The political dimensions of 'The lost honor of Katharina Blum'.
Published: 1977
Language: eng
Subjects: Bo ll, Heinrich, -- 1917-1985.
Notes: Offprint from : New German critique. 1977. no. 12. pp.75-84.(Milwaukee).
Table of contents: title: Heinrich Boll's new novel is a literary tour de force that turns the mystery story on its head and names the killer at the outset, leading the reader back from and act of violence to the complex search for truth.; title: Katharina Blum- young, attractive, bright, sensitive-fall in love at a carnival party 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 cruelly exploited subject of cheap newspaper sensationalism. Paraded across the front pages of a big-city daily newspaper, portrayed 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 service, she shoots the offending journalist and then rings the front doorbell of the chief criminal investigator to request her own arrest.; title: The actual story is reconstructed step by step in a narrative report which follows the drama with irony and sympathy, disclosing a vast panorama of human relationships.; title: The whole is a masterful comment on the law and the press, the labyrinth of social truth, and the press, the inevitable collision of fact and fiction.