The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum

The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, or: how violence develops and where it can lead (original German title: , ) 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 the 1970s in the Federal Republic of Germany. The main character, Katharina Blum, is an innocent housekeeper whose life is ruined by an invasive tabloid reporter and a police investigation when the man with whom she has just fallen in love 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. Plot Four days after a Weiberfastnacht's eve party (Wed. 20 February 1974), where Katharina Blum met a man named Ludwig Götten, she calls on Oberkommissar Moeding and confesses to killing a journalist for the newspaper Die Zeitung.