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Chapter 33
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Ethics in Journalism
Truth, Lies, and Narrative
Class, Hierarchy, and Exploitation
Dignity and Compassion
Summary
Analysis
Miss Woltersheim and Beiters escort Katharina back to her apartment. Undercover officers, one dressed as a sheikh and the other dressed as an Andalusian woman, watch them from afar. Katharine goes straight to her mailbox, desperate to see if Götten has contacted her and apparently discovering that he has not. The phone rings almost immediately once they walk through the door. Katharina picks it up and hears an unfamiliar voice on the other end calling her a “filthy, cowardly bitch.” Miss Woltersheim ends the call and then carefully keeps the phone off the hook. Katharina looks through her mail and finds nasty postcards and letters. Some are crude, while others accuse her of being immoral or a communist.
Recall that Carnival festivities are ongoing, so the undercover officers’ rather indiscreet-seeming (for 1970s West Germany, anyway) costumes in fact blend right into festivalgoers, many of whom would be wearing “costumes.” Upon Katharina’s return home, the full impact of the News’s defamatory stories starts to become clear, with Katharina receiving hateful and threatening letters and phone calls from people whose sole knowledge of her comes from the misleading, cruel stories about her they’ve read in a tabloid paper.
Active
Themes
Fortunately, Miss Woltersheim intercepts a letter that Katharina’s neighbors apparently slipped under the door before Katharina could read it—in the letter, the neighbor berates Katharina for turning down his sexual propositions and threatens to “force [his] happiness on” her.
Active
Themes
