Resumo de Die Verlorene Ehre Der Katharina Blum

Title: ?The Lost Honor of Katherina Blum? by Heinrich Boell, Germany.

With this story Heinrich Boell continues the storytelling style of
his novel ?Group Portrait with Lady?. The premise is a woman's
existence who has to move in a complex society.
For this purpose Boell paints a panorama of a society with a wide
variety of characters: representatives of the tabloid press, corporate
giants, labour, the churches, the state.

The center figure is a young woman, Katharina Blum, who
accidentally gets implicated in a harmless criminal case: she provides
residence for a deserter from the German army.

A tabloid newspaper inflates this fact into a sensational crime.
Katharina feels her reputation is ruined and shoots the author of the
story dead.

This case is reconstructed and analyzed by Boell, factually and psychologically.

The story unfolds before the backdrop of Germany at the beginning
of the 1970s, a time when the notorious radical leftist Baader-Meinhof
group is active. The aim of this group, which liked to call itself ?The
New Left? is to transform the bourgeois West German society into a
socialist one. First they try teach-ins at colleges and universities
and actions within the democratic political institutions. But their
goal becomes ever more unattainable in the neo-capitalist
?Wirtschaftswunder?, the seemingly unending economic post-war boom of
the Federal Republic. So they try criminal methods: bank robberies,
bombings, assassinations and jailbreaks. Terrorism.

Their actions created division and fear in the German population,
to the point of hysteria. This was exploited by a sensationalist press.

At the end most members of the ?gang? as the tabloids like to call
them, get caught and both Ulrike Meinhof and Andreas Baader die under
mysterious circumstances in jail.

Boell rejects the simplistic generalizations of the boulevard
press. At the time he writes articles like ?Does Ulrike want Clemency??
(he uses her first name, because she used to be a writer colleague
herself) and ?Safe Conduct? and calls the zeal with which the gang
members are persecuted ?naked Fascism. Injurious Lies. Scum...?

The narrative consists of 58 chapters and is structured like a
reportage. A narrator who chooses this form wants to project an air of
objectivity and realism. The foundation for this are police
interrogation transcripts, attorneys' and prosecutors' briefs and
notes.

The plot evolves in the span of only 4 days. The reader asks
him/herself how it was possible that the perpetrator is driven to
murder in such a short timespan. Later Katharina roams the city in
search of repentance but says she did not find any.
We note that Boell himself never calls her perpetrator or murderer.
The subject of the story is not the crime, but which motives could
drive a harmless, normal person like Katherina to such a devious deed,
or as the subtitle suggests, how violence is instigated.

In the following chapters the character traits of Katherina are
described and the emotions of the author become more and more
discernible. The narrator suffers together with his protagonista. The
pseudo-objective narrative becomes more and more sentimental and
melancholic. Boell seems to identify with his heroine and generates
understanding and sympathy for the young woman.

(Translator Jerry Hoss' note: The book is in print in many
languages and was also made into a major motion picture in Germany. --
Hoss is a native German speaker and well published writer, in English
too. He knew both his colleagues Heinrich Boell and Ulrike Meinhof
personally.-- Hoss is available for major and minor writing, editing
and translating assignments via mail to fewocal-at-yahoo.com)

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