The Clown (The Essential Heinrich Boll)

by Heinrich Böll

A clown who takes to drink falls faster than a drunk tile-layer topples off a roof.

I thought of the gutters I would lie in one day. For a clown approaching fifty there are only two alternatives: gutter or palace.

“Yes,” I said, “and now get out, you lousy little Christian worm.”

She thought this was “beneath” me, and I told her the only thing beneath the gutter was the canal, but she didn’t understand what I meant, and I hate explaining a metaphor.

Executive Committee of the Societies for the Reconciliation of Racial Differences. It is really a race

He always spoke of himself to me “as an unskilled laborer in the vineyard of the Lord, with regard to outlook as well as wages.”

“You’re just agreeing now out of laziness and not because you are convinced of the justness of abstract principles of order,” and I said, Yes, it was true I was doing it out of laziness

It was evening, in a hotel room in Hanover, in one of those expensive hotels where, when you order a cup of coffee, you only get three quarters of a cup of coffee. They are so sophisticated in those hotels that a full cup of coffee is considered vulgar, and the waiters know much better what is sophisticated than the sophisticated people who play the part of guests there.

She walked up and down by the foot of the bed and every time she gesticulated she jabbed the air so precisely with her cigarette that

the little smoke clouds looked like full stops.

was not surprised to find Marie had gone. I found the note on the table “I must take the path that I must take.” She was nearly twenty-five, and she ought to have been able to think of something better than that.

“Stop this nonsense, Schnier. What on earth’s the matter with you?” “I don’t trust Catholics,” I said, “because they take advantage of you.” “And Protestants?” he asked with a laugh. “I loathe the way they fumble around with their consciences.” “And atheists?” He was still laughing. “They bore me because all they ever talk

about is God.” “Then what are you?” “I am a clown,” I said,

Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel.

“Oh,” said Sommerwild’s voice, “I hope I didn’t disturb you in the midst of a double sommersault.” “I am not an acrobat,” I said, furious, “I am a clown—there is a difference, at least as

Another thing the emigrants don’t know is that not many Nazis were sent to the front, most of those who fell were the others, Hubert Knieps, who lived next door to the Wienekens, and Günther Cremer, the baker’s son, although they were Hitler Youth leaders they were sent to the front because they “didn’t toe the line” and would have nothing

to do with all that disgusting snooping.

Kalick would never have been sent to the front, he toed the line then the way he toes the lin...

“Well, Martin, how about our putting you in a nice little concentration camp, one that’s not too grim?”

“Once a swine always a swine, and you always were one.”

They all know, of course, that a clown has to be melancholy in order to be a good clown, but the fact that melancholy is for him a deadly serious business, that they don’t grasp.

“No,” I said, “my dislike of plums is as inexplicable as it is insurmountable.”

I hate untidy rooms, but I am incapable of tidying them up myself.

Fine china does not sound fine when it is thrown against the kitchen wall.

To my mind there is hardly anything more painful than a woman looking bitterly at her husband because she is pregnant.

the whole point of comedy was to present people in abstract form with situations taken from their own reality,

There are some strange unrecognized forms of prostitution compared with which prostitution itself is an honest trade: at least you get something for your money.

ought to have remembered the fatal sentimentality inherent in objects.

there was even room for a clown who was guilty of the worst of all clown sins: that of arousing pity.

For the first time I sensed how terrible are the objects left behind when someone goes away or dies.

Life goes on, or something of that sort, but I knew very well: that wasn’t so, it isn’t life that goes on but death.

Or did they have special liturgical regulations for fallen girls and former clowns’ concubines?

“The open suitcases are staring at me like mouths wanting to be fed,”

“What kind of a man are you?” he asked. “I am a clown,” I said, “and I collect moments.

There is no better hiding place for a professional than among amateurs.

Heinrich Böll once claimed that only two themes interested him as a novelist: love and religion.

what is the right course of action when an individual’s morality contradicts that of society?

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.

In this familiar, Sisyphean quandary Böll found characters ideally suited to his attempts to evoke a Germany still grappling with the Nazi nightmare.

And Never Said a Word, an existentialist tale of a wayward husband that is deeply indebted to Camus.

Warnke himself noted the many similarities between Hans and Holden Caulfield,

these futile attempts at communication become effective ways to concretize the spiritual, moral, and physical isolation of each book’s protagonist.