The Futility of Satire in Heinrich Böll’s “The Clown”
Hans Schnier is a fool in the vein of King Lear’s, but while his predecessor critiques mainly the king, Heinrich Böll’s clown goes after everyone and everything.
Having emerged from World War II’s rubble into relative economic prosperity, the West Germans of the novel’s early sixties have either forgotten or whitewashed their recent Nazi past. They’ve moved on without meaningfully confronting it or themselves. The tragic result, as Schnier, who was a child during the war, observes, is mediocrity, hypocrisy, and emptiness.
Schnier sees this everywhere. Postwar politicians who’ve worked to ban prostitution privately grumble “about the shortage of floozies.” The press, with its meaningless yet eye-catching headlines and celebrity gossip, does so little real thinking that it might as well outsource its work to ChatGPT. And the Catholic church, whose relationship with the Nazis was complicated, to say the least, still holds a good deal of power and influence.
It’s the latter especially that Schnier resents. His reasons are manifold, but chief among them is that his wife Marie, a Catholic, has left him over his refusal to sign an agreement to bring their future children up in the religion. Marie is devout…
