The Clown
, of course, did not come about in a vacuum. Böll made an early stab at a Hans-like problem character in his 1953 novel,
And Never Said a Word
, an existentialist tale of a wayward husband that is deeply indebted to Camus. The book became Böll’s first bestseller, granting him a national profile and premium space in the nation’s newspapers. Over the course of the 1950s he would continue these investigations in several further novels, capping the decade with 1959’s monumental
Billiards at Half-Past Nine
, a remarkably complex work that undertakes the Joycean task of telling fifty years of German history through the exceedingly fractured, convoluted narration of just one day.
With a very successful ten years behind him, Böll reached new levels of stardom with
The Clown
. It quickly rocketed to the top of West Germany’s bestseller list, and, even more importantly, its popularity among readers was matched by
the controversy it engendered among Germany’s critics. The book sparked intense debate, with the influential newspaper
Die Zeit
devoting no fewer than eight original reviews to it. (Die
Zeit
also featured excerpts from reviews in other publications.) Responses ranged from enthusiastic praise to claims that Böll’s nihilistic protagonist exhibited the values that had cleared the way for Hitler in Weimar, and as the book became an increasingly debated commodity it was labeled, perhaps a little prematurely, the ’60s answer to that great German novel of the ’50s, Günter Grass’s
The Tin Drum
. Perhaps most bemusing of all,
The Clown
was even a huge success with the Soviet public (despite one damning scene set in the German Democratic Republic, neatly excised by the censors). Like so many books popular with Soviet readers,
The Clown
did not fare nearly so well among the Soviet intelligentsia: though critics there had long since developed a taste for Böll’s attack on Western values,
The Clown
disappointed them for Hans’ steadfast refusal to espouse anything resembling a clear ideological stance.
The fierce debates raging around
The Clown
belie the judgment—originally voiced by Böll himself—that
The Clown
was a provincial book that would hold little interest outside of Germany. In fact, its U.S. publication in 1965 was greeted with a bevy of reviews in the likes of
Time, Newsweek
, and
The New York Times
. Though there was much praise, many critics seemed to labor under the mistaken impression that the novel was little more than Böll’s fulminations against the Catholic Church and Nazi guilt. For all the shortsightedness some critics showed, however, there were those who fought against the prevailing callowness. Writing in the pages of
The New Republic
, Frank J. Warnke lamented that “most of our journalistic reviewers, confronted with Heinrich Böll’s new novel, have whipped out their basic assembly-line platitudes about German guilt and the heritage of Nazism” and then proceeded to make the case for
The Clown
as art. He praised
the book for its “intensity of feeling” and “smooth mastery of tone,” two things that of course bring allow it to transcend its postwar German context.
Even as U.S. critics were praising
The Clown
as a book that transcended nationality, they were also deciding that it was a distinctly American novel. Warnke himself noted the many similarities between Hans and Holden Caulfield, and
The Nation’s
Stephen Koch struck a similar note, comparing Hans to Saul Bellow’s Herzog and declaring that
The Clown
is remarkably American: “Böll has inlaid the standard German romantic theme of the poet’s pathos, futility, need for love, emasculation, into the texture of the sociological-critical search for identity we have come to expect from American fiction.… [A]side from the criticism of the Nazis, this novel could have been written next door.”
Indeed, in the years to come more and more critics would come to realize, like Koch and Warnke, exactly how much an existentialist tale of post-Nazi Germany could pertain to a postwar America building a new identity as the world’s leader. In his review, Koch noted how both Hans and Herzog struggle with identity (they find it, if at all, in the quotidian), as well as that both books recall their protagonists’ “struggles with the devices of the isolated—gnawing, morbid letters and telephone calls.” In both cases these futile attempts at communication become effective ways to concretize the spiritual, moral, and physical isolation of each book’s protagonist. Likewise, in each the struggle of the individual’s incapacity to function in his country helps magnify that nation’s shortcomings.
If the similarity between Hans and Herzog is palpable, that of Hans to Holden all but grabs a reader by the throat. While Böll worked on
The Clown
he was also translating
Catcher in the Rye
into German (the translation appeared in 1962 and is acknowledged for introducing Salinger to the Germans), and it generally agreed that Böll’s translation work infected the novel he was writing. A list of Hans’ and Holden’s commonalities
would include: rebellion against parents, a thorough distaste for hypocrites and phonies, an existential angst and isolation, penury, foul language, and dead siblings whom they idolize. Both books are dramatizations of what happens to an individual who will stand in judgment of his own society, and both books are deeply ambivalent about whether a strict adherence to a personal morality is in fact a good thing. Though Hans and Holden are far from interchangeable—Hans is, after all, a young adult in his mid-twenties who has just ended a lengthy “marriage”—both are exceedingly good vessels for the sensation of youthful rebellion against the bourgeois capitalism that was taking hold in each author’s nation when their books were published.
Those first reviewers who saw
The Clown
as art—and not as agitprop—have had their impressions validated by the test of time.
The Clown
reached such heights of worldwide popularity that in 1985 Böll wrote an epilogue to the book in which he attempted to explain its enduring, widespread fame. In the epilogue Böll notes the tension inherent in having a Catholic church speak for millions of individuals, a tension echoed in many of today’s democracies, where politicians are often poor channels for the political will. Hans’ plight is one that resounds today because he chooses to question those who say they know what is best. Individuals such as Hans will always be in short supply and great need, and if we cannot have enough of them in our discourse we can at least have them in our fiction. To read
The Clown
today is to have a glimpse of a Germany now half a century old, but it is also to see many of the questions and scourges of our own time reflected and refracted within a tortured mind that somehow feels contemporary. Hans’ jagged, eloquent voice is one that should be heard today.