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Chapter 5
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
The News, the murdered men’s employer, reacted “oddly” to the murders, enthusiastically printing front-page stories about the killings. The murder of a journalist, after all, is “more important” than the murder of, say, a businessman. Other newspapers reacted similarly, with one even calling Tötges “a victim of his profession.”
Katharina Blum is translated from German. The News is a translation of Der Zeitung—which was coincidentally (or perhaps not coincidentally at all) the name of a real tabloid newspaper in West Germany at the time (and to this day). Böll begins the novel with a disclosure that the name is mere coincidence, but the implication is that readers are meant to take this disclosure ironically. Therefore, readers should interpret the critical view of tabloid news that Böll presents in the novel as criticism of Der Zeitung and of abuses of the free press in West Germany in general at the time of the novel’s publication.
Active
Themes
