It is wrong-headed to read The Clown as a simple condemnation of German national character, or to find in its wistful hero that mythical figure so dear to our own uneasy sense of virtue—the Good German Intellectual castigating his vicious and hypocritical countrymen. Vice and hypocrisy are the subjects of the book, satiric castigation is its mode, and the twilight of the Nazi era sounds a sinister ground-bass in the memory of the narrator-protagonist, but neither ex-Nazis nor neo-Nazis are conspicuous in the contemporary Rhineland of the clown Hans Schnier. Drinking excessively and in a decline because his Catholic mistress has left him to marry a prominent Catholic layman, he telephones the entire range of his acquaintance in Bonn—ostensibly to borrow money and to locate Marie, but actually to operate as a kind of scourge of villainy, to force his interlocutors to come to an awareness of their true selves and thus to measure those selves against the clear moral imperatives which, the novel implies, only a clown can fully perceive.
A clean record in the bad old days is no guarantee of moral purity, although two of the least savory figures in Böll's gallery were passionate followers of the Führer. The execrable Herbert Kalick, one-time Hitler Youth leader who had menaced the child Hans in the closing days of the war, has become a sentimental democrat, fond of talking about "Jewish spirituality," but the truly appalling thing is that his conversion is perfectly sincere: he is, as Schnier observes, "a born conformist." And Schnier's unspeakable mother, a fervent Blut und Boden patriot in the old days, is now active in the "Executive Committee of the Societies for the Reconciliation of Racial Differences." But other characters, with less compromised political pasts, come under as severe attack from the clown, to whom the facile doctrine of collective guilt is quite meaningless…. Individual guilt, his experience with the virtuous pillars of society would suggest, is quite sufficient to make recourse to abstractions unnecessary.
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