The Clown by Heinrich Boll Critique - Essay Example

Singh,Trishna Dr. Sanjay Gupta Department of English British Council 22nd February, 2007 “The Clown” by Heinrich Boell “The Clown” Heinrich Boll’s exploration, is a true literary oeuvre that draws a revealing portrait of German society under Hitler and in the postwar years. “This Book unveils many of the significant thematic elements considered by Boll to be of fundamental significance in his work: the alienation of the individual by a dehumanizing, materialistic, and often emasculating society;”1 the corruption of Christian ethic and spirituality; the loss of traditional familial and social unity; and the failure of mankind to accept the moral responsibilities of the age. “The Clown” is a brilliant social mockery, an impassioned, tragic, highlighting love, spirituality, religion and politicis.The book also reflects criticism against catholic church. It is a grim post-war novel abounding in fatalism, doubt, sarcasm, melancholy, loss and survival. This novel is a biting critique not only of postwar German society, but of hypocrisy in general (religious, romantic, and otherwise). Boll captures magnificently the feeling of being down and out and rootless. It is set specifically in post World War II Germany and describes well what surely the feelings of many were. But the sense of loss, alienation, lack of love, religious doubt set forth in the book go much deeper than that. "I am a clown," says Hans. "I collect moments."2 Ostensibly intended by Boll as a simple definition of character, the statement offers considerable insight into Bolls philosophical perspective. Hans Schnier is the "Clown" of the novels title and invariably the spokesperson for Boll as the author. The Clown is a hugely life-like figure; his pain bleeds through the paper, his tears smear the words. He is an artist, destroyed by loss and betrayal, an artist who has reached the lowest point of his existence and now despairs in the knowledge of his own pathetic tragedy. The book is told first person by its hero, a clown, Hans Schneir. The "hero", a bedraggled clown, has lost everything - his job, his love Marie but not his honor. A moment of time is expanded by Boll to a whole evening of tragic and of memories of his childhood and his one-and-only love Marie. The life of Hans Schneir, a down-on-his-luck, melancholy, incisive clown could represent any human life after surviving and living the day-to-day economic and emotional traumas hatched by war and the idiocy of policy that brings it about. His thought center on his own spiritual and emotional poverty, on the loss of Marie, his ambivalence towards religion, and the attempted change among Germans following their defeat. He phones for help or consolation as he huddles in his terra cotta apartment, swelling with nausea, a bruised knee, a headache, and a broken heart. He tilts back his cognac and sucks on a drooping cigarette, brooding over his loss, and trying to distinguish between fact and fiction, reality and his own frantic imagination. Boell crafts an image of a man willing to do anything for love, and is suspicious and afraid of the world around him after his personal world collapses. In lines such as "Think of the clown who weeps in the bath, and whose coffee drips onto his slippers,"3 Boell reveals his mastery of capturing the human spirit through poignant narration and philosophy. Besides, there are many comical depictions of the eccentricities of Schnier and his circle of acquaintances. This book reflects sadness and pain from the first line until the last. The most strong portrayal of what occurs when society takes form over substance, and how choosing the latter to live your life will not make you immune to having your heart broken and being misunderstood. Actually the most probable outcome is that you will end up being beaten since most humans hate to have a mirror place in from of them if it can show them how they really are. Hans Schneir is encased in a cocoon of soulful hardness, an all encompassing iciness of mistrust, cynicism, destroyed ideals and melancholy. His mother, a former Nazi sympathizer who ultimately evolves into a kind of champagne activist while serving as president of the Executive Committee of the Societies for the Reconciliation of Racial Differences. He sees people who can not deal or cope or who are wounded with life, as is the case with his brother, Leo, who converts to Catholicism and then enters and is ultimately stashed in a seminary. All the time while German citizens flounder in their varied emotional states, Hans has two things which keep him stable, his unbending emotional hardness and his lover, Maria, who, as well, drifts away from him while gradually embracing the ideals of a Catholic neophyte named Zupfner. Hans Schneirs resolute closeness versus Marias relentless openness causes the two to clash in many ways. Where he sees hypocracy and weakness, she sees Truth and possibility. Yet, to Hans, that is exactly what she is supposed to see and fall into, another trapping created by man to make a big power machine (the Church) even bigger. Thus he loses her, and she becomes the "first lady"4 of German Catholicism (Pg. 176). As all that Hans holds near and dear to him slowly drift away, the one thing that he clasps onto is his art, the talent of pantomime, whereby he immitates those in his environment: politicians, religious leaders, people who use other people and institutions merely in order to feel a sense of worth. But as he acts out the truths that he sees yet things that people do not wish to see, he even fails at his art, for who wants to see a sad clown? In the end, he struggles along, fighting to incorporate snippets of hard truth into his life, truth that nobody wants. Heinrich Boll is indeed the grand master of exploring the harsh truth of human behavior and how humanity uses a veneer of politics and God in order to not confront itself. Scheneir says near the end of the book in an important passage “If our era deserves a name it would have to be called era of prostitution. People are being accustomed to the vocabulary of whores.”5 Scheneir is an unbeliever but a “monogamous” unbeliever and can’t adjust himself to the loss of Marie. He looks to friends, family, and others for comfort but could find none. “Hans Scheneir recreates incidents in people’s life with honesty and compassion. After the departure of lover, he recalls his own history with equal sensitivity and cynical idealism: his mother working for “racial reconciliation” after fighting to save Germany from Jewish Yankees; his brother, ensconced in a catholic seminary; and his lover Maria, who married another in hope of regaining comforts of Catholicism. Scheneir’s own comfort, however remain elusive.”6 According to Heinrich Böll, fascism didnt begin and end with the Nazis, but rather lurks within common, everyday attitudes and interactions. In postwar Germany, former Nazis eagerly embrace "reconciliation," yet on a personal level their fascism-that quality which once led them to eagerly turn in classmates of suspicious racial origin, or enlist their children in the "defense of the sacred German soil"7 against the "Jewish Yankees"8--remains intact. "They failed to grasp that the secret of the terror lay in the little things. To regret big things is childs play: political errors, adultery, murder, anti-Semitism-but who forgives, who understands, the little things?" Hypocrisy is rampant, especially among the bourgeoisie; but the clowns critique is not ideologically restricted, for when invited to East Germany to perform his satirical sketches about capitalism, he instead looks for targets among the institutions of state socialism. Of course his clear analysis of his social environment produces intransigence, melancholy and self-destructiveness in his own life, and of course his girlfriend leaves him, and not only because of her concern for religious values and respectability. The ending-not involving a jail cell, but rather another kind of sentence that only a clown could devise-is both bleak and hopeful, for in breaking his last ties to "respectable" society, a certain kind of clownish redemption becomes possible. References 1. "BookRags Short Guide on The Clown." 21 February 2007. 2.”The Clown” by Heinrich Boll,22nd February 2007. Read More