Reflection on The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum Sean Johnson

In his novel, The Lost Honor of Katherina Blum, Heinrich Böll uses the story of a young woman’s descent

into the personal torment of a police investigation and vicious tabloid attacks to offer a critique of West German

society during the era of the Red Army Faction terror. Although there is no doubt the RAF was an extremely

violent faction that posed a serious threat to the stability of a democratic German postwar, B öll was not alone in

the opinion that the government and establishment media’s harsh and sometimes paranoid reaction constituted

a danger to a free society themselves.

Katharina Blum is presented as a very upright, somewhat old-fashioned young woman, completely

apolitical, with no hints of radicalism. Even her decision to leave the Catholic Church seems to have been

motivated by her childhood bullying by a vindictive local priest who held a grudge against her parents rather

than by any spirit of rebellion against tradition. Indeed throughout the book she often finds temporary

sanctuary from troubles in churches. In short, it would be hard to construct a more wholesome and innocent

character, especially for the West German audience for which B öll was writing in the 1970s, making her

subsequent victimization all the more painful for the reader. Katharina’s essential crime was to fall in deeply in

love with a man at her friend’s dance, a man who turned out not to be what he seemed. As a result, her life is

attacked by the forces of both the state and the media. Böll’s portrayal of Katharina as politically and socially

naïve are meant to show the reader that the careless application of state power can ruin even innocent lives.

In a variety of ways, both the police and the media violate Katharina’s constitutional rights. The police

storm her apartment, and then wiretap her phone without seeking a warrant. Their questioning of her and her

neighbours is aggressive and invasive, not demonstrating any due process or presumption of innocence. The

leaking of police information to the News is even more insidious, as Werner Tötges mounts a vicious campaign

of harassment against Katharina. His hostile interviews, deliberate and extensive misquotation of sources – 

Katharina’s mother’s “How could it come to this?” becomes “I knew it would come to this” – and his utter lack of 

ethics in pursuit of his story drives Katharina to murder. Böll is here levelling criticism against the Axel-Springer

group who owned the real-life Bild-Zeitung on which the book’s newspaper is explicitly modelled. During the

late 1960s, this paper’s hysterical denunciations of anyone who, in Katharina’s priest’s words, “smelled like a

Communist” led to the intensification of the feeling of persecution felt by the left-wing, which quite possibly

resulted in the formation of such violent offshoots as the Red Army Faction. While Böll was careful to keep his

novel apolitical, the RAF still found in Katharina’s shooting of Tötges a justification of political murder. Böll

categorically rejected this statement, but it further demonstrates how his novel touched to the heart of 

Germany’s societal unrest.