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Volume 6, Number 2 (1982) reprinted by permission Legal Studies Forum THE WORKINGS OF LAW IN KAFKA'S DER PROZESS AND BOLL"S DIE VERLORENE DER KATHARINA BLUM HEIDI E. FALETTI * subjective vision of Franz Kafka's metaphysical novel, Der Prozess (The Trial) and the journalistic flux of Heinrich Boll's post-war narrative satire, Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum (1974) (The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum). Both narratives are focused on the arrest and persecution of an individual based on a foregone conclusion. On his thirtieth birthday, Josef K., a high-ranking bank official, is arrested one morning in bed for no specific reason and is hounded by an enigmatic court until his assassination in a quarry. Katharina Blum, a twenty-seven-year old domestic aide, and, fortuitously, the one-night lover of a young man reputed to have engaged in outlaw activities, is imprisoned and interrogated. Consequently, a nationally-read scandal sheet, the News, distorts the leaked- out interrogation material, thus inciting Katharina to murder its editor. Appropriately, the subtitle of the narrative is Or: How Violence Develops and Where It. Can Lead.1 The legal proceedings of both narratives are reflective of the mentality of modern capitalistic society, but each presents this exploitative mentality from a different angle of vision. Kafka's mythic approach emphasizes the law court as an ongoing process of metaphysical self-condemnation which could happen to anyone. Boll uses the law in a more realistically particular way by locating it, in the form of interrogations and journalism, satirically within the society of contemporary Germany. In Kafka's novel, set in a metropolis reminiscent of early twentieth-century Prague, the focus is on society's values within the soul of Josef K. As his detached, assertive and inconsiderate treatment of others suggest consistently, he is guilty of leading a dehumanized existence. As such, he is a characteristic member of modern society. However, he refuses to acknowledge his guilt on his own. Instead of searching within himself for the Law, he submits to the superficial law of the outside world-its interrogations and intimidating evasiveness. In this way, he surrenders to society's control over himself and to an escape from his own responsibilities for his behavior. The mysterious legal proceedings, which he accepts passively, are metaphysical constructs, however detailed, rather than documentary portrayals of outside society. As aspects of a dreamlike vision, they pictorialize his weakened forces of self- indictment and thus his inner reliance on the essence of society's absurd, anonymous legalities-based on necessity rather than truth.2 Certainly, then, he is society. Its legal attitudes are his. Finally, they become his punishment for failure to acknowledge freely his own guilt, as the transgressor becomes his own sin.3 In Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum, the proceedings are presented from various reported points of view rather than concentrated in the subjective vision of one protagonist. The fictional narrator links these points of view together, thus allowing them to "flow" and become muddied, in order to provide insight into the absurd symbiosis of society and the law. Although such a symbiosis has metaphysical significance as evidence of bondage to the material world, as do the happenings in Der Prozess, this union appears in the form of current events through documentary narrative reportage. Katharina Blum is not dominated by the existential guilt of K., but appears mainly as a responsible, morally integrated, and sincere individual. It is precisely this trait that makes the young woman a target. She is judged a priori, not only because of her highly discriminating mode of life. Such a life style involved a rejection of virtually all men because of her desire for mutuality and love and friendship. Certainly, the law officials and the scandal sheet, the News (die Zeitung), together with its readership, exact vengeance on the threat Katharina poses to their norms, self-image, and perpetuity in power. With respect to the differences and similarities of both twentieth-century narratives, written in the same language, it should be constantly borne in mind that they both explore the law as it menaces the individual in modern society. Essentially, Boll's novel picks up a legacy which Kafka's Der Prozess bequeathed to German literature, namely a fictional concern for how confrontation with the law can alienate individuals from themselves. For Josef K., bondage to the law as a mental state is revealed by the legal process. For Katharina Blum, the law involves phases of terroristic conditioning, which almost but not quite destroy her unified personality, in that they incite her to commit murder. A proper understanding of the unique idea of law in both stories requires, for each narrative, an overview of its main configuration of events, and an exploration of its integration of legal procedures into the fateful life of its protagonist. The primary situation in Der Prozess is that of an individual enslaved by society. Such bondage is expressed in the central metaphor of the Court, which permeates the omnipresent cityscape of K.'s psyche. The Court gives imagistic unity to this narrative-always manifest as a fictional fantasy of modern reality, rather than a randomly concrete stream-of-consciousness. The workings of the pervasive court can well be analogous to the bureaucracies of Austria-Hungary at the beginning of the twentieth century; they are, moreover, strikingly akin to other modern red-tape establishments, such as universities, department stores, banking systems, and governments of the Western world. The unfreedom of K., that is, his inability as a socialized human being to acknowledge his guilt, is projected into the totalitarian persecution to which he is subjected. The very nature of the guilt itself has been interpreted variously as nameless Angst, existential guilt, or original sin. The concept of original sin is, within the framework of Der Prozess, a viable one and accords with Kafka's own statement in his sketch, "He:" Original sin, the ancient wrong that man has committed,A further dimension of inherent guilt can be recognized in an absence, on the part of K., of brotherhood with other human beings. He constantly values people on the basis of their status rather than as fellow humans, feels superior to those "beneath" him, is brutally self-assertive, irritatedly misinterprets occasional acts of kindness, and fails generally to show solicitude for others, as he seeks, but at the same time, circumvents, justice. Indeed, T. Ziolkowski's insight that Kafka uses the process of motivation in the depiction of K., the projections of one's own guilt onto the world outside in order to deny it, provides a plausible basis for understanding the protagonist's evasiveness.5 However, the world outside is really a subjective one, an interiorized construct of K.'s self-projections. Essentially, it is not necessarily a real world transformed by his idea of it; it provides images for his own dreamlike efforts at self-assessment, which in their complexity and evasiveness mirror modern bureaucracies in which the citizen and society can truly be one. When K. wakes up one morning to his arrest in his bedroom, just as the commercial traveler in Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis) woke to find himself conspicuously transformed into a bug, he is awakening to an awareness of a past life of personal inadequacies. His existence hitherto has materialized into a state of arrested development in the domains of sexuality, ethical responsibility, and personal self-fulfillment-hence, his arrest. His moment of awareness is fleeting and feeble, for he has already begun to rationalize his situation in a defensive and bureaucratic way in the novel's first sentence: "Someone must have traduced K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning."6 Henceforth, he thoughtlessly causes the misfortunes of others while seeking outside help. His attempted avoidance of knowledge of guilt brings no lasting benefit whatsoever and ultimately brings about his self-condemnation and execution. His main concern is for expediency-at the bank, during the sporadic episodes of his trial, and even in his personal relationships. Some of the major events of K.'s quest for escape from guilt, which all point to his death by despair, illuminate his fundamental egoism. Right after his arrest, he seeks the advice of his attractive apartment-neighbor, Fraulein Burstner, whose room had been misused by the self-projected functionaries of his arrest. He re-enacts the absurdities of the persecution despite her fatigue, and finally afflicts her with forcible advances. Later, when K. has the opportunity to indict the court proceedings with great flourish at an interrogation, his rhetoric is interrupted by a shriek, uttered by a man assaulting the washer-woman who had evinced an interest in K. on his way to the interrogation chamber. This event reflects the earlier interview with Fraulein Burstner, when he mocked the arrest, tried to justify himself, and assaulted her spontaneously. K. attempts to use these women, and then experiences them as somehow humiliating to himself (the shrieking man). The free responsibility which Fraulein Burstner assumes for her own life distances her from the pointless existence of K. The latter's persistent defensiveness is an effort to mask his egoistic striving, particularly profiled in the curiously connected professional and erotic spheres of his life. In both, K. displays an assertiveness over others which obviates genuine communication or mutual love. For example, his thoughtless criticism of the warders, Franz and Willem, at the interrogation, brings about their everlasting whipping in the bank's lumber-room, which he is too cowardly to prevent because of the presence of other bank employees outside. His merely selfish involvement in extricating himself from guilt can be noted especially in his court intrigues, his addictions to obfuscating and irrelevant analyses of his case on the part of the lawyer, Huld (whom he at last brutally dismisses), and the lure of supposedly helpful women. The hope invested in the "influence" of these women, such as the washer-woman and Huld's maid, Leni, reflects K.'s own investment in self-prostitution as a means of removing himself from guilt by placating the judges. A brief moment of depressing clarity is provided by the artist, Titorelli, who informs K. of the three sole possible outcomes of a Court trial: acquittal, which cannot be documented as ever having transpired; ostensible acquittal; and indefinite postponement. The inevitability of K.'s predicament is accentuated by the claustrophobic atmosphere of Titoreni's attic and later by the increasing bouts of fog, snow, rain and darkness in the sundry reaches of the city where K. inquires and rationalizes. Ultimately, the key to his entire flight from insight is offered by the parable of the gatekeeper and the man from the country, as presented by the prison chaplain, who straightaway recognizes K. while the latter waits in a cathedral for an Italian businessman whom he plans to take sightseeing. K., however, fails to grasp its import. By telling this parable, the chaplain tries to deflect K. from chasing vainly after outside help and hopes to direct him to his innermost self, the source of guilt and potential insight into that guilt. According to the parable, a man from the country seeks admission to the realm of the Law, but his fear of the gatekeeper, who guards the entrance and says that he cannot admit the man at this moment, prevents him from direct entry into that realm on his own volition. Through the years, the man continually seeks entry. He attempts to bribe not only the gatekeeper, but the fleas on his coat as well, for perhaps they might be moved to influence that formidable guard with the Tartar beard. Finally, when the man from the country is too decrepit, almost divested of hearing and sight, to make further entreaties to enter, the gatekeeper informs him that this gate was destined only for him and that it is now going to be closed. In elucidating the parable, the chaplain affirms outright that Josef K. is seeking only outside aid and that this is clearly the wrong kind of help. The various interpretations the priest offers for consideration suggest that the gatekeeper, possibly simple-minded, duty-bound, and ignorant of the real nature of the Law he tries to serve, is merely one typical form of the outside authority one might be tempted to turn to in order to evade one's own responsibility for guilt and choice. Although there is no way to escape the responsibility for guilt, one might, by acknowledging that guilt, escape dependence on the tyranny of arbitrary authority figures. At no point is entry forbidden by anyone other than the gatekeeper, who appears as a form of manipulative power, without perhaps really meaning to be so. K. believes, in the gathering darkness of the cathedral, that the man from the country is deceived and implies that he is thus helpless: I said the man is deceived. If the doorkeeper is clear-The possibility of direct entry through the gate by means of true self-awareness without reliance on anyone never occurs to K. He is as dependent on worldly might, whether in the form of the gatekeeper or the pompous judges painted by Titorelli, as was Georg Bendemann obedient to his vainglorious and feeble father who instructed Georg to drown himself in Kafka's "Das Urteil" ("The Judgment"). K.'s path toward existential suicide is realized when he submits to his own execution by two black-clad comedian types who, before stabbing him, accord him the abortive chance to kill himself. At this point, it may well be asked how "the law" of Der Prozess can exist in a dreamlike state. Is it meant as a symbol of the shortcomings of mundane law, the failure of modern humankind to perceive the true moral Law? Does it have any objective relationship with modern legal arrangements? Both questions can be answered affirmately. The defective legality of modern bureaucracies provides the pictorial and ideological substance for the story of K.'s inner psyche, which reflects the essence of actual social worlds. His rationalization of his guilt mirrors the morally evasive methods of institutions more concerned with their own subsistence and continuity than with external goals, truth or brotherhood. In "real" life, individuals can become enmeshed and believe in a maze of legal strictures; one can accept terrorism against oneself as well as others as a paradoxical means of escaping lucid thought and recognition of responsibility-as the road of least resistance. In this connection, it might be suggested, as does J. P. Stern8 convincingly, that, in this novel, the ordinary attributes of the judiciary and police are reversed. Kafka himself, as the lawyer for an insurance company, had thoroughly understood what legal entities were supposed to be: responsible, thoughtful, ethical. Here, the judiciary, namely the Court, and the police, vaguely indicated by the persons who arrest K., have a totalitarian aspect; they mechanically pass on and execute a conviction of guilt based on a foregone conclusion. Mere arraignment means conviction from which acquittal is essentially impossible. The totalitarian, rubber-stamping type of legality in Der Prozess gives no reason for its persecution, but bases its activities on the mere fact that a particular person is alive, whose necessary death is foreordained. It is further maintained that Kafka's novel, written in the period before the First World War, anticipated the advent of National Socialism and the Gestapo state, within which a person could be adjudged guilty a priori and dispatched without ostensible reason. The negative ontology of guilt as a state of being, forcing arraignment to be equal to conviction, are the conditions which K. faces under the jurisdiction of the mysterious court. Such conditions are not unlike those indicated by the chief public prosecutor of the People's Courts in a letter dated July 19, 1940, to the Reich Minister of Justice: Whenever acquittal is consequent upon proof of innocence,moreover, Stern points out that the chief of the Reich Security Office informed its officials three years after this letter (following the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich) that law proceedings, as opposed to summary trials, were to transpire only "if it has been ascertained through previous inquiry that the court will pronounce sentence of death."10 The totalitarian nature of Josef K.'s self-projections, which are remarkably similar to the proceedings outlined in documents of National Socialism, and are, moreover, suggestive of analogous measures obtaining in other modern dictatorships, is expressed in a maze of arbitrary legal procedures. The very precinct of the bank where K. is climbing the corporate ladder before the onset of the trial, is the metaphysical testimony of his own brute need for an outside authority. The legal perspective of Der Prozess is based on K.'s conflict, as a divided self, between the moral Law of humanity and an arbitrary legal justice which has nothing to do with real justice. His passive submission to legal justice and its values estranges him progressively from the fraternal acceptance of others as equals. He thus becomes a sacrificial victim of his own bondage to bourgeois society's temporal law, which has become fused with his own consciousness. The society represented by the law in Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum is that of West Germany in 1974, the time of the narrative's publication. In a sense, this post-war society, sensation-seeking and monolithically conformist, might be regarded to be as totalitarian and "Kafkaesque" as the terroristic vision formed by K.'s self-projec t ions. Its persecuting powers inhere in the symbiosis between the legal proceedings and the scandal sheet, a daily newspaper which exploits and distorts the information leaked out from the interrogation. This newspaper is markedly similar to the one so rampant in Germany today, namely the conservative and flagrantly gossipy Bild-Zeitung. Such a publication certainly reminds one of the National Inquirer, the Globe the Star, or the Examiner, whose headlines are visible at supermarket checkout counters throughout the United States. However, the coverage of the Bild-Zeitung, as a daily newspaper, is much more voluminous. It reports on major events-from so-called scandals to routine sports-with red headlines, lurid reportage, opinionated views, and splashy photographs. Heinrich Boll perceived this newspaper as an especially pernicious and fascistic one in its exploitation of the prosecution of the Baader-Meinhof gang of terrorists in Germany and in its manipulation of human lives and public opinion.11 Indeed, Boll refers to it significantly in a prefatory note to the narrative itself: Should the description of certain journalistic practicesThe narration covers four days, from Blum's first acquaintance with the outlaw Ludwig Gotten on a Wednesday to her shooting of the editor Werner Totges on a Sunday. The narrative form is the retrospective piecing together of a report by an anonymous author from the transcripts of the police interrogations, the attorney, and the public prosecutor, as well as other minor sources. Indeed, the whole report is based on the tracing of Blum's motivation to commit the deed, to allow an explanation to emerge as to why such a coolheaded person as Blum "not only planned the murder but also carried it out and, at the critical moment-one which she herself had engineered- not only seized the pistol but put it to use."13 Unlike the straightforward chronology of the 1975 film adaptation of Boll's narrative by Volker Schlondorff and Margaretha von Trotta, this entire low-key report is atemporal in much of its composition. It depicts events and dialogues in the form of cabaret-like caricatures, collages and flashbacks for an accenting of the absurd fluidity of the happenings--their siltings, blockages, and leakages. For purposes of analytic clarity, however, a brief chronological survey of the main events will be useful as a concrete background for the thematic dimensions of law as they relate to the persecution of Katharina Blum within the narrative texture itself. On February 20, 1974, on the Wednesday eve of the traditional opening of Carnival, a young woman of twenty-seven left her city apartment about 6:45 p.m. to attend a dance at a private home, where she danced all evening with Ludwig Gotten, a man she had never before met. This transpired under police surveillance, since Gotten was wanted for desertion from the army and for robbery. After she fell in love with Gotten that evening and he then spent the night with her, he absconded through the apartment's heat duct system which she had pointed out to him. She was taken from her abode for questioning the next day, and was photographed repeatedly from all sides by a representative of the News. As her background was recorded that Thursday at police headquarters, she recounted every detail meticulously. As a child, she had to do housework at an early age because her ailing father died early and her mother had only low-paying jobs as a cleaning woman. She was graduated from a school for home economics, married, contracted a severe aversion to her husband, and was divorced as the guilty party, resuming her maiden name. Eventually, she found a position as a domestic aide with Dr. and Mrs. Blorna, a lawyer and architect respectively, and also did accounting work for them. Because of their generous loans and her careful savings, she was able to amass enough money to buy a condominium. In the course of further questioning, it was insinuated that she must have known Gotten before the dance, an allegation which she denied. On Friday, she was questioned again in efforts to establish that she had known Gotten previously. On the same day, the News printed a headline story on Blum, using distortions of information which had obviously been leaked from the interrogation. Special emphasis was placed on her hometown pastor's designation of Blum's father as a Communist in disguise, on misquotations stemming from an interview forced on Hubert Blorna, on the insistence of a long-term involvement with Gotten, and on speculation about where she actually secured the money to buy her apartment. Blum was at a loss to understand how details of her interrogation could have been picked up by that newspaper and used as material for fraudulent statements. The public prosecutor hastened to tell her she was of justifiable public interest, a state she could have avoided had she not evidently helped Gotten to escape. On Saturday, the News printed its versions of interviews with Blum's ex-husband and her cancer- ridden mother, as well as remarks about the supposed leftist tendencies of Dr. and Mrs. Blorna. By Sunday, Blum's mother had died, ostensibly as a result of the interview by Werner Totges, the main journalist for the News, who had slipped into the hospital disguised as a painter. The Sunday edition of the News blamed Blum outright for her mother's death, since her mother had supposedly not survived the shock of confrontation with details of her daughter's affiliations. There were further sneering references to the Blorna's and the "reunion" between Ludwig Gotten and Katharina Blum. By then obscene and threatening mail and telephone calls had reached voluminous proportions. Thereupon, Blum arranged for an interview with Werner Totges in her apartment, whose interior had been ruined by her rage against her wrecked life. She borrowed a target- practice pistol from a friend and killed Totges as soon as he came to her apartment and propositioned her. After confessing the murder, she could look remorselessly to the future when she and her "dear Ludwig," who had by then been arrested, would be together again after the parallel expiration of their prison sentences. Certainly, Katharina Blum becomes convicted at first as a person by the law, the News, and the public. It is only after her vengeful murder of the editor of the News because of her lost honor, that an actual prison sentence becomes possible. Her initial arrest, impelled by the fact that she had spent the night with an outlaw, is the main issue of her persecution, beginning with the frantic paparazzo activities of the photographer from the News. Her arrest has links of similarity with the avidly observed arrest of Josef K., since they are both largely based on a foregone conclusion. Indeed, Katharina's affection for Gotten is so supremely deviant that it becomes automatically newsworthy, capable of attracting exploitative distortions and public threats. She is persecuted by the interrogators and the press, who cooperate with each other, primarily because of her preference for an outlaw over other "normal" men and her hitherto well-organized life of moral integrity and honesty. At the starting point of her persecution, during her arrest, Blum evinces short-lived feelings of triumph over mundane contingencies because of her love for Gotten. These feelings allow her to respond to the most vulgar insinuations with serene equanimity. When presumably asked in lewd terms by the Crime Commissioner Beizmenne if Gotten had made love to her, she apparently responded with casual calmness: "No, I wouldn't call it that."14 She loses her initial composure bit by bit through the abrasive procedures of the interrogation, whose main focus is on the unmasking of her private life-often under attack by means of obscene innuendos. Nevertheless, she attempts to maintain her pride and insularity by refusing breakfast and small talk. Her background proves disappointing to the leering and overly paternal Commissioner Beizmenne, who aims to subdue and frighten her, for it reveals a private life punctiliously organized and, formidably controlled. Such factors as the possibility of gentleman callers, and the enormous number of kilometers accumulated on Blum's speedometer-acquired during rainy nights of boredom, when she refused to frequent lurid discos and raunchy night spots-draw his attention, without, however, becoming incriminating in the final analysis. The News appropriates its information from the officers present at the interrogation, though they remain unidentified as sources. In so doing, the News continues what the interrogations had begun: the violation of a human soul for the gaining of power, for the destruction of a well-ordered life which is so threateningly different from the social norm. Certainly, the interrogation proceedings and the News are intimately linked in their aims. Their relationships with each other are essentially that of microcosm and macrocosm, for the News actually operates as an arm of the law which reaches outward to embrace the public sector. Accordingly, the following dominant topics of the interrogation are adapted by that daily newspaper and are endowed with a purely sensational significance in the distortions they receive: Blum's sordid family life; the pastor's suspicion that her father might have been a Communist; her mother's once drinking the sacristy wine, Blum's divorce from the textile worker, Brettloh, on the grounds that he made advances rather than expressed tenderness; her acquisition of a fashionable condominium despite her humble station in life; the many kilometers driven on rainy nights; the "gentleman" callers; the effects of her notoriety on her ailing mother; her devotion to Gotten that fateful evening; and her friendship with the Blorna's, the so-called leftists. The last item is especially "hot" in its import in light of the fact that Mrs. Blorna, designated as "Trude the Red," had designed the apartment complex with ducts through which Ludwig Gotten would escape to freedom. it becomes even more significant when Dr. Blorna becomes Blum's defense attorney for the murder charge. As Blum's life is systematically devastated by the terroristic power of the press, she can express at first only bewilderment as she reads the same issues of the News over and over. She is merely amazed at the sheer might of the publication to distort reports and involve the readers themselves in the persecution of an individual. Indeed, she wonders why the government does not do something to prevent the publication of such malicious slander and misrepresentation. Clearly, she is unaware of the fact that the mentality of the government is largely determined by the propensities of the mainstream of the populace which reads the News. Her own admission that everybody reads the News is testimony to the financial benefit accruing to the publication because of its terroristic persecution of unusual and thus suspect individuals. To be sure, up to the point of her arrest, all the forces of her being have been directed toward outrunning the sordid memories of her home life as a child-when she was nicknamed "pink Kathy" because of the suspected Communism of her father-and the remembrances of her marriage with the brutish Brettloh. Her condominium apartment, acquired through judicious loans and savings rather than through gentleman callers, is a characteristic sign of success in the post-war West German framework of values. Yet Katharina Blum's background in the interrogation reveals her to be so organically harmonious in her professional and private life that her very existence becomes threatening to a society whose "order" is only apparent rather than real. She is thus a menace to the collective self-esteem of the common run of society, which clings to decent appearances but dreads the discipline of true self-control. Indeed, the conduct of the journalists and readers of the News, with their threats and accusations, is as selfindulgent, exploitative, bureaucratic and totalitarian as is the behavior of the law officials in Der Prozess. Katharina Blum's hardwon initial immunity from ordinary vulgarity and disorder is based on a devotion to the maintenance of her own honor. This honor, however, is not founded on a desire to please society, but to be protected from its encroachments. Her reliance on honor turns out, in effect, to be a fatal flaw, probably more lethal, however, for the editor of the News than for her. The predatory needs of a consumer society, hungry for sensation and entertainment, compel her, in turn, toward the aggressive act of murder as an event of retribution for the loss of her honor. Despite her needs and compulsions, she does not have the same kind of dependence on society's norms, on the "outside" world, as are mythically suggested by the evasive strivings of Josef K. Katharina Blum, to the contrary, accepts or tries to accept conscious responsibility for her conduct. Moreover, her creative devotion to her work and her genuine, all-absorbing love for her "dear Ludwig" remove her from the status of a control freak of dehumanized ambition. Her attainment is one of ordered artistry, as can be noted in the way, for example, she sets a table with careful attention to detail and charming touches. In bookkeeping duties, she makes it possible, through her cheerful but efficient exactitude, for the Blornas to advance in their professions and to enjoy more free time, rather than being encumbered by the minutiae of household management. Certainly, the dilemma of Josef K. might be perceived as an underlying menace to Blum's existence in the light of her high regard for honor, since honor is based, at least partially, on external criteria. However, Blum would seem to be immune to K.'s total enslavement to the values of the societal world. Although she obviously cares what others think of her, her ability to devote willingly her efforts and time to her employers and to give of herself in love appear to remove her from the possibility of a condemned, mechanical existence, tantamount to that of K., an entire loss of integrity. As Blum continues to read the News day after day, her honor collapses into interiorized self-hate, which is volcanically manifested by her systematic destruction of her own apartment. Her sense of outrage, nourished by a constant supply of propositions by letter and telephone from the conservative readership of the News, culminates in the murder of the editor, Totges, after the death of her mother following an operation which had been precipitated by the impact of Totges's interview. The will to power, exemplified in the modus operandi of the newspaper, is expressed in its destructive concentration on Katharina's exceptional life style, which it attempts to besmirch and distort. This power-drive is epitomized most tellingly in the fateful interview between Blum and Totges in the ruined apartment. As she awaits the opportunity to kill him, he, dressed as a sheik, proceeds with the intention of seducing her in anticipation of her masochistic dependence on the power manipulations already exercised by the News. As he addresses her crudely with this intent, she shoots him dead. The News laments the hapless man as the victim of his profession and accords him a vastly disproportionate amount of space, whilst Blum, in a state of blissful hope, awaits the day of release from prison when she and Ludwig will be living together from the proceeds of a catering business. The Wednesday after Totges's death, the photographer of the News, Alfred Schonner, is found shot, the very same one who photographed Blum from all sides as she was arrested. His death was not caused by Blum at all, as is conclusively shown by the evidence, but Blum does not deign to deny it, merely remarking cryptically: "Yes, come to think of it, why not him too?"15 The whole of Blum's persecution, resting on the fact that her integrity marks her as a social deviant, is tied to the legal proceedings. The law nourishes the sensation-seeking press which serves the needs of an enormous readership avid for entertainment that can be easily consumed. The law is reflective of the social mediocrity and defends its interests. The Commissioner Beizmenne and certain law officers present at the interrogation, whose transcript Blum re-reads and corrects for rigor of expression, consistently sanction the freedom of the press. Furthermore, they insist on the immunity of those who divulge information, since Blum supposedly has become a part of the public domain. The sanctimonious assertion that Blum brought all this publicity on herself and thereby earned her deserved conspicuousness is repeatedly made. In this way, an attempt is made to shift the moral burden from the persecution to the victim herself. Widespread identification with the law and the newspaper on the part of the readership of the News, which according to Blum, includes everybody, makes possible such a defense of freedom of the press. The supreme relentlessness of the methodology of the News in its misrepresentation of leaked information can be discerned in the kinds of events it willfully dramatizes and distorts. All of them appear as possibilities only, unproven and always tenuous. But their effects, after the "news" is published, are altogether real. The Blornas, especially "Trude the Red," are constantly pilloried with the result that they truly lose their reputations. The News even has Hubert Blorna photographed in a pawn shop in order to gloat over his impecunious state, his fall from supposedly undeserved wealth as a "leftist" opportunist. Finally, a journalistic commentary is made on the death of Blum's mother. She died of the shock provided by Totges's forced entry, as he confronted her with news of her daughter's involvements in order to glean her response. Blum in great grief reflects on the intent of the News to deprive innocent people of health, honor, and reputation. But the News blames the death of Blum's mother on the conduct of Blum herself, without which her passing might not have transpired. There is no doubt that the actual event of the murder of Totges is a powerfully motivated deed. A recounting of it both begins and concludes the narrative, and there is no lack of specifying detail as to the manner, place, and motive of its realization. Blum feels no remorse after the deed, and takes full and shameless responsibility before society for having committed it. At the onset of the narrative, Blum rings the door bell at the home of Crime Commissioner Walter Moeding, the only officer who was truly kind to her during the interrogation and even wished to protect her from possible suicide in the wake of the newspaper stories. He is dressing himself as a sheik, for professional reasons. She explains that she has just killed the reporter, Werner Totges, in her apartment, has roamed around town in quest of a remorse she cannot find, and wishes to be arrested so that she can be where her "dear Ludwig" is. The account given at the close of the narrative is that of Hubert Blorna, who was given full details by Blum herself to constitute a report far more capacious than a mere encapsulated summary. After showing interest in target practice, a friend had lent her a pistol, and she had it ready for the arrival of Totges in her devastated apartment. It is not absolutely clear whether her real intent to shoot him had become a compulsion before he arrived, dressed as a sheik. However, after his coming, the need to take action became imperative. Blurn's narration of the event reflects a candid effort to understand what happened and why, and to assume full responsibility for every aspect of the editor's destruction: ...he had already come up in the elevator, and there heKatharina Blum had tried to locate Totges at a reporters' bar beforehand to take a look at him. She appears to have become essentially assimilated into the terroristic and dehumanizing process of journalistic sensation-seeking. As she assesses the reporter, before her total loss of control, she regards him voyeuristically as an image, an interesting item in the eyes of others, an object of dramatic impact: "bastard," "good looking," "you've seen his pictures." He becomes the victim of his own journalistic game. Blum, barely removed from the metaphysical fate of Josef K., but still in a viable state of self-awareness, tries to understand her motivation by reproducing it in detailed narrative form: "for a split second he looked at me in amazement, like in the movies when someone gets shot out of a clear blue sky. Then he fell to the floor, and I think he was dead."17 It is significant that she first confessed the crime to "Moedin'l, the police officer who had been so nice to me before." Her desire to relate to people by presenting herself exactly as she is, especially to those for whom she has conceived some affection, such as Moeding, or more profoundly, Ludwig Gotten, gives testimony to her need, however labored it may express itself, to avoid estrangement from the world and to be part of humanity. This need exists even after all that has happened to her. In retrospect, both novels represent the mass mentality of modern bourgeois society through the medium of the law. In Der Prozess, the law Court emerges as an interiorized acceptance of society's values and figures as an escape from a truly moral and responsible way of life. In Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum, society has an objective existence of its own, fictively external to that of the protagonist. Katharina is persecuted both for her outcast status and for her exemplary realization of society's own work ethic. Josef K. is totally assimilated into society's norms, whereas Blum rises above them through her sincere capacity to love in a recklessly genuine way. The absence of kindred feelings and the drive for exploitative power are both traits of capitalistic society depicted in both narratives, and both assume a clearly totalitarian aspect. These traits prevent Josef K. from perceiving the true moral Law; they hound Blum because of her essential integrity. The absurd vision of capitalistic society exemplified in these two portrayals of legal processes testify to the twentieth- century perpetuation of a narrative concern already begun at the time of emergent capitalism in nineteenth-century Western literature. Gogol's satires of bureaucratic St. Petersburg society, Balzac's infernal vision of money-obsessed Parisian habits in Scenes de la vie parisienne, and Tolstoy's rejection of the bourgeois bane of youthful peccadillos and social-climbing in the existence of a judge in The Death of Ivan Ilych are prime manifestations of this tradition. The treatments of the law in Der Prozess and Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina. Blum continue this legacy. Pennsylvania State University, Erie l. Heinrich Boll, The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, tr. Leila Vennewitz (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1975) and Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum (Munchen: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1978). 2. Cf. Martin Greenberg, The Terror of Art: Kafka and Modern Literature (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1968), 113-153. 3. This is a view both plausible and widely held. it is especially elucidated in Theodore Zielkowski, Dimensions of the Modern Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969). See also Walter T. Sokel. "Education for Tragedy," in Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis, trans. and ed. Stanley Corngold (New York: Bantam Books, 1972), p. 175, for well-articulated views on the identity of sin and punishment in The Metamorphosis. 4. Theodore Zielkowski, Dimensions of the Modern Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 44. 5. Ibid., p. 49. 6. Franz Kafka, The Trial (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963), p. 3, and Franz Kafka, Der Prozess (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1965), p. 9. 7. The Trial, p. 176, and Der Prozess, p. 262. 8. J. P. Stern," The Law of The Trial," On Kafka: Semi-Centenary Perspectives, ed. Franz Kuna (London: Elek Books, Ltd., 1976), pp. 22-41. 9. Ibid., p. 30. 10. Ibid. 11. For a good discussion of Boll's political and ontological position on this issue and for details of his article in Der Spiegel against the Bild-Zeitung, see especially Robert C. Conrad, Heinrich Boll (Boston: G. K. Hall & Co.), p. 5. 12. The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, p. 5, and Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum, p. 5. 13. The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, pp. 13 and 14, and Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum pp. 12 and 13. 14. The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, p. 19, and Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum, p. 18. 15. The Lost Honor, p. 11, and Die verlorene Ehre, p. 11. 16. The Lost Honor, pp. 137-138, and Die verlorene Ehre, p. 120 17. The Lost Honor, p. 138, and Die verlorene Ehre, p. 120. 18. The Lost Honor, p. 140, and Die verlorene Ehre p. 122. |
