The Lost Honor of Katherina Blum

The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1974)

Heinrich Böll

            There are two kinds of news media on this planet: the kind that soberly reports the news, unbiased, with a nose for the truth, and the vicious, sensationalist kind, that cares only for ratings and money and will sacrifice and mutilate anyone just to stir up trouble. Here in America if the former ever existed then it is a dinosaur, on his way out, but the latter is alive and well, the most well known manifestation being FOX News. I think every one in America has had the misfortune of knowing someone writhing in the grip of FOX: a bigoted relative, a rabidly anti-union boss, someone who really hates “Socialism” or immigrants, a guy who wants to get a business degree, a cop, etc. This kind of “journalism” is like an agent provocateur in the service of the the new robber baron aristocracy, an agent who utilizes the sensationalist and confrontational language designed to appeal to a generally uneducated proletariat (a proletariat that has been hobbled from birth and views the world in simple us-versus-them terms), an agent who comes to the working class bar in the middle of the night and incites stupidity so the pigs can burst in, make some arrests and flex their muscle. Now, FOX did not invent this sort of reporting, it has been around as long as there have been people and their reptile brains, and, of course, a cowed and obedient media is one of the cornerstones of fascism.

            The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum or: How Violence Develops and Where it Can Lead, by Nobel Laureate Heinrich Böll, is about the disastrous effects this sort of uncontrolled sado-journalism has on the common working person. The title character, Miss Blum, is a hard-working, frugal, honest young woman who is unknowingly connected to a wanted fugitive and is viciously, horrifically slandered in the media and driven to murder. Her life is ruined, her mother dies of stress, and the reporter who has made her miserable shows up at her apartment for an interview, demands a blowjob, so of course she pulls a pistol out of her handbag and pops him a couple times. The police emotionally abuse her, the paper drags her through the dirt, and heavy breathing voices ring her in the middle of the night. Given that treatment, who wouldn’t shoot someone? Everyone has a breaking point, and public humiliation is a very heavy weight.

            This book is about a few different things: about the power the news media has, the uncaring and the pyromaniac urges of the worst sorts of closet fascists, and how easily people submit to authority. Most folks will spread their legs for anyone with a badge. And they wouldn’t print it if it weren’t true, right?

            I’ve found that reading the prize-winning books by a Nobel Laureate is a lot like kissing your sister. That is to say it’s often deeply underwhelming. I’ve been waiting all week to use that phrase, my new favorite figure of speech. The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum is not a bad book, it’s just didn’t do much for me; the prose is competent if boring, and the premise is elementary and obvious. What you might call your “no shit” hypothesis. Yes, the abuse of power by journalists and police is awful, I agree with that. I think most would. My main motivation when reading books, however, is not to seek a childish comfort by reading things that one, I agree with, and two, make me feel as if I were a good person for believing. Instead, I patronize literature because I want to be dismembered by a massive explosion and then later, in a lab, rebuilt out of stronger and faster machine parts like Steve Austin, the Six Million Dollar Man, able to punch through steel, with infrared eyes and a new computer brain. I want gamma radiation to shoot holes in my pathetic DNA and patch them in with something newer and better. I want literature to break me down to my constituent atoms and rearrange them into a stronger lattice. I want to discover new visions and ways of thinking and synthesizing experiences that wouldn’t be natural to me, or to put it more simply: I read so that I might briefly see through another’s eyes. I don’t think that’s too much to ask for from literature, and if a book can’t do that then maybe it isn’t doing it’s job. I think that being destroyed and rebuilt like this makes me a better man.

            This book was the definition of a book that is ‘good’ but not ‘great’. It didn’t redefine arrangements or challenge assumptions or anything like that. It had a small point to make and it made it well. At times it read a bit like an exercise. I wasn’t repulsed by Böll. I would read another of his books if I had the opportunity.

One thing I did find offensive, however, was Miss Blum’s one moment of stupidity. I’m less than impressed it when the premise of a book (or anything) hinges on the characters being stupid or ignorant for no real reason. I guess most people are quite dumb, and that’s probably the point, so in that sense it is realistic, but it invariably comes off as being far too contrived for my tastes. It boggles my mind that anyone would ever view a cop as trustworthy, or an ally. Who would ever speak to the police without having a lawyer present? ‘Never tell a cop anything’ is a pretty good rule of thumb, and if Miss Blum had followed that advice then this whole book could have been avoided. This is Germany the early 1970s, so we’re talking about police who not too long before were literal Nazis. Not Nazis like your father’s a Nazi. I mean Nazis like Heinrich Himmler was a Nazi. I wouldn’t talk to a cop here, and I certainly would not talk to a cop in fucking Dusseldorf in a time when bloodthirsty Gestapo night raids and the cancerous death camps were still a living memory.  

            I picked up this book at the world famous Powell’s in Portland, Oregon. Portland is a heck of a city, and Powell’s is a world-class bookstore, worthy of a city ten times the size. It would be very easy for a guy to live in Portland. Much easier than where I live now. Went there a bit ago with my girlfriend, earlier this month. We visited friends, went to museums, drank lots of coffee. I had a Powell’s budget, fifty dollars. No lies: if I didn’t budget myself I would have spent everything I had. I could get lost in Powell’s, I could die stuffed between the shelves. As it is buying books is a luxury in a world where millions die of starvation. Got this book, Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delaney, Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald, and Period by Dennis Cooper. Quite looking forward to all of these. Working my way through Rings of Saturn currently, it’s a very strange and unique book.

Got to level with you: I finished this book before my plane even landed back in San Diego and then I waited a while to write this. One: an airplane is an awful place to read a book. Two: waiting is something I need to stop doing. Strike while the iron is hot, the saying goes. I don’t think that a long delay does much for writing that is of pretty poor quality to begin with, and I find I have less to say, and I’ve forgotten all the things I thought of while reading. I even keep a little notebook but after a week it’s just not fresh, and sometimes my notes, when distant and out of context, seem a little concussed. This review has been awful. Neuromancer was awful, and that book in particular deserves better than whatever pathetic gibberish I drool across its spine.

I guess I have to wrap this up. Barely even wrote about the book. It was okay, competent, well crafted, etc. However, I expect a lot more out of books. I give them my eternal devotion and in return I want them to break me apart and put me back together, stronger, in a unique form. I don’t know why anyone would ask any less.