Essay on The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum

THESIS: The Good German achieves moral complexity by depicting everyday German experience, using the detective genre to show how brutal the Holocaust was for many German citizens, and by offering a view of German suffering that creates ethical dilemmas.

In “The Author to Her Book,” Bradstreet is inundated in indecision and internal struggles over the virtues and shortfalls of her abilities and the book that she produced. As human beings we associate and sympathize with each other through similar experiences. It is difficult to sympathize with someone when you don’t know where they are coming from and don’t know what they are dealing with. Similar experiences and common bonds are what allow us to extend our sincere appreciation and understanding for another human being’s situation. In this poem an elaborate struggle between pride and shame manifests itself through an extended metaphor in which she equates her book to her own child.

The perpetrators in the book are all view differently by Funder as they all vary in levels of dedication to the GDR, Stasi and communism ideology. Despite in different levels of devotion, they all establish themselves as self-important officers who are unremorseful with their past actions. The interview with Herr Winz highlights that he was a strong believer in the system as he still lives within the past. Funder describes him as a man who still plays spy games even 7 years after the fall of the wall underlined by him hiding his identity as a westerner before the meeting Funder. A very strong believer in the GDR, Herr Von Schnitzler, was descried as “a grumpy old puppet, throwing scorn on proceedings from on high,’ as despises the current system of Germany, and still supports communism. However, both Herr Kock and Bohnsack portrayed a different character compared to the other Stasi officials. Koch was used for propaganda as a child and was described as a “poster boy for the new regime.” Despite being a part of the system since a child, Koch still became a victim, due to his resignation from the stasi, and battle in keeping his marriage intact. Bohnsack was “a man with nothing to prove,” as he was

When reading literature we often attempt to use particular threads of thought or lenses of critique to gain entry into the implied historic or legendary nature of literature. To accurately process a tale in the light in which it is presented, we have to consider the text from multiple viewpoints. We must take into consideration intentional and affective fallacies and the socioeconomic circumstances of the presenter/author/narrator. We also have to consider how our personal experience creates bias by placing the elements of the story into the web of relationships that we use to interpret the external world. There also is the need to factor in other external pressures, from societal norms, cultural ideals, and psychological themes, and how

Bolls sympathy and admiration for economically lower class citizens, most likely due to the economic hardship faced by his father, is presented through the hardworking nature of Blum. However, he also shows the suspicion cast upon Blum because of her comfortable living standards as a result of her independent ways. This suggests that he is concerned with people’s inability to except rises in class without assuming something sinister or unlawful has occurred in the process. Through the use of his characters in The Lost Honour and Bolls personal life experiences we are able to see his concerns regarding the cultural boundaries within Germany.

Heinrich Böll uses his novel, The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, to attack modern journalistic ethics as well as the values of contemporary Germany. The structure of this novel is important to conveying his message. He uses a police report format, differences in chapter lengths, narrator or author intervention, a subtitle, and the extensive use of the 'puddle' metaphor. All these things contribute towards the message in the text.

An essential step in analyzing a poem is to provide a structural outline of the poem. Anne Bradstreet’s poem, “The Author to Her Book,” can be divided into seven sections. First, line one provides the general description of how she views her creation. She repeatedly speaks directly to her work in apostrophe, as if it were her own child. Second, lines two through five depict how she feels embarrassed that her private

For Germans, especially in the Soviet Occupied zone, the war never really ends. They are hardly ever able to get back on their feet and it is more difficult for them to recover from The Second World War. Heinrich Böll focuses a great deal on the affects it has on children and German veterans and how difficult it is for East Germans to adapt to the new lifestyle by writing many short stories on life in Germany after the war. He also focuses on the emotional withdraw from ordinary life that all Germans go through. This most importantly consists of depression, emotionally and physically. This is best described in “Business is Business”, “Lohengrin’s Death” and “Between Trains in X”. Not only does Heinrich Böll have first hand experience as someone

The developmental stage of a young child’s life is very crucial and can be impacted by the media. In The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, Liesel Meminger is a young girl living in a very important part of Germany’s history, the Second World War. Liesel’s childhood unfolds and develops against the backdrop of a time when words, books specifically were used for power and control. Liesel is someone who has a love for reading and, as such, books become very important to her, not only for her education but for her rebellion and discovering her true identity. Throughout the novel, books become a crucial symbol used to convey the desires and discovery of identity for the main character as her childish ignorance changes to her mature adulthood.

Eva Braun was the twenty-three years younger girlfriend and then wife of Adolf Hitler, the leader of the Nazi party. Historians argue over how involved in her partners’ tyranny; did she take support the ideologies and cruelty from behind the scenes or was she in denial about the events she knew were happening? This essay will look into these questions.

When looking into the history of Germany and determining what led to the startling rise in Nazism in Germany and its detrimental effects on the social outcasts in Europe, it can be easy to deduce that the Nazi regime was one where Hitler walked in with his officials and took office by force. The truth is that, while the Nazi party is responsible for the atrocities that occurred before and during WWII, they would have not gotten far if it hadn’t been for the cooperation of the German people themselves. Life in the Third Reich provides proof through voting, youth programs and village life that the Nazi party rose into power with German support.

Hart, a legal positivist, believes that “law is law,” and argued against Radbrunch’s theory in servings as a solution to fix Germany’s judicial system. He argued against his theory and wanted a separation of law and morality because he thought that it would only “cloak the true nature of the problems,” and encourage a “romantic optimism,” rather than addressing the dilemma that the courts had in deciding on convicting Nazi criminals. Though Hart acknowledges that this case poses a difficult situation for the law, he does propose his own solution to the problem. With his positivist approach to the law, saying that the laws are the rules expected of us, and enforced at a particular time, he proposes that the “grudge informer” should be punished through a different and ‘new’ set of laws. These laws he deems “retrospective laws,” would entail punishing acts such as revenge and duplicity. However, this dilemma between choosing if the “grudge informer” was innocent

Reading literature is like reading a history book- every word and every sentence works together to build a reflection of past times. Literature is a part of an author’s soul that survives and teaches younger generations through the years. Besides literature being a direct connection to the thoughts, feelings, and struggles of past peoples, it is comparable. For example, analyzing Anna Letitia Barbauld’s “The Rights of Woman” will teach a different lesson than Mina Loy’s “Feminist Manifesto”.

In 1990, Bundeskanzler Kohl promised Germany that ‘Es wird uns gelingen, […] schon bald wieder in blühende Landschaften zu verwandeln’, however this proves difficult to achieve. In this essay I shall argue that, whilst Kohls promise has not been fulfilled, Michael Kliers Ostkreuz (1991) implies that the future of Berlin is not without hope. In the first shot of the clip, Elfie is walking through rubble to find Edmund. These scenes truly bear resemblance to the postwar Trümmerfilme, and it is apparent that questions of how to rebuild the country remain unanswered. However, the clip provided paints a different picture and this essay shall highlight that despite the rubble and rejection Klier leaves his viewer with a optimistic, albeit carefully

Authors often use characters within their novels to show the consequences of challenging cultural boundaries and, in turn, display their own personal concerns. It is not uncommon for characters to reflect an author’s ideology regarding social groups in their contemporary time periods. It is clear that this is certainly the case with the 1975 novel The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, (also referred to as How Violence Develops and Where it Can Lead), written by the German Author, Heinrich Boll. The Lost Honour is, on the surface, an attack on yellow journalism and the damage it causes to the lives of the people reported on. However, with a more in depth analysis of the novel we are able to see