I stood up, to get ready for my performance. No doubt my agent Zohnerer would “drop” me too when I began singing and playing the guitar in the street. If I had really sung litanies,
Tantum ergo
and all the texts I loved to sing and had practiced for so many years in the bath, he might perhaps have “gone along” with it, it would have been a good gimmick, something like painting madonnas. I even believed him when he said he really liked me—the children of this world are more sincere than the children of light—but “businesswise” I was finished as far as he was concerned, if I sat down on the Bonn station steps.
I could walk again without noticeably limping. That meant I didn’t need the orange crate, all I had to do was tuck a sofa cushion under my left arm and the guitar under my right, and go to work. I still had two cigarettes, I would smoke one, the other would look enticing enough lying there in the black hat; at least one coin next to it would have been good. I searched in my trouser pockets, turned them inside out; a
couple of movie tickets, a red parchesi counter, a used Kleenex, but no money. I pulled open the drawer of the hall table: a clothesbrush, a receipt from the Bonn church paper, a coupon for a beer bottle, no money. I went through all the drawers in the kitchen, hurried into the bedroom, hunted among collar studs, collar stays, cufflinks, among socks and handkerchiefs, in the pockets of the green corduroy trousers: nothing. I pulled off my dark trousers, left them lying on the floor like a peeled-off skin, threw the white shirt down by them and pulled the pale-blue jersey over my head: grass green and pale blue, I opened the door with the mirror: excellent, I had never looked so good. I had put the make-up on too thick, during all the years it must have been lying there the grease in it had dried out, and now I saw in the mirror that the layer of paint had already cracked, showed fissures like the face of an excavated statue. My dark hair like a wig on top. I hummed a verse to myself which I had just thought up: “Catholic politics in Bonn, Are no concern of poor Pope John, Let them holler, let them go, Eeny, meeny, miny, mo.” That would do to start with, and the Anti-Blasphemy Executive Committee couldn’t object to anything in the words. I would make up a lot more verses, intone the whole thing like a ballad. I would have liked to cry: the make-up stopped me, it looked just right, with the cracks, with the places where it was beginning to flake off, tears would have ruined all that. I could cry later, if I still felt like it. A professional bearing is the best protection, only saints and amateurs are mortally vulnerable. I stepped back from the mirror, looked more deeply into myself and at the same time further away. If Marie saw me like this and was still capable of ironing the wax spots out of his Knight of Malta uniform—then she was dead, and we were divorced. Then I could start mourning at her grave. I hoped they would all have enough small change when they passed by: Leo something more than a nickel, Edgar Wieneken, when he got back from Thailand, perhaps an old gold coin, and Grandfather, when he returned
from Ischia—he would at least make me out a crossed check. By this time I had discovered how to turn them into cash, my mother would probably consider two to five pfennigs appropriate, Monika Silvs might lean down and give me a kiss, while Sommerwild, Kinkel and Fredebeul, outraged at my scandalous behavior, wouldn’t even throw a cigarette into my hat. Now and again, when no train was due from the south for a few hours, I would bicycle out to Sabina Emonds and have my bowl of soup. Perhaps Sommerwild would call Züpfner in Rome and advise him to leave the train at Godesberg. In that case I would ride out there on my bike, sit down in front of the villa with the sloping garden, and sing my ditty: all she had to do was come, look at me, and be dead or alive. The only person I felt sorry for was my father. It had been nice of him to save the women from being shot, and it had been nice of him to put his hand on my shoulder, and—I could see it now in the mirror—made up as I was I not only resembled him, I was amazingly like him, and I could understand now how violently he had rejected Leo’s conversion. With Leo I had no sympathy, after all he had his faith.
It was not yet nine thirty when I went down in the elevator. I remembered the Christian Mr. Kostert, who still owed me the bottle of schnapps and the difference between the first and second-class ticket. I would write him an unstamped postcard and jog his conscience. Besides, he still had to send me my baggage claim check. It was a good thing my neighbor, pretty Mrs. Grebsel, didn’t run into me. I would have had to explain things to her. If she saw me sitting on the steps of the station I wouldn’t need to explain anything any more. All I needed now was the briquette, my visiting card.
It was chilly outside, a March evening, I turned up my collar, put on my hat, and felt for my last cigarette in my pocket. I suddenly remembered the cognac bottle, it would have looked very decorative, but it would have been a deterrent to generosity, it was an expensive brand, you could see it from the cork.
The cushion tucked under my left arm, the guitar under my right, I walked back to the station. On the way I came across the first signs of what is known here as “the time of folly.” A young drunk dressed as Fidel Castro tried to jostle me, I got out of his way. On the station steps a group of matadors and Spanish donnas were waiting for a taxi. I had forgotten, it was Carnival time. That suited me fine. There is no better hiding place for a professional than among amateurs. I placed my cushion on the third step from the bottom, sat down on it, took off my hat and put the cigarette in it, not quite in the middle, not at the edge, but as if it had been thrown in from above, and began to sing: “Poor Pope John,” no one paid any attention to me, and it was better that way: in an hour, in two or three hours, they would begin to notice me all right. I stopped playing when I heard the announcer’s voice inside. He was calling out the arrival of a train from Hamburg—and I went on playing. I gave a start when the first coin fell into my hair it was a nickel, it hit the cigarette, and pushed it too far to the edge. I put it back where it belonged and went on singing.
Heinrich Böll once claimed that only two themes interested him as a novelist: love and religion. Böll understood religion’s ability to hijack love; he was also a keen observer of passion’s many means for infuriating the church (for a contemporary example, think gay marriage). These conflicts have produced much great fiction, and we must certainly count among them Böll’s 1963 novel,
The Clown
. An instant bestseller and long among the author’s most popular novels, the book offers what is likely Böll’s most penetrating and emotionally wrought examination of love and religion in mortal combat.
If by the end of the book it seems that the battle has ended in anything but a draw, that is perhaps only because we know Hans Schneider so much more intimately than his estranged partner, Marie. Hans is a professional clown who has lived in sin with Marie ever since they ran off together as teenagers, a step the two very willfully invited on themselves when they
deflowered one another in provincial ’50s Germany. After the act, word traveled like wildfire through their small community, and the pair is forced to flee to cosmopolitan Bonn, where they established a devoted, though unmarried, partnership for the next several years.
All seemed well, until Marie relapses into Catholicism. Suddenly filled with status anxiety, she leaves Hans to marry the kind of decently bourgeois man her ex-clown despises. In the face of this abrupt and humiliating rebuke, Hans fights to continue as normal, but it is a charade. He realizes he cannot go on, takes a fall on stage, and holes up in his dingy, empty apartment for a pity party. The question that lingers throughout the novel is whether Hans’ rage at a society that has taken his beloved is really misplaced rage at himself for his inability to fit in.
The Clown
is the morbid, mordant monologue through which Hans takes stock of his shattered life at the ripe old age of twenty-six. Although we are with Hans for just four hours, his reminisces range over eighteen years, from the last years of Nazi rule up to the turbulent ’60s. What unfolds in these pages is the tragedy of an atheist who loves a believer, a son who cannot love his parents, a young man with no clear way forward. Into this story Böll will weave a deeply satirical portrait of postwar Germany, painting it as a nation populated by ex-Nazis who have struck it rich through false contrition, a hapless Catholic Church beholden to a morality dearly out of step with the times, and those lost youths like Hans who—by their choice or not—have remained beyond the reach of Germany’s postwar prosperity.
Why read the novel today? Or to phrase it differently, why has this novel worn so well since it was first published? The answers are many.
The Clown
is as tightly plotted as they come and is filled with rich moments and bitter laughs. This accessible testament to Böll’s powerful, mid-career modernism is girded by Hans’ youthful rebel yell, an angst-ridden howl that,
though unreliable, blemished, and profane, nonetheless has a truthfulness and an urgency that can still be appreciated today. With
The Clown
, Böll gives a thorny, nuanced treatment to the problem that stands at the core of his work as a novelist: what is the right course of action when an individual’s morality contradicts that of society?
It is a question that remains important today, in a a world still reckoning with the fallout of the cultural revolution of the ’60s, as it was in Böll’s time. Böll wrote
The Clown
in the early ’60s in full awareness of Germany’s desperate struggle to sort out its postwar identity. It was a country still coming to terms with the Nazi legacy while also forging a national psyche in which the long-dominant Catholic morality was giving way to bourgeois values. Böll’s goal with
The Clown
was to stir debate over these questions of Germany’s future identity, and he was not disappointed. The book was an out-and-out literary event, by far his most talked-about and controversial work.
Böll’s stock had been climbing steadily among the postwar writers since at least 1951, when the prestigious Gruppe 47 awarded him its prize for best contribution by a member. Although Böll’s style would change dramatically between then and 1963, his core concerns would not: the work that won him the Gruppe 47’s award was a story called “The Black Sheep,” and it is striking for its similarity to
The Clown
. Like Hans, the work’s protagonist (the titular black sheep) is a bohemian and outcast who holds his personal freedom far dearer than the approval of bourgeois society. The story dramatizes the inevitable conflict that comes from pursuing one to the detriment of the other.
The Clown
is nothing if not that story, and indeed, the story of the outcast against society is one Böll told many times throughout his career. Böll made his first acquaintance with the lot of the left-behind while growing up in a downwardly mobile family during the German hyperinflation. His family had such inauspicious economic luck during those years that
they lost their home, and they very nearly lost it a second time. Even in the better years things were far from normal for Böll: one oft-told tale finds the toddler Böll buying a candy with his first piece of paper money: a million-mark note. When the Nazi era began, Böll became not just an economic outcast but a social one as well. He steadfastly refused to participate in the adulation of authoritarianism then
de rigueur
and became the only member of his school to refuse to join the Hitler Youth. Though he was later forced to fight for the Wehrmacht, he did eventually desert (and was forced back amid threats of execution). After the war Böll became more deeply impoverished than ever, living in squalor amidst the wreckage of a smashed Cologne that went from 800,000 pre-war inhabitants to 28,000 survivors. So close was Böll’s family to the edge of survival in those years that when he received 1,000 marks in prize money from the Gruppe 47 in 1951, he immediately sent it to his wife and children so they could buy something to eat.
Böll’s intimacy with poverty and his determination to stand outside of a regime he saw as evil deepen the truthfulness of
The Clown
, both in its portrayal of Hans’ desperate poverty and in its evocation of the strange personal morality that underlies an existence willfully lived on the margins. The fact is that Hans need not be poor: his parents are wealthy, and he could be too if he would humble himself enough to ask for a handout. Similarly, Hans could easily marry Marie if he disavowed his atheism and made a sincere conversion to Catholicism. Hans both controls his fate and relishes his role as a martyr, and this contradiction makes him a prototypical Böll character. Though Böll’s protagonists are consistently at war with their society, they frequently have the power to end their struggles and enter the cushy, comfortable mainstream—that is, if they break from their principles. In this familiar, Sisyphean quandary Böll found characters ideally suited to his attempts to evoke a Germany still grappling with the Nazi nightmare. These characters also personify Germany’s schizophrenic
struggles to find a new identity amidst unprecedented secularization, a yawning chasm between its east and its west, and an unfamiliar role as the lynchpin of a democratic, bourgeois Western Europe.
Böll would take up these questions again and again, and in
The Clown
he works to find new ways to examine them. Böll once said that after the war German literature was a “literature of finding a language,” and
The Clown
reflects its author’s determination to not simply rehash the old forms bequeathed by previous generations of German novelists. With Hans, the 46-year-old author delves into the language of the German youth, and this is notable. This leap into uncharted waters may have been a risk on Böll’s part, but it was one that paid off handsomely, as it is precisely Hans’ ringing voice and his archetypical coming-of-age struggle that give the book much of its enduring power. Though
The Clown
does not make for a pretty portrait, its ugliness is proof that Böll created a character that contained both the contradictions of lost youth and those at the heart of Germany in the ’60s.