Heinrich Boll's 1974 novella "The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum" can be read as an easy indictment of the press's propensity to choose sides, sway public opinion and even ruin lives. The book recounts how a young woman and those near to her lose control of their lives when she confesses to the shooting of a journalist whose aggressive investigation destabilizes her.
Other less obvious readings are also possible. In fact the first chapter, which is only one page long (in a short book made up of 58 chapters) sets the stage for multiple conversations, one of which takes the novel out of its manifestly political and sociological context to explore questions of form and narration. These investigations ultimately lead to epistemological considerations: what can we as readers actually know? what is the truth? how do we get at it?
The novel begins with the narrator (journalist? friend? neighbour? concerned citizen? novelist? — we never find out) naming his sources, which include the transcripts of the police investigation and the names of the defense attorney and the public prosecutor. Then, before the third sentence ends, the conceit of impartiality breaks down because he reveals that his “account” is “supplemented” with unofficial and ultimately subjective material acquired from the public prosecutor who is a childhood friend of the defense attorney, a man who is, bizarrely enough, implicated in the life of his client, the accused. The narrator himself admits that “the case of Katharina Blum will...remain more or less fictitious”.
In this novella, police station truth will vie with courtroom truth which will vie with opinion coloured by loyalty, mixed with the claim that truth is not transparent and if it is at all available, it is available through the creative act. Truth is not singular or self evident and Boll tells us elsewhere that it “must be assembled” through language which is “inexact”. He writes,“The fact that a word has a multiplicity of meaning, not only within a language but also outside of it, makes it important to try to get to the root of words and language. That is the constant striving of literature. The absolute meaning exists somewhere; we just haven't found it yet.”
The telling of Katharina Blum’s story is a successful experiment in modern, committed, philosophically driven literature.
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