The Clown

Just my kind of book. Sad, witty, caustic, disgruntled… but scarifyingly honest. First and foremost it is a book delving into the character and characteristics of Hans Schnier, a professional clown, absolutely flat broke and confined to his apartment by (among other things) a knee injury From

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here he forces himself to phone acquaintances to see if he can drum up a loan. I say ‘acquaintances’ because by now he has fallen out with practically everyone he’s ever met. The circumstances of these ‘fallings-out’ as retailed by Hans are simultaneously both hilarious and sad.

Except for a few opening pages (his arrival at his apartment) and some at the end (when he goes busking) the apartment is where the ‘action’ stays for the rest of the novel. But don’t be put off. I usually find this kind of introspective, one-scene-only type of book hard to read and I don’t continue beyond the 50 pages or so I always allow before I fold. However, Boll’s book is different. ‘Captivating’, I’d say, without the usual twee associations that usually go with that word. The downside to this ‘captivation’ of the reader is that it gives him/her a feeling of claustrophobia, though this may be intended by the writer. And I never knew there was such a range of religious groupings in Eastern Germany (the book was first published in 1963): both Catholics and Protestants get short shrift from Hans. Also the Communists, so you see what I mean about him having fallen out with everybody.

Two women dominate the book, though absent from it. Hans’s former partner Marie, who has left him for someone else, and his sister Henrietta who was killed in the last days of the war. Marie is particulary an obsession and in this the book remeinds me of that iconic novel ’The Catcher in the Rye’ (by JD Salinger) where the main character is similarly troubled by an absence. The self-confessional style also reminds me of Salinger’s hero, Holden Caulfield, with his very personal angst-filled narrative of events.

Absolutely recommended.

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This book was my selection in the potentially short-lived book club. It follows Hans Schnier, a depressed clown, who "suffers from monogamy" and doesn't believe in God or much else. The story takes place in Post-Nazi Germany, therefore a broken Germany trying to deal with its collective past. Hans

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is depressed because his lover, Marie, who is a devoted Catholic has left him to marry another Catholic. He can no longer effectively perform and moves back to his hometown of Bonn. The story fluctuates between Hans' current state of despair over Marie and what he imagines her new life to be like, his current encounters with his family and past acquaintances, and memories of his life with Marie and as a successful clown. He also remembers his debates with the Catholic group and his comparative honesty and purity in juxtapostion with their teachings. This story is often bleak and sad, but also includes elements of humor and critiques of nearly everything bourgeois.

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I first read this in my early 20s, and again in my late 30s, and I recommend it. It’s a funny book about Hans Schnier, a melancholy unbeliever who clowns for a living in postwar Germany. His home is Bonn, the baby capital of what was then West Germany, and it’s the awkward period around 1950

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(after the war but before the “economic miracle”) when it was hard to see the point of being German. On top of that, his true love Marie has left him, and Hans blames the Catholic Church. Sidelined by an injured knee and bad press, with only one deutschmark left in his pocket, he starts phoning all the relatives, friends, Catholics, and “repentant” Nazis he knows, partly to pass the time, but also to hit them up for cash.

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The protagonist is the alienated son of a privileged German family just after WWII, who lost his sister to the patriotic defense of the motherland, and he now makes his living as the clown of the title. His struggles verge on the fey and self-absorbed, but somehow become emblematic of the plight of

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Germany (and in fact all of Europe) after the war.

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Wow! This story is told by a professional clown whose lover has left him; he is out of work and suffering from a depression. Through his conversations with friends and family, we get to know him and at the same time, to explore religion, war, love, families. While the story never says so, the Clown

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must be a fantastic performer...his insights into people's characters and motivations are amazing. As he says, "I am a clown and I collect moments." This book is a collection of those moments, and much more.

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superb description of a clown - popular in his professional, but useless in his private life, caught between pleasing the public and being bitter and unloving towards his mother; recalls every bit of his moments of fame in his own peculiar way.

First edition 1967, so it may look dated but the sarcastic humor and vivid description of the Zeitgeist of the late sixties is splendid. Böll's scalpel mercilessly dissects the postwar German bourgeoisie class, seen through the eyes of the scion of a lignite dynasty turned clown. The book caused a

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scandal because of its sarcastic criticism of German catholicism.

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Heinrich Boell exposed the German economic miracle of the 60’TH. The book also practices criticism against the Catholic Church. It shows that nothing is undertaken against the fact that former national socialists work again in high positions. The main person in this roman: Hans Schnier, who is a

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melancholy, alcohol addicted, and unsuccessful clown.

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This is one of my absolute favorite books.

The first third of this book is very funny. The narrator is a young clown afflicted with innocence and an unusual world view. Through his innocence he reveals the hypocrisy of those around him. It's a satire of post-war West Germany, but the failings it highlights are universal. There are hints of

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something clever going on with the narrator. Although he's innocent he's imperfect and unaware of his failings so at times he is a mirror of society, At other times he seems to be the scapegoat, at other times a mirror of the author.

After this opening, the narrator gives a diatribe against Catholics (Böll was Catholic) and most of the humour disappears. The novel then fails to go anywhere. Still readable though.

Worth reading for the opening.

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A book that was done a disservice by its reputation, at least as far as I'm concerned. It didn't help that I read Wolfgang Koeppen's Death in Rome just before this one; in fact, I read this because of that one. Koeppen's novel is superior in many ways: it's stronger as a picture of German society;

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it's more interesting and entertaining; it's better on the meta-literary "why do we do art stuff anyway?" question. It's less psychologically plausible, but otherwise, The Clown loses out quite badly.

That said, if this had been presented to me as a kind of addendum to Proust's jealousy volumes, only with some post-Nazi world stuff thrown in, I might have enjoyed it much more. The core of the book is jealousy, not society; it's about an individual, pure and simple, who stands apart from the society he happens to find himself in (i.e., post-war West Germany), but would have stood apart from any society he found himself in. That makes it hard to take seriously as a tragedy (there's no real relationship between the individual and his society, except opposition).

I'm not sure what Boll was aiming at, then, but I know what he succeeded in doing: giving us a plausible depressed artist who has lost the woman he (thinks he) loves to someone he can't stand, even while he has to accept that the man he can't stand is more successful and competent than he is. If you know that's what's going on, you might enjoy it more than I did. If you go in expecting specific, historical, social criticism, you'll be pretty disappointed.

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I suppose this is the German version of the "angry young man" novel. Comedian Hans Schnier has had a kind of professional meltdown after his girlfriend Marie breaks up with him and goes off to get respectably married to someone else; with his last few Deutschmarks he retreats to his Bonn apartment

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and tries to take stock.

He blames Marie's Catholic friends who have been pressuring her to give up her sinful cohabitation with Hans, but widens this into a more general disgust with his wealthy parents, with Bonn, with the CDU, with the booming Wirtschaftswunder society that is obsessed with respectability and appearances but refuses to think about anything that it might have done wrong before 1945, and with the men in bars who are so happy to talk nostalgically about their good old days in the war at the drop of a hat.

Hans has made a stand against the hypocrisy of the world around him by dropping out of school and running away with Marie to build a stage career for himself, but after six years on tour this doesn't seem to have solved anything, and he has simply humiliated himself in the eyes of the world. Ironically, though, Böll seems to be suggesting that it's only by embracing this humiliation that he can start the process of reconciling himself with those around him. When we leave him in the last chapter he may be at the very bottom of his trajectory, but it seems that the only way is up.

In a way, this seems to be a bit like having your cake and eating it: Böll manages to enjoy the best part of 250 pages ranting against the hypocritical values of postwar German society in general and the Catholic Church in particular from the point of view of a radical atheist, but then plucks what looks very like a Kierkegaard-style Christian reconciliation out of it at the end. Very sixties, of course!

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