The Clown

Hans Schnier’s Evening

The Clown takes place in a single evening in the early 1960s. Hans Schnier, twenty-seven years old, returns to his apartment in Bonn with a knee injury, no money, and no Marie. He makes a series of phone calls. The calls constitute the novel.

Hans is the second son of a wealthy Rhineland industrialist—the kind of family whose prosperity survived both the Nazi period and the war with minimal interruption. He rejected his class destiny, became a mime and clown, and built his act and his life around his partner Marie Derkum, the daughter of a small Catholic shopkeeper. Marie has left him: under pressure from Catholic youth group friends and her own guilt about their unmarried cohabitation, she has married Heribert Züpfner, a Catholic functionary, and gone to Rome.

The phone calls reveal the architecture of West German Catholic bourgeois society through Hans’s attempts to extract money from it. He calls his father, who is elaborately rich but dispenses advice and moral reflection rather than cash. He calls his brother Leo, who has converted to Catholicism with an earnest literalism that Hans finds both admirable and catastrophic. He calls various Catholic prelates and committee members who were part of Marie’s circle—men who combine religious language with social and professional ambition in ways Hans finds obscene. He calls Marie’s new husband. He calls his mother, a committed nationalist during the Nazi period who has since reinvented herself as a promoter of Jewish-German reconciliation.

Each conversation adds a line to the portrait. Böll never loses sight of the concrete particulars: the exact nature of each person’s complicity, the specific language through which they avoid honesty, the gap between their professions of Christian concern and their actual behavior.

Marie and the Church

The love story at the center of The Clown is the key to what makes the satire work. Hans’s grief for Marie is real and unsentimentalized. Their relationship—conducted in hotel rooms and rented apartments across Germany as Hans’s touring circuit—was a genuine companionship and a creative partnership. Marie believed in his act; he believed in her decency. Their cohabitation was, by the standards of early 1960s West German Catholicism, a scandal, but it was also, Böll insists, the most honest thing either of them had.

The Catholic Church’s role in the novel is not the role of a tyrannical institution but of a pervasive social atmosphere. No one explicitly forces Marie to marry Züpfner. But the cumulative weight of expectation—from her priest, from her Catholic youth group, from the respectable network of committee members and board functionaries who constitute the social world of German Catholicism in Adenauer’s republic—makes the marriage feel like the only available path to legitimacy. Hans, who is not Catholic, cannot be legitimized.

Böll was himself a Catholic—a serious, practicing, critical Catholic—and his engagement with the Church in The Clown is not the assault of an outsider but the grief of a believer who watches an institution betray its own best principles for social comfort. The priests and committee members Hans calls are not evil; they are accommodated, which in Böll’s moral economy is worse.

The Satirist’s Method

The clown as a satirical figure has a long European tradition: the fool who is permitted to say true things because his role removes him from the social contract of respectability. Böll uses Hans’s profession deliberately. Hans’s act consists of mimicry—of bureaucrats, of preachers, of pompous officials—and his gift for mimicry is also the novel’s gift: the ability to reproduce a social type’s language well enough that the type condemns itself.

Hans fails as a professional clown by the time the novel opens: without Marie, his act has collapsed. His personal loss and his professional collapse are the same event, which is Böll’s most economical point. The clown’s art requires genuine feeling; the moment it becomes a performance separated from experience, it dies. Hans cannot fake grief because he actually grieves.

The novel ends with Hans sitting on the steps of Bonn’s main station, playing the guitar and begging. He is wearing his white makeup. It is a theatrical image—the clown reduced to street performance—but it is also Böll’s image of the honest man in a dishonest society: stripped of comfort, visible, without resources, but still present.

Our rating: 4.2/5 — Böll’s bitterest and funniest novel: a one-evening anatomy of West German Catholic bourgeois society, seen through the eyes of the only man in the room honest enough to be a failure.