THE CLOWN by Heinrich Boll

INTRODUCTION

Heinrich Boll was born into a catholic pacifist household that apposed the Nazis and he refused to join the Hitler Youth. He was apprenticed to a bookseller before going to Cologne University to study German. Conscripted to serve in WW II, he was wounded 4 times and also contracted Typhoid Fever.   He was captured by the Americans in 1945.

After the war he worked in his family’s cabinet business and then in a municipal statistical bureau which he did not enjoy.  He became a full-time writer at the age of 30 and published his first book, The Train was on Time in 1949.

While he did receive much acclaim, he was also unpopular with conservatives in Germany because of his criticism of the Catholic Church and the Christian Democratic Party.  He remained a devoted Catholic but was very critical of the hierarchy and could not forgive the Concordat of 1933 between the Vatican and the Nazis. He felt that it had given international legitimacy to the Nazi regime at an early stage of its development.   The conservatives even tried to diminish his Nobel Prize by saying that they are only given to “liberal left-wing radical” authors.

His works constantly reminded the Germans of what they did. He was angry that many who worked with the Nazis prospered after the war. He also felt that the German population showed little remorse about events before and during the war.    This sense of estrangement from the general population is illustrated in the short story When the War was over. His protagonist is on a train going home with many others who have been released from a prisoner of war camp.  An old woman gives him a loaf of bread as the train passes through a station and he shares it with the others in his rail car. But then he finds that he cannot bring himself to eat with them.

He was deeply rooted in Cologne and was strongly affected by the Nazi takeover of the city and also by what he saw of the destruction after the war.  He would have preferred that the damaged cathedral be left as it was as a reminder to the people of what they had done and its consequences.  He saw all the reconstruction as a way of burying the immediate past and their responsibility for it.

His villains are always figures of responsibility who show conformism, lack of courage, a self-satisfied attitude and abuse of power.

Heinrich Boll died in 1985. Are his writings still relevant today?   A new generation is now in charge in Germany who are not tainted by National Socialism and likely do not feel any sense of responsibility for what happened – and this may facilitate a revision of the past. And is the Catholic/Protestant/Atheist issue still front and center today?  Would the “Clown” find new belief systems to escape from or to caricature?  I am inspired by Heinrich Boll’s work to recognize likely parallels. But first let us watch The Clown in action. 

THE CLOWN

Why is the main character a clown? Is the mask of eccentricities allowable to a clown a way to show up and caricature post Nazi Germany?  The novel shows the Protestants to be richer but the Catholics to be setting the political agenda and moral issues.    He is an atheist caught between these groups. His anti-authority stand is displayed in his refusal to get the certificate required to marry a Catholic.   But this seemingly trivial stand causes him to lose the girl he loves.

Marie could have been happy with him in a less rigid society.   However, she cannot question her upbringing and Catholic teaching for his sake. She has been convinced that kindness and honesty can only been founded on a belief in God.

PARALLELS

What “certificates” would be required to justify human relations? Would the “clown” have questions about the validity of the COVID vaccine?

And if he falls in love with Marie 2, what inviolable convictions will he have to face? As it happens, she is passionate about saving the world from global warming. But if he wonders about the efficacy of windmills and solar panels, she is shocked. How can the “clown” joke about world extinction? And when it is obvious, isn’t it, that Russian gas is at the source of all evil, (and as is their wont, they always start wars) how can he question facts established by reasonable, duly elected leaders?

In short, what would be the “Clown’s” job today?