Ansichten eines Clowns

Ansichten eines Clowns; The Clown (1963)

The Scottish novelist Muriel Spark declared Heinrich Böll to be her favourite contemporary German author, and on the basis of this superb book it is easy to see why. This short novel combines scathing satire with psychological sensitivity and an elegant metafiction about art and artists. It anticipates the coruscating existential satires of Thomas Bernhard.

The narrator is a professional clown in his late twenties, Hans Schnier. Schnier is down on his luck. His latest show is a flop, his agent Zohnerer refuses to book any more gigs for an entire year, and the love of his life, Marie, has just left him and married another man, Züpfner. Schnier injures his leg and realises that he has no money left. He returns home to Bonn and sits in his flat, wondering who he can borrow some money from. His parents are rich but extremely stingy and disapproving. His father offers him some money but only on condition that he retrains as a mime artist, which he refuses.

The action of the novel takes place in Schnier’s flat in Bonn, interspersed with his reminiscences (his teenage years in the last years of the Third Reich, his relationship with Marie). The plot centres on a series of phone conversations in which he tries, unsuccessfully, to borrow some money from the people he knows.

‘Schnier’ is an apt name because it hints at the German word ‘Schmier’ (smear). The idea of ‘smear’ is resonant, firstly because his family has become rich from the brown coal industry in the nearby Ruhr valley, but also because the narrator dishes the dirt on everyone he knows. He has a dirty, slanderous tale to tell, about ex-Nazis who reinvented themselves after 1945 as democrats and pillars of West German society. The narrator’s ‘smears’ have the ring of truth, as he describes (in excruciating and entertaining detail) the vanity, cruelty and hypocrisy of the political, religious and economic elites in Bonn: the rich parents whose children barely have enough to eat (Chapter 15), the ex-Nazi Kalick who is awarded a Federal Medal of Honour (Chapter 17), the Catholic intellectual Kinkel who sets a minimum income level for others that is 35 times lower than his own minimum income (Chapter 21), and the Catholics who persuade Marie, the love of his life, to leave him for another man. Ironically, only the poor clown is able to tell the truth about this hypocritical society.

The story proceeds with an inexorable logic: the narrator’s wealthy and powerful connections refuse to help him in his time of desparate need: ‘Wenn es um Besitz geht, werden Christen unerbittlich’ (When it comes to money and property, Christians become merciless) (Chapter 23). Even his own brother has betrayed him to his love rival. All that remains for the narrator is bittersweet humiliation – how low can he sink?

As Mary Bryden comments: ‘This valorising of weakness is pre-eminently the province of the clown. Indeed, for [Jacques] Lecoq, the key to a successful clown is precisely the “discovery of how personal weakness can be transformed into dramatic strength.”’ (see below, Bryden, p. 166)

This beautiful novel treads a fine line between tenderness and disillusionment, hope and despair.

English Translation

Heinrich Böll, The Clown, trans. by Leila Vennewitz (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1965)

Further Reading in English

Mary Bryden, ‘Beckett, Böll, and Clowns’, Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui 19 (2008), 157-171

Leonard L. Duroche, ‘Böll’s Ansichten eines Clowns in Existentialist Perspective’, Symposium (Syracuse, NY) 25:4 (1971), 347-58

H.R. Klieneberger, ‘Heinrich Böll in Ansichten eines Clowns’, German Life and Letters 19 (1965), 34-39

Robert H. Paslick, ‘A Defense of Existence: Böll’s Ansichten eines Clowns’, The German Quarterly 41:4 (1968), 698-710

J.H. Reid, ‘Labyrinths: Heinrich Böll, Ansichten eines Clowns, and the nouveau roman’, Modern Language Review 115:1 (2020), 107-23

Arrigo Victor Subiotto, ‘Ansichten eines Clowns – A Reassessment’, New German Studies (Hull) 18:1 (1994), 35