The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum

PENGUir-.' TWENTIETH-CENTURY CLASSICS THE LOST HONOR OF KATHARINA BLUM Heinrich Boll was the first German to win the Nobel Prize for literature since Thomas Mann in 1929. Born in Cologne, in 191 7, Boll was reared in a liberal Catholic, pacifist family. Drafted into the Wehrmacht, he served on the Russian and French fronts and was wounded four times before he found himself in an American prison camp. After the war he enrolled at the University of Cologne, but dropped out to write about his shattering experiences as a soldier. His first novel, The Train Was on Time, was published in 1949, and he went on to become one of the most prolific and important of postwar Ger man writers. His best-known novels include Billiards at Half-Past Nine (1959), The Clown (1963), Group Portrait with Lady ( 1971 ), The Lost Honor of Katbarina Blum (1974), and The Safety Net (1979)-)n 1981 he published a memoir, What's to Become ofthe Boy? or; Something to Do with Books. Boll served for several years as the president of International P.E.N. and was a leading defender of the intellectual freedom of writers throughout the world. He died inJune 1985. HEINRICH BOLL The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum OR: HOW VIOLENCE DEVELOPS AND \VHERE IT CAN LEAD Translatedfrom the German by LEILA VENNEWITZ PENGUIN BOOKS PENGUIN HOOKS Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Books USA Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, l"ew York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London \V8 5TZ, England Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, \'ictoria, Australia Penguin Books Canada Ltd, I 0 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4\' 3 B2 Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Hannondsworth, Middlesex, England First published in the United States of America by McGraw-I lill Book Company I 975 Published in Penguin Books I 994 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 English translation cop)Tight© Heinrich Biill and Leila Vennewitz, 1975 All rights reserved Originally published in Germanunder the title of Die I '.rim-meEhreder Kntharma Bl11m, Ode�·: Wie Gru•a/tmtstebw tmd u•obi11 sie fiihrf11ka11n by Kiepenheuer & \\'itsch, Cologne, Germany. Copyright© I 974 by Verlag Kiepenheuer & \Vitsch, Kiiln. TilE LIBRARYOF CO:>:GRESS liAS CATALOG!:ED THE HARDCO\"ER AS FOLLOWS: Biill, Heinrich, I 917- The lost honor of Katharina Blum, or how ,;olence develops and where it can lead. Translation of Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum, Oder: \ \'ie Gewalt entstehen und wohin sie fuhren kann. I. Title. PZ3.B63316LO [PT2603.0894] 833'.9'14 7+-28138 ISBl'\' 0 14 01.8728 6 Printed in the United States of America Set in Janson Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or othernise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any fonn of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. The characters and action in this story are purely fictitious. Should the description of certain journalistic practices result in a resemblance to the practices of the Bild-Zeitung, such resemblance is neither inten tional nor fortuitous, but unavoidable. TranslatorsAcknowledgment I am deeply grateful to my husband, William Vennewitz, for the patientand knowledgeable assistancehe has given me inthe translation of this book. Leila Vennewitz 1 For the following account there are a few minor sources and three major ones; these will be named here at the beginning and not referred to again. Major sources are: the transcripts of the police interrogation; Huben Bloma (attorney); and Peter Hach (public prosecutor, also high-school and university classmate of Hubert Bloma). It was Hach who-in confidence, needless to say-supplemented the transcripts and re poned cenain measures taken by the police investi gators as well as the results of their inquiries absent from the transcripts: not, we hasten to add, for official purposes but solely for private use. Hach was genuinely affected by the concern and frustration suffered by his friend Blorna, who could find no ex planation for the whole affair and yet, "when I come to think about it," found it "not inexplicable, but almost logical." Since the case of Katharina Blwnwill, in any event, remain more or less fictitious, because of the attitude of the accused and the very awkward position of her defense counsel Blorna, such minor and very human lapses in conduct as those committed 8 THE LOST HONOR OF KA THARINA BLUM by Hach may be not only understandable but for givable. The minor sources, some of greater and some of lesser significance, need not be mentioned here, since their respective implication, involvement, relevancy, bias, bewilderment, and testimonywill all emerge from this report. 2 If this report-since there is such frequent mention of sources-should at times be felt to be "fluid," we beg the reader's forgiveness: it has been unavoidable. To speak of "sources" and "fluidity" is to preclude all possibility of composition, so perhaps we should instead introduce the concept of "bringing together," of "conduction," a concept that should be clear to anyone who as a child (or even as an adult) has ever played in, beside, or with puddles, draining them, linking them by channels, emptying, diverting, and rerouting them until the entire available puddlewater potential is brought together in a collective channel to be diverted onto a different level or perhaps even duly rerouted in orderly fashion into the gutter or drain provided by the local authorities. The sole ob jective here, therefore, is to effect a kind of drainage. Clearly a due process of order! So whenever this ac count appears to be in a fluidstate in which differences in and adjustments to level play a part, we ask the reader's indulgence, since there will always be stop- 9 HEINRICH BoLL pages, blockages, siltings, unsuccessful attempts at con duction, and sources "that can never come together," not to mention subterranean streams, and so on, and so on. 3 The first facts to be presented are brutal: on Wednes day, February 2Q....l9'M· on the eve of the traditional operung of Carnival, a young woman of twenty-seven leaves her aparnnent in a certain city at about 6:45 P.M. to attend a dance at a private home. Four days later, after a dramatic-there is no get ting around the word (and here we have an example of the various levels that permit the stream to fiow) turn of events, on Sunday evening at almost the same hour (to be precise, at about 7:04 P.M.) she rings the front door bell at the home of Walter Moeding, Crime Commissioner, who is at that moment engaged, for professional rather than private reasons, in disguising himself as a sheikh, and she declares to the stanled Moe ding that at about 12: 15 noon that day she shot and killed Werner Totges, reporter, in her apanment, and would the Commissioner kindly give instructions for her front door to be broken down and the reponer to be "removed"; for her part, she has spent the hours between 12:15 noon and 7:oo P.M. roaming around town in search of a remorse that she has failed to find; furthermore, she requests that she be arrested, she would like to be where her "dear Ludwig" is. 10 THE LOST HONOR OF KATHARINA BLUM Moeding, to whom the young person is known from various interrogations and who feels a certain sympathy toward her, does not doubt her statement for a moment; he drives her in his own car to police headquarters, informs his superior, Chief Crime Com missioner Beizmenne, of the situation, has the young woman escorted to a cell, and fifteen minutes later meets Beizmenne outside her front door, where a police commando breaks down the door and finds the young woman's statement confirmed. Let there not be too much talk about blood here, since only necessary differences in level are to be re garded as inevitable; we would therefore direct the reader to television and the movies and the appropri ate musicals and gruesicals; if there is to be something fluid here, let it not be blood. Perhaps attention should merely be drawn to certain color effects: the mur dered Totges was wearing an improvised sheikh costume concocted from a rather worn sheet, and the effect of a lot of blood on a lot of white is well known; a pistol is then sure to act almost like a spray gun, and since in this instance the costume was made out of a large square of white cotton, modem paint ing or stage effects would seem to be more appro priate here than drainage. So be it. Those are the facts. II HEINRICH Bt>LL 4 For a time it was considered not unlikely that Adolf Schonner, press photographer, who was also found shot but not until Ash Wednesday, in a wooded area to the west of the festive city, was likewise a victim of Blum; later, however, when a cenain chronological order had been established for the course of events, this "proved to be unfounded." A cab driver stated later that he had driven Schonner disguised as a sheikh and a young female person dressed as an Andalusian woman to this very wood. But Totges had been shot Sunday noon, whereas Schonner had not been killed until Tuesday noon.

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