The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum

I wasn’t sure what to expect from The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum.  I know that Heinrich Böll won the Nobel Prize in literature (mostly because the cover of the book tells me so) so you’d hope he’d be good.  But then J M Coetzee has one of those and I can’t stand a bunch of the stuff that he’s written.  It is good, though I don’t know if it’s enjoyable.  The book is more than forty years old and it describes a society that is still recognisable for all the wrong reasons. 

Katharina Blum is an innocent young woman who meets and quickly falls in love with a man who is, unbeknownst to her, a bank robber.  When she helps him escape from the police while leaving her flat a media shit storm naturally descends.  One journalist in particular, Werner Tötges, goes to town on her.  He leaves no stone uncovered in a bid to dig up any dirt in an attempt to vilify Blum in his paper Die Zeitung, leaving things like facts and morality firmly to one side.  It’s kind of how I assume The Daily Mail operates; Tötges’s calibre of journalism would certainly fit in there.

The problem I had with this book is that is left me despairing for society a little and especially tabloid journalism.  The only thing that has changed from 1974 is that access to media has gotten easier and so the scope for these kinds of bullshit tabloid lies has just gotten wider.  Not to flog an (unfortunately) very much alive horse but The Daily Mail’s sidebar of shame is a case in point of this.  People, women especially, are vilified for things as trivial as not wearing make-up to get a cup of coffee or having too many relationships.  It’s sad because this story could still happen today, and with our instant media it wouldn’t even take the four days of the novel for things to come to their crescendo.

One of my favourite parts of the book was in relation to how the tabloids sensationalise things.  Tötges interviews the other residences of Blum’s block of flats and most of them have little to say about her; she is a typical single woman who works and occasionally has men to stay; nothing shocking.  Tötges twists her into a woman with a revolving door for men.  Her employer describes her as a, “very intelligent, cool, level-headed person,” this becomes the much more lurid, “ice-cold and calculating.”  Tötges journalism has just enough journalism in it to not be libel, but it’s an amazing transformation of the truth. 

I feel like, in all this, I should write more about Katharina Blum herself.  She is an interesting character, meticulous and precise and I do like her.  But this isn’t her story.  It’s the story of her story, the construction of her media identity and the truth is that she as an individual matters little in this.  Again, this just leaves me with sadness that we have not built a better way to do the news or seemingly learnt any lessons in the forty-two years we have had since the publication of (to give th book its full title) The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, or: how violence develops and where it can lead.

My next book is White Noise by Don DeLillo.