The Clown (The Essential Heinrich Boll)

by Heinrich Böll

felt sorry for him. It must be terrible for a father to have his first real talk with a son who is almost twenty-eight. “There

With money it was like with “desires of the flesh.” Nobody really talked about it, really thought about it, it was either—as Marie had said about the carnal desires of priests—“sublimated” or considered vulgar, never as the thing it was at the moment: food or a taxi, a packet of cigarettes or a room with bath.

and to spend money was in his eyes synonymous with wasting it.

Hoarder of money

It was nearly eight o’clock, I had been in Bonn for nearly two hours, had talked on the phone with six so-called friends, spoken to my mother and father, and instead of having one mark more than when I arrived I had one less.

Two hours have passed yet Hans has reflected on mpre than half of his life.

One can’t dictate compassion,

They were so moved by all the remorse and loud protestations of democracy that they were forever embracing and radiating good fellowship. They failed to grasp that the secret of the terror lay in the little things. To regret big things is child’s play: political errors, adultery, murder, anti-Semitism—but who forgives, who understands, the little things?

Kalick would never have been sent to the front, he toed the line then the way he toes the line today, a born conformist.

Then when Karl was drunk he would start despatching curses to Rome, heaping maledictions on cardinals’ heads and popes’ minds, and the fantastic thing about it was that I would start defending the Pope.

It struck me that they really had me to thank for the fact that Marie had remained a Catholic. She had some terrible religious crises, due to disillusionment over Kinkel, as well as over Sommerwild, and a fellow like Blothert would probably have turned even St. Francis into an atheist.

It was only now that I realized I had been the one to offer Pope John and Züpfner as a source of comfort in her religious doubts. I had been scrupulously fair in my attitude toward Catholicism, that was just where I had gone wrong, but to me Marie was Catholic in such a natural way that I wanted to help her retain that naturalness.

the others believed in more than people: in God, in abstract money, in things like nation and Germany.

“I am a clown,” I said, “and I collect moments.