T., W., L., B., P., and Suffering

IF you are in the business of judging people--and Heinrich Boll is--then you had better be precise. If you feel guilty for the war crimes of your Nazi countrymen, you won't work it out by heaping blame on the girl who wove wreathes for dead Party bosses or on the man who has lost an eye and a leg for Germany and filched gold teeth from American corpses for himself. You had better plot dates and crimes, X's and Y's, and allegations against counter-allegations, until you determine who, in the sum of suffering, has done what to whom, and who is innocent. Only that kind of Fact, Boll reminds himself with the self-flagellation of exactitude, can inform correct judgement.

Consider, then the life-history of Leni Pfeiffer, who was in her early twenties during the war years and whose experiences of the late 1930s and 40s are bound up--she is a German citizen--with the progress of the Third Reich. There are plenty of witnesses to Leni's development, but Heinrich Boll would certainly have trusted none of them with the narration of Group Portrait With Lady, his book about Leni. The man he does empower, as persona, to find the facts about Leni is a late-middle-aged man who identifies himself as the Author, or the Au., and who, with an attachment to Leni and an obsession for detail, tirelessly pursues the truth.

The Au. is, admittedly, a sentimental man whose confessed fondness for Leni fuels his excavation of her past and who confesses, in a defensive way late in the narrative, that he is concerned with what Virgil called Lacrymae rerum, or the quantity of suffering/tears that is endemic to life. That is about as generalized as the Au. ever gets about his pursuit. The rest of the time he simply measures and records, indefatigably, such essentials as the number of air-raids over Germany in 1944 during which Leni found time to have intercourse with a secret Russian lover, and the number of seconds that Leni once prolonged a particularly "deathly" silence by painstakingly washing out a coffee cup.

But the Au. does not stop with interviews and superficial calculations concerning Leni's whereabouts and occupation. He must quantify much more metaphysical occurences, and for this purpose develops a code near the start of his narrative. Tears, Weeping, Laughing, Beatitude, Pain and Suffering are all human intangibles that he knows he must reckon into his Factual account if he would emerge with a judgement. And so T., W., L., B., P., and S. are all defined briefly but methodically, and suubsequently designated by their initials, as useful coordinates for plotting the lacrymae rerum of any one of the clump of characters he has exhumed in the course of his research.

BOLL did not produce this Au. as a satire. Obsession with fact and quantification is a German neurosis, he indicates, and the image of Nazi Germany that this methodology produces is neither dry nor statistical. It is spirited and ironic, yielding intense descriptions of the Pain and occasional Beatitude of a collection of domestic victims of the war--of their collective Suffering. The Au.'s doggedness is of the same guilt-ridden stripe as the repetitive and brutal naturalism of Gunter Grass: that, if it is too simple to condemn Nazi Germany with bombastic self-righteousness, maybe we will not fail if we do our literary best to reproduce every shivering detail of some tiny local aspect of this horror.

There is, still, a dogmatism here: Boll's assumption that such persistent reporting will in a minute and factual way produce the truth. The gross destruction of the World War is enough, perhaps, to confirm as corollary the Au.'s more subtle conclusions that this war machine also injured, with the grindings of its internal gears, a sensitive and beautiful woman. Or maybe also his suggestion, that, because this woman was endowed sensually and spiritually with qualities that transcended the simple realism of, say, another citizen or soldier, she was thus somehow justified in her utter ignorance till early-1945 of what the Nazis were doing to the Jews. One is willing to accept such a moral judgement, so long as it is premised by that initial moral assertion, that, "Yes, Nazi Germany was terrib..." The Au. is a kind and trustworthy man, after all.

Boll's problem is that this faith in the fact-crazed reporter appears to fade in Boll's latest publication, The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum. Here again, a woman, but not even a woman whose whole life the reporter hopes to track down in 400 pages. Just five days!--from February 20 to February 24, 1974--just five days is all he wants to know about the life of Katharina Blum. Yet even this knowledge is impossible to extract, despite detailed police records and the personal testimony of the woman involved, a woman who, at the end of that five day period, killed a man.

THE reporter begins this book with the same dogged investigation that was so fruitful for the sentimental devotee of Leni. The facts are what he is after, he tells us, but he is confused. It all begins clearly enough; each chapter is so short as to contain just a few positive assertions of facts in the case, and it is established that Katharina Blum, at the beginning of these five days, slept with a man who was wanted for murder. Duly it is stated, too, that under police interrogation, Katherina shows herself to have been ignorant of her lover's legal status. But from then until Katherina's murder of the newspaperman who has hounded her since the beginning of the case, the web of facts breaks apart in a cascade of "allegedly"s. The ambiguities pile up quickly: The reporter even records a full page of argument between a cook and a secretary about whether their employer will have crepes with poppy seed or creme Brulee for Sunday breakfast. The dispute is never properly settled. The question, "Who did what to whom?" that was asked and answered with such compassionate precision in Group Portrait is washed out by a torrent of conflicting allegations impossible to reconcile, and by the unresolved issue of just how, why and when Katharina plotted the murder.

The reporter states his desperation calmly when he interrupts the narrative to speculate on the validity of accounts produced by civil servants who tap phone calls. Even this form of reporting, which one would have hoped was as regular and reliable as the mechanism of a tape recorder, is utterly flawed:

Above all: what goes on in the "psyche" of the wiretapper? What passes through the mind of a blameless civil servant who is only doing his duty, who, we might say, is required to do his duty (albeit reluctantly) by the exigencies of earning a living if not of obedience to orders? What does he think when obliged to monitor a telephone conversation...?

The psyche of the reporter, what he thinks when he works, is so significant that even the hardest bits of evidence that he preserves on magnetic tape cannot be trusted. The reporter/narrator sees that this is true for himself, too, when late in the book he launches into an earnest inquiry--unanswered--of whether or not one of his characters infiltrated a hospital by dressing up as a painter. The reporter gives up, acknowledging that the story that began as a statement of fact is no longer reducible to fact, no longer trustworthy.

DOES this mean that one must dismiss the moral conclusions of the first Author, from Group Portrait With Lady, as just another reporter's invalid conclusions, turned out carefully as truths? Is this chronicler's psyche so immoderate, too, that his patient judgements about what the Social Democratic state has done to its people must be laughed aside? It is too simple to throw those judgements away.

For the narrator of Group Portrait admitted that he was a persona from the beginning, stated plainly that he was "the Au." and not some imperious ego-less reporter. The Au. said candidly that he was too fond of Leni; while the poor, nameless narrator in The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum repressed all affection for his heroine, denied his own "psyche" until he broke with exasperation at the way his story had eluded his control on page 98 ("Too much is happening in this story"). One would rather trust the unashamed lust of the Au. for his main character which finally sublimates itself when he makes a nun his lover in the last fifty pages. For Boil, there is nothing so honest as sensuality: Leni's sensuality, even when she does not know Nazis kill Jews; the sensuality of anonymous lovers who in churches, cemeteries, or bomb-shelters embrace each other amid the desolation of an air-raid; and the sensuality of an Au. who has conceded from page 1 that he has too much concern to be detached.