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Chapter 36
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
Before returning to the story’s present (Saturday), it’s important to revisit one last detail of Friday evening and Friday night at Miss Woltersheim’s, during which Konrad Beiters put on some records and tried to get Katharina to dance to cheer her up. Miss Woltersheim and Beiters try to get Katharina to make decisions about what to do going forward, like whether she should consider getting a new apartment, but Katharina is evasive and only mumbles about wanting to make a Carnival costume.
Once more, the narration draws attention to its manipulation of time, explicitly drawing the reader’s attention to the report’s many flashbacks and flashforwards to emphasize the constructed (and therefore fictional, or at least subjective) nature of the report. In other words, the narrator’s account of Katharina’s days leading up to the murder, though based in fact, is still somewhat biased, in that the narrator is making conscious, intentional choices about the facts they include and omit and in which order they relate those facts to the reader, all of which contributes to the reader’s sympathy (or lack thereof) for Katharina and her plight.
Active
Themes
Later, Katharina is so exhausted that she falls fast asleep, not even waking to the telephone ringing at 2:30 in the morning. Beiters takes the phone from Miss Woltersheim and briefly speaks to the person on the other end before hanging up the telephone. It’s now that Miss Woltersheim and Beiters decide to shield Katharina from the subsequent News articles.
Active
Themes
