The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum - Heinrich Blum (1974)
NUMBER: 71
Genre: Fiction; Origin: Germany; Pages: 100
Satisfaction rating: 8.5
OVERVIEW:
The first facts to be presented are brutal. On Wednesday, 20 February 1974, a young woman of 27 leaves her apartment in a certain city at about 6.45pm to attend a dance at a private home. Following a brief encounter with a man wanted by the police, the hitherto unremarkable Katharina Blum becomes the object of a smear campaign conducted by an unscrupulous newspaper. Labelled a whore, communist sympathizer and atheist, her life is ruined; her privacy and reputation systematically destroyed.
MATTHEW’S COMMENTS:
The Nobel Prize winning Boll has excelled in this story. Albeit entirely fictitious, Boll’s writing presents only the ‘facts’ of a crime and the myriad of characters that orbit its events. The style of prose is hard to describe, while the dust jacket suggests that Boll is writing in the manner of a police report, it often goes beyond this clinical framework by including ‘qualified’ empathy, qualified by the weight of facts, but never judgmental.
Interestingly, for a single minded plot driven story, devoid of speculation (how else can you present a story told only in gathered evidence?), there is a surprising amount of subtext. Of course, we are left to our own devices to read into the motivations of the characters via their interrogation and testimony, but it is the cause and effect of tabloid journalism that offers broader subversive themes. At least the for me the unveiling mystery of the crime is of secondary interest.
In fact, further to the dust jacket comments, rather than a police report I see this novella playing on these broad themes. Surely it possible that Boll is taking aim at ‘gutter level press’ in general, writing this fictional piece in a style that presents the reader with an ‘ideal’ account of a crime, a piece of journalism with an ethical core, written in the style in which one might hope would be published in the papers? An allegory? A report which often apologises for excessive description of violence as opposed to sensationalising it?
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