num_pages: 140
description: A bright, sensitive young woman, Katharina Blum, falls in love with a young radical lawbreaker in flight from the police. Her brief association with a hunted man brings her under police surveillance and makes her the exploited subject of cheap newspaper sensationalism. Portrayed on the front pages of a big-city daily as a whore, an atheist, a Communist sympathizer, she becomes the target of anonymous phone calls and letters, sexual advances and threats. Out of an anger so remorseless and a violation of integrity so profound that it overcomes even her will to survive, she shoots the offending journalist and then turns herself into the chief crimial investigator.The actual story is reconstructed step by step in a narrative report which follows the drama with irony and sympathy, gradually disclosing a vast panorama of human relationships. The whole is a masterful comment on the law and the press, the labyrinth of social truth, and the inevitable collision of fact and fiction.
language: English
title: The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, Or How Violence Develops and Where it Can Lead
titlecomplete: The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, Or How Violence Develops and Where it Can Lead
characters: Erwin Beizmenne, Katharina Blum, Werner Tötges, Trude Blorna, Ludwig Götten, Walter Möding, Alois Sträubleder, Dr. Hubert Blorna, Else Woltersheim
genres: Fiction, German Literature, School, Literature, Classics, Novels, Nobel Prize, Germany, 20th Century, Crime
ratings_count: 15086
places: Germany
publisher: McGraw-Hill