this decline as a human being, into a kind of animal or child, comes even as Herr Geiser continues his knowledge-obsession. The more notes he takes, the less sense he himself makes or can make as a human being.

Through the cutouts which praise human subjugation of the natural world, and the very fact of the town’s existence – “the Federal and local government do everything to ensure the valley does not go extinct” – we have a sense that even though human endeavour seems ultimately insignificant on a geological timescale, it is still better to try to work collaboratively to build human habitable worlds, than just to retreat into ourselves as Herr Geiser does. In this sense, the text is not entirely nihilistic.

As a Novella

With that said, it is hard not to read Man in the Holocene as an overall depressing, nihilistic work. It is a work where we humans simply do not matter. The cutouts, and the descriptions of nature, paint us as utterly insignificant and totally vulnerable to disasters. “Only man knows catastrophes, and only if he survives them; nature knows no such thing.” The relentless repetition of geologic facts emphasises the shortness of our lives, even the lives of homo sapiens as a whole.

We do not even need the cutouts, however. Man in the Holocene is a novella, and it shares many of the central ideas that form has gathered around itself during its storied history within German-language literature, such as madness in the protagonist. In terms of humanity’s smallness, however, another novella trope is important – a serious interest in time and its movements. In Frisch’s story, this comes across in the idea of cyclicity. Throughout the novella we get a sense of the valley as functional unit, with the post bus with its hooting in particular coming to be the obvious symbol for this. But at the novella’s end, all of these things are described in a long panoramic section without Herr Geiser being mentioned once. In other words, we loop back to the story’s beginning, and find that nothing has changed once we remove its central character. We do not need geologic time – even in the short timeframe of the novella we see how easily we are wiped away and replaced without a change to the world’s essence.

In the Context of Frisch’s other works

Man in the Holocene is my third Frisch, after Homo Faber and Montauk. While it shares themes of aging with the latter, in its concern with humanity’s development the more obvious point of comparison is with the former novel. I remember Homo Faber as being critical of humanity’s technological development through the figure of its narrator, who was obsessed with his electric razor, but ultimately struggled to experience emotions, leading to a kind of ruinous personal life. Like Herr Geiser, Walter Faber in his novel tries to understand his world through statistics and facts, but unlike Herr Geiser Faber finds strange coincidences and love forcing him out of his comfortable worldview.

Where Homo Faber was ultimately a cautiously optimistic work, describing a kind of way out of an entirely mechanistic worldview through emotional engagement, Man in the Holocene is no such thing. This is not merely because Herr Geiser’s mental decline is permanent. Rather, what is important here is that it simply does not matter. Humans may change the world however they will, but in the end it will all be washed away by floods, or crushed under heavy stones.

The world has existed since so long ago that we cannot even conceive it, and it will continue long after we have all gone extinct. The result is that nothing matters, even the attempt to write about it or gain knowledge about it, even the attempt to write blog posts about it. Because Elsbeth is dead, there’s no way out for Herr Geisler. Instead, there’s just a nature that is beautiful, but completely indifferent to him and all of us.

Depressing or not, I found it very interesting that the work demonstrated one way we might approach writing about things like climate change. A way that is probably morally irresponsible, but still valid – to write about life in this geological timeframe, showing how meaningless human endeavour is. This is the voice of a climate pessimist, or even a sceptic. The climate is changing extremely fast, geologically speaking and compared to historical changes to the climate, but the effects are felt the same way they are described here in Frisch’s work – as something huge, unstoppable, and utterly indifferent to us. A few weeks ago we had wildfires in California, last year my family’s house in Switzerland was itself flooded and the village cut off from the outside world. At least in the latter case we had insurance.  

When we think of nature, once we stop thinking about it in a Romantic manner – as a source of sublime beauty – we get to this sense that it is indifferent and cruel. (Of course, this is part of what the Romantics meant by sublime, but there is a slightly different emphasis). Clearly we must go a little bit further still, to find some way of writing about catastrophes and human insignificance which does not rule out human agency to make some small positive contribution against them. Without hope and ensuring action against these great impersonal forces and the human forces behind them, Frisch’s book, and humanity as a whole, may find themselves ashes, not some great interplanetary species. 

Correcting our Idea of Genius – Thomas Bernhard’s Correction

I am something of a Thomas Bernhard fanatic. After Woodcutters, the other Bernhard on this blog, I had a break until late 2023, when I read, in quick succession, Concrete, The Loser, Extinction, and Wittgenstein’s Nephew. Bernhard is a writer who is addictive in a quite unique way. His books are propelled by the bile and bitterness of his narrators and are inescapable thanks to their flowing, paragraphless prose, which offers no exit for someone looking to put them down and take a break. Entering Bernhard’s world means a total surrender to his aims and approach.

Correction, which I have now read for the second time, is to my mind the best Bernhard, and one of my favourite books altogether. It has a unique structure for the author, with two narrators, (even though one filters the other,) who take equal sides of the novel for themselves and who have slightly different voices. It also has the most interesting readerly experience, in that the novel’s journey is primarily one where we change our opinion about its central character, the genius scientist Roithamer, rather than one where something happens. All happening takes place before the book begins.

As with all Bernhard, the story itself is simple. Roithamer, a genius of sorts who works at Cambridge, upon the death of his parents inherits a lot of money and decides to use this money to build a Cone in the centre of the Kobernausser Forest in Austria for his sister to live in. Once the Cone is finished his sister dies, probably not of joy, and Roithamer then hangs himself. Our narrator, a friend of Roithamer’s, arrives at the house of a mutual friend, Hoeller, where Roithamer did much of his work on the Cone, to start putting Roithamer’s literary remains in order. The first part of Correction is an almost hagiographic portrayal of Roithamer by this friend; the second is Roithamer’s own literary remains, partly filtered. Chief among them is a manuscript entitled “About Altensam and everything connected with Altensam, with special attention to the Cone”.

In the first part of the book Roithamer is presented as a classical genius – what Bertrand Russell said of Wittgenstein is entirely appropriate here: “he was perhaps the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived, passionate, profound, intense, and dominating.” Roithamer is totally focused in a way that few of us ever are: “a topic he took up had to be thought through to the end”. The ultimate end, it turns out, is suicide, but before we get to suicide, this thinking is inspirational. Roithamer builds a Cone for habitation, something nobody has done before, and does so totally professionally, as the result of massive research and effort, and all this in the face of all manner of criticisms and accusations of madness.

He is also totally himself, totally dedicated. Quite frankly, I would rather be like this – more pedantic, more unbearable, more focused, than any of the human qualities those who know me would wish I had in greater quantities to balance out my already well-developed inhuman ones. Almost all I could think as I read these sections was how much I agreed with everything, how much I myself wanted to build my own Cone, or rather in my case a Cube, a white glass cube but also in the centre of a forest or failing that atop a cliff and far away from everything and everybody, my own “thought-chamber” where I would be able to work totally undisturbed and think better, cleaner, wiser thoughts than anywhere else. A place where I would experience the same joy as I had recently in the crypt at the cathedral in Münster, where I was alone beside silent stone.

We see Roithamer’s genius reflected in Bernhard’s prose. It flows, in long sentences, with a focus on choosing the right words. One of the things I love, you’ll have noticed, is Bernhard’s italics. He uses italics to make us read words and phrases we might otherwise pass over. Strangely, simple though it is, it works. But there are also the neologisms, obviously more brilliant in the original German where they can remain a single word, things like the “thought-chamber” above. This sentence-by-sentence genius can also be drawn out to the wider book, where we are constantly becoming more precise, more accurate, more truthful in our various assertions.

Here is an example. On page 1 we learn that Roithamer has killed himself. On page 53 we learn the location, on page 61 we learn the method, on page 81 we learn who found him. The whole book is structured like a spiral, as we constantly correct our initial view to be closer to the reality that once was. Spirals can mean madness, of course, the sense of one being trapped. But they can also be like drill bits, precisely what is needed to make a hole through something – some challenge or problem – otherwise impenetrable. That is the great test of genius and obsession – to fixate upon the right thing, not the wrong. I have a friend whose longtime obsession is Pokémon Pearl. I, fortunately, am more obsessed by books and terrible questions.

Our narrator’s obsession is Roithamer himself. This is, he notes, not exactly healthy. He describes being unable to think his own thoughts, because he is incarcerated “within Roithamer’s thought-prison – or Roithamer’s thought-dungeon.” This, naturally, makes the depiction of Roithamer we receive in the first part of the book slightly suspect. It also provides one of the novel’s mysteries. For the second part is a collection of Roithamer’s thoughts, as filtered through the narrator, yet the narrator is nowhere to be found. Even though he claims they were friends who went to school together, Roithamer doesn’t mention him once. In fact, Roithamer provides information that directly contradicts the narrator’s testimony. (The narrator claims Roithamer visited Stocket to see him, whereas Roithamer claims he visited Stocket to see an uncle).

The result of the narrator’s obsession is that he essentially goes mad, helped by working in quite literally the same room as Roithamer when he worked on the Cone. He is almost subsumed into Roithamer. Arguably, the second part of the book, where Roithamer’s voice is even more dominant, is just an extension of this – the narrator is totally crushed as a human being with any more existence than merely that of a bridge between the dead man’s words and our ears. Yet interestingly, his admiration for Roithamer, his Roithamer-obsession, is quite similar to what I felt.

One of the ways that Correction provides a journey for the reader is that it takes that attitude and forces us to amend it. Once we hear Roithamer’s voice, unvarnished, the genius becomes rather more petty than godly. “That extraordinary talent for life” which the narrator so praises becomes in practice rather pathetic. Roithamer absolutely hated his upbringing on the estate of Altensam. He spends page after page criticising his brothers, his father, his mother in particular. He describes endless squabbles and confrontations in which he himself is the instigator. For example, it was enough for him to return home from abroad and find that a barn had been painted to send him off on a rampage.

Given that, like a lot of people on the spectrum or whatever, Roithamer has a real dislike of hypocrisy, the sheer amount that we find in him soon comes to undermine him. Nobody understands him, yes, but he claims to have been observing his sister for years and years to create the ultimate habitation for her in the form of a Cone. Yet the result of this observation is a home so comically unsuited that she dies pretty much immediately. The repetitions of these problems, Roithamer’s total lack of growth, and indeed the way that his entire personality seems to have come from his upbringing even though he claims to despise it, all makes him look rather ridiculous. He cries about people who “never once seek a single cause of their unhappiness in themselves,” but it is he who is the first person who should consider this.

Bernhard is a hugely funny writer, which I have failed to indicate here thus far, but humour is another way that our thought-image of Roithamer becomes covered in cracks. As Roithamer’s own suicide approaches, he reels off a whole host of family members who have committed suicide, in a way that is too over-the-top to be upsetting. “…They shoot themselves, like my uncle, or they hang themselves, like my other uncle, or they throw themselves in front of a train, like my third uncle. … And didn’t our cousin, the only son of our third uncle, kill himself too, after he got married to a doctor’s daughter from Kirchdorf on the Krems.” When we learn that one of these people literally threw themselves down the air shaft of a cheese factory our sympathy struggles to break through the snort of laughter at these words.

In fact, it is humour that keeps Roithamer alive. At one point he visits the cliff off from which one of his relatives threw himself and finds himself considering following suit, “but suddenly, when this idea was at its most compelling, this idea seemed ridiculous to me, and I took myself out of there.” We laugh, perhaps, but three of Wittgenstein’s own brothers died to suicide, so these numbers are not the mad inflations they might seem. And Austria did, for a long time, have among the highest suicide rates in the world.

By the time Roithamer reaches the idea of suicide, the final “correction” for “our entire existence as a bottomless falsification and misrepresentation of our true nature”, we are already no longer with him, but watching him, rather sadly, as the madman that others did claim he was. One of the key elements of cone-building, as we learn, is “statics”, basically how to keep things from falling over. In the case of Roithamer, this provides a beautiful metaphor. He tips and tips as far as he can into his thoughts, and done well he can make huge advances (as he does by building the Cone) without getting to a point where he loses his balance and falls over. But in the book, he does go too far, and hence falls. We, watching, do not.

Another key idea, understandably, is the idea of correction itself. Roithamer writes his manuscript about his childhood and then corrects it, making it much smaller and completely different, then does so again, then finally kills himself. Correction, when I reflected on it, really has two meanings or uses. It can mean to take something false and replace it with what is true, as in the case of an incorrect mathematical summation, or it can mean to take what is largely true and make it more precise. Correction abounds in the latter, but believes it is a tale of the former. One of the mesmerising beauties of Bernhard’s prose is its precision-fanaticism. Whether it’s denying one word in favour of another, “master builder” instead of “architect”, or its deployment of a huge number of words and phrases to create a more accurate picture than one or two alone could do, Correction aims at precision in a way that others might be willing to stop and say this is “good enough.”

Precision-fanaticism is another phrase for perfectionism. Nowadays, self-help gurus are all about the need to be less of a perfectionist, and Correction provides a dramatization of why we should heed them. Roithamer, finding error and inaccuracy everywhere, ultimately gives up on his connection to the source of all error – existence itself. For us, it need not be so. We can stop at a given sentence, just as I can give up on a given blog post, and say that this is good enough. Could be better, but won’t be. Thus we live to fight another day.

As much as this book ultimately becomes a criticism of Roithamer, indeed even a correction to our idea of genius, it remains mysterious to me because I am unable to shake my love of the ideas it represents and the way it represents them. Much as once upon a time I wanted to be Ivan Karamazov or Levin, I would want to be Roithamer if I could. At least the Roithamer that is represented in the novel’s first half. The Roithamer of the second, with his pettiness and pointless arguments with his family members, I fear I already am.

Where Bernhard is normally so negative and cruel that we normally come out of his books looking for things that might actually be affirmed in life, in Correction I actually heard something truly beautiful and admirable – the sheer, single-minded dedication to an arbitrarily chosen idea that we are willing to stake our entire soul upon. Yes, it’s mad, but I want to build my Cone. Better that than not wanting anything at all, and sinking into the grim mediocrity that Bernhard hates so much.

Heinrich Böll – The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum

Reading well, at least as it’s taught at university, is not much different from detective work. From incomplete information, we make deductions and classifications, and test hypotheses against textual evidence. What does this word really mean, what was this character’s real motivation? Often, the “best” works seem to be those revealing the least, having us fumbling the most. Obscurantism occasionally lies very close to greatness.

The German author Heinrich Böll’s The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum is different because it’s a detective story that we wish were not one. Like many of the great German novellas, into whose tradition it neatly falls, Böll’s work is dominated by an interrogation of what it means to narrate. Katharina Blum meets and falls in love with a criminal, then shoots a journalist. But whose story is this to tell?

This plot, which we learn almost on the first page, is not what keeps us reading. Rather, it is the determination of Katharina’s motive or, more broadly, what’s in her heart. As we read, we encounter different ways of presenting / understanding her that seem to have a claim to be the truth.

Narrative coldness.

What we notice first is this strikingly cold narrative. The narrative voice seems obsessed with distancing itself from any kind of bias or emotional contribution to our experience. “And so, those are the facts”, it declares after an early chapter. At another point, it names all the sources for the novel. Generally, it uses the passive voice and the German indirekte Rede, or reported speech, which in formal use is its own grammatical construction and gives the narrative a kind of serious “report” feel to it. All of this effort to be honest about the work’s narrative, which stretches as far as a sly apology by the narrator every time the strict chronological telling is interrupted, makes us wonder what such approaches conceal.

Yet we can also take the narrator at face value, and trust that they were trying their best to tell the truth. We can do this because we have two actors who are manifestly not doing this – the police, and the journalists. But first, there’s Katharina herself.

Katharina

In his afterword, written ten years later, Heinrich Böll calls Katharina the “embodiment of the economic miracle” that took place in West Germany after the Second World War. She has her own flat, drives a car, and does her own budgeting – sending money to her poorly mother and her incarcerated brother. We read of interest rates and savings accounts. A generation earlier, a novel about a young woman from the countryside going to the city would end up with the woman being exploited, but here, Katharina manages more or less to hold her own life together…

…At least until the novel’s events begin. The novel is set in 1974, just as the economic miracle ended due to the oil price chaos in 1973. And this change of fortunes is mirrored in Katharina’s own life. Things taken for granted turn out to be less stable. The police is one such topic – when Katharina begins to get bullied by the press, her pleading is “can’t the state do something?” Her employment situation, once her name starts going through the gutter, also wobbles. She receives threatening phone calls. All the signs of her freedom start to turn on her.

Katharina lives in a world of change, and while it has benefited her, her focus on her “honour” is precisely an attempt to find something solid that she can keep safe. She is under constant threat throughout her life from men who are trying to proposition her, and so she tries hard to protect herself from this. When we first hear her voice in the narrative, in the context of questioning at the police station, it is in a mode of pedantry: she is insisting that the police use the right language for her experience. “Zärtlichkeit” and “Zudringlichkeit” are both to do with sexual attention, but Katharina insists that she is experiencing the latter word, which is unidirectional, while the police keep mistakenly writing the former and suggesting thereby that Katharina herself reciprocated or encouraged when she did not.

Yet pedantry is one way of creating an oasis of personal agency in a world where you have very little. Like the cold narrative style, it is an attempt to control a message.

The Police

After Katharina Blum takes Ludwig Götten home following a party, she is pounced upon by the police, who have been trailing him. Somehow, however, Ludwig has escaped – and Katharina must know how, even perhaps be an accomplice. The narration puts us in the place of the police, who are trying to get to the bottom of things. Normally, as I noted at the beginning, readers slip quite willingly into the interrogator’s shoes – crime novels are popular for a reason. Here, however, this becomes quite uncomfortable both for the overwhelming power of the police relative to Katharina, and our own complicity in the invasion of her privacy.

Besides comparing ways of telling Katharina’s story, The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum is, in a more earthy manner, concerned with privacy and our right to it. When the police first raid her flat, they insist on collecting everything with writing on it. Rather than finding a smoking gun, we are forced to see Katharina’s life broken down into components and painstakingly analysed. We go through notebooks, through family photos, through her finances, and even through her car’s odometer reading. We certainly learn, or think we learn, something about her life. But the cost is, naturally, that we begin the process of destroying that life.

The Tabloid

More so than the police, the greatest damage done to Katharina’s honour comes from the tabloid, “NEWSPAPER”. A German reader would recognise Bild, their popular if sensationalist and unreliable tabloid, akin to something like the UK’s Daily Mail. If the police are able to throw her in a cold room and interrogate her, the newspaper’s treatment of her is somehow more deadly and poisonous. No sooner than Katharina is released from her first questioning, we learn that she is being written about in a way that has, at best, only limited intersections with the truth. It is a pattern that’s repeated throughout the articles quoted in the novella.

Her friends, the upper-middle-class Blornas, are misquoted in a way that makes Katharina look bad. At other points, the reporter “improves” quotes out of an apparent duty to “provide simple people with help articulating their thoughts.” The only person who is convinced that the paper got him right is the priest from Katharina’s hometown, who has an obvious agenda (he calls her a communist). When he’s later confronted by Blorna, his source for this association proves to be “his nose.” It turns out he can smell communists. We would sigh, or maybe laugh, if it weren’t part of Katharina’s life being turned upside down by the paper that reports him.

The paper does damage – there’s a reason why Katharina ultimately shoots the man responsible for the stories. Yet part of that damage is buried under plausible deniability. After the story of Katharina first emerges, she starts receiving threatening phone calls, for example from men propositioning her, in yet another invasion of her privacy. Can we blame the newspaper for that? Certainly, but not in a way where the dots could be connected in a court, and by then the damage would be done anyway. That’s the power of institutions when they are not on our side.

But Böll does not leave the matter there – he also wants to connect the paper more directly to death. He does this through Katharina’s ailing mother, who is already in hospital. Here the journalist is denied an interview by the hospital workers, who state that her condition is very fragile, but the journalist is undeterred. Making use of a disguise, he sneaks in and gets his scoop. The cost is Katharina’s mother’s life – she expires soon afterwards. To rub salt into her wounds, in the newspaper report the author claims that it was the shock of Katharina’s misdeeds that prompted her mother’s death!

And so, Katharina is progressively dehumanised, in the sense that she is replaced as a human in the public eye by another – false – human according to the paper’s editorial decisions – a communist, a bad person. Is it not surprising, then, that she turns to violence?

“how violence develops and where it can lead”

The full title of the novel is The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, or: how violence develops and where it can lead, and it was the second part that was most interesting to me before I had any idea what the book was actually about. One thing we might notice is that the second title reflects the coldness of the general narration – we have a report’s title more than a story. How Katharina becomes dehumanised and miserable enough to shoot a reporter is presented with a focus on the causes rather than on either Katharina’s mental state (which remains mostly hidden) or on any moral judgment of the murder. Murder remains bad, but readers are expected to want to understand how it might come about.

Simply put, it seems to come about from a decline in social trust. We hear a lot about it today in the context of our own political situations and nations’ changing demographic profiles, but Böll depicts the problem long before our own time. Katharina moves to a big city, which is, of course, a good thing and an achievement, and successfully makes a few friends there. Still, at the same time, she’s aware of how the social and technological progress she’s reliant upon for this success can have its negative sides: “I know so many women who are alone, who spend their evenings alone in front of the TV,” she says. Just as her world became bigger, for many people it can become smaller as they close themselves off from the world. (For example, by reading the gutter press without ever having the experiences that might conceivably balance it).

As soon as the paper starts printing rubbish, the trust Katharina feels in society collapses – recall her cry for help to the police to do something about the libel being printed. (The police are leaking information anyway). The institutions she had expected to help her have not complied with her reasonable idea of justice, while the people she had expected to treat her kindly – strangers – are instead contacting her in a way that is threatening. With her name and honour dragged through the mud she is essentially locked out of society, which is a position where violence becomes a plausible-seeming answer to her problems. So that’s one way that violence comes about. Herr Blorna experiences something similar, as his association with Katharina leads to his own career and world collapsing – though in his case it only ends in fisticuffs.  

There’s another instance of violence, too, as we’ve seen – the death of Katharina’s mother. Here, there’s a kind of trust issue at stake. The reporter both ignores the advice of the doctors to leave her alone and adopts a disguise to achieve his goal. In other words, he completely ignores the social rules whose obedience confirms our status as good citizens. The result, Böll chooses to emphasise, is yet more violence.

Conclusion

In theory, newspapers are supposed to tell the truth, just as the police in their investigations are supposed to discover it. In The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, we see a paper that fails to tell the truth and an investigation that mostly probes a private life with little success at its stated goal. Only the novel’s chosen narrative approach, of a bloodless directness that names its sources and tries to be clear about sources of bias, seems to stand against this by telling us what really happened. However, in reality, this only complicates things further. We might notice, for example, how little Katharina herself speaks, even if she gets the last word. Too often she is only being quoted by others or described.

And should we even trust her own words? Aren’t humans often inarticulate about what’s within their hearts? The narrator might try to be neutral, but neutrality is itself a mask that allows biases safe passage. Really, shouldn’t we know who he or she is, so that we can make our own judgements? Or alternatively, shouldn’t we be given sources without mediation or introduction, so that we can assemble the story ourselves? (This is still not neutrality, because the ordering and choice of sources is itself an influence on our perception of them, but it’s closer to neutrality). Ultimately, we might say that if the narrative makes us distrust bad newspaper reporting, its wider message is not consoling about our capacity to locate objectivity.

Someone I went to school with now works at one of those newspapers, and when I asked him at a chance meeting whether that made him complicit in their occasional hateful and socially destructive messaging, his unencouraging answer was that the paper wasn’t left or right-wing, and that if people wanted to read populist rubbish that was their choice and equally their choice as a paper to write in a way that catered to it. He was quite confrontational in manner, obviously in part a response to my tactless question, but also in a way that to me seemed to indicate that even though he presented himself as being above what he wrote, it was beginning to affect his soul. I can’t say I was too happy for his success.

With that said, The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum definitely feels like it has no answers to the existence of papers like Bild. It might have been motivated by its author’s rage at the presentation of the Baader-Meinhof group of terrorists in the papers at the time, but the work has very little to say about the people who actually read the papers and how such papers’ influence might be diminished. Instead, it focuses on their effect on an individual. In that, it’s an emotional appeal clad in cold language, rather than a rational argument. Böll himself calls the text a “pamphlet” in the afterword and that’s really what it is –  a short, effective story, told interestingly. But not one with any answers.