The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, Or: How Violence Develops and Where it Can Lead (German: Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum oder: Wie Gewalt entstehen und wohin sie führen kann) is a 1974 novel by Heinrich Böll. The story deals with the sensationalism of tabloid news and the political climate of panic over Red Army Faction terrorism in 1970s West Germany. The main character, Katharina Blum, is an innocent housekeeper whose life is ruined by invasive tabloid reporter Werner Tötges and a police investigation when the man with whom she has just fallen in love, Ludwig Götten, turns out to be wanted by the police because of a bank robbery. The book's fictional tabloid paper, Die Zeitung ("The Newspaper"), is modelled on the actual German Bild-Zeitung.
The novel received a film adaptation in 1975, directed by Margarethe Von Trotta and Volker Schlöndorff (the latter of whom who also directed the film adaptation of The Tin Drum) and starring Angela Winkler as Blum, Jürgen Prochnow as Götten, and Dieter Laser as Tötges.
Provides examples of the following tropes:
- Either/Or Title: The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, Or: How Violence Develops and Where it Can Lead.
- Foreign Remake: The Lost Honor of Kathryn Beck, a 1984 CBS made-for-television film starring Marlo Thomas and Kris Kristofferson which transfers the story into an American setting.
- Hypocrite: The film ends with Tötges' editor delivering a speech at his funeral about how his murder was an attack on democracy and the freedom of the press despite the paper's own blatant disregard for other people's civil liberties.
- Immoral Journalist: Tötges harasses Katharina throughout the novel, frequently makes up quotes and distorts facts to make her life fit a salacious narrative of a promiscuous woman who aids and abets anarchists and terrorists, and ultimately doesn't care if she's innocent or not.
- No Celebrities Were Harmed: Averted. While the events of the story are fictitious, the newspaper is clearly a stand-in for Bild-Zeitung, as made clear by the opening disclaimer."The characters and action in this story are purely fictitious. Should the description of certain journalistic practices result in a resemblance to the practices of Bild-Zeitung, such resemblance is neither intentional, nor fortuitous, but unavoidable."
- Old Media Are Evil: A major theme of both the film and the original novel is how the paper's thirst for sensationalism and lack of ethical standards ruins innocent people's lives. In Katharina's case, she is painted as a rabid communist sympathizer and a fervent accomplice of Götten based purely on circumstantial evidence, resulting in many of her former friends and co-workers turning against her.
- Ripped from the Headlines: The novel was inspired by several real-life scandals involving Bild-Zeitung's sensationalistic coverage of the Red Army Faction and their crimes. Böll had previously written an article for the magazine Der Spiegel wherein he sharply criticized Bild's journalistic practices and stated that the paper "isn’t crypto-fascist anymore, not fascistoid, but naked fascism. Agitation, lies, dirt."
- Take That!: As mentioned elsewhere, both the novel and film are one giant middle finger to Bild-Zeitung and its journalistic practices.
- Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: Katharina. After all the relentless bullying she endures at the hands of the paper, she finally snaps and shoots Tötges and his photographer dead.
