Indeed, in the years to come more and more critics would come to realize, like Koch and Warnke, exactly how much an existentialist tale of post-Nazi Germany could pertain to a postwar America building a new identity as the world’s leader. In his review, Koch noted how both Hans and Herzog struggle with identity (they find it, if at all, in the quotidian), as well as that both books recall their protagonists’ “struggles with the devices of the isolated—gnawing, morbid letters and telephone calls.” In both cases these futile attempts at communication become effective ways to concretize the spiritual, moral, and physical isolation of each book’s protagonist. Likewise, in each the struggle of the individual’s incapacity to function in his country helps magnify that nation’s shortcomings.
If the similarity between Hans and Herzog is palpable, that of Hans to Holden all but grabs a reader by the throat. While Böll worked on The Clown he was also translating Catcher in the Rye into German (the translation appeared in 1962 and is acknowledged for introducing Salinger to the Germans), and it generally agreed that Böll’s translation work infected the novel he was writing. A list of Hans’ and Holden’s commonalities would include: rebellion against parents, a thorough distaste for hypocrites and phonies, an existential angst and isolation, penury, foul language, and dead siblings whom they idolize. Both books are dramatizations of what happens to an individual who will stand in judgment of his own society, and both books are deeply ambivalent about whether a strict adherence to a personal morality is in fact a good thing. Though Hans and Holden are far from interchangeable—Hans is, after all, a young adult in his mid-twenties who has just ended a lengthy “marriage”—both are exceedingly good vessels for the sensation of youthful rebellion against the bourgeois capitalism that was taking hold in each author’s nation when their books were published.
Those first reviewers who saw The Clown as art—and not as agitprop—have had their impressions validated by the test of time. The Clown reached such heights of worldwide popularity that in 1985 Böll wrote an epilogue to the book in which he attempted to explain its enduring, widespread fame. In the epilogue Böll notes the tension inherent in having a Catholic church speak for millions of individuals, a tension echoed in many of today’s democracies, where politicians are often poor channels for the political will. Hans’ plight is one that resounds today because he chooses to question those who say they know what is best. Individuals such as Hans will always be in short supply and great need, and if we cannot have enough of them in our discourse we can at least have them in our fiction. To read The Clown today is to have a glimpse of a Germany now half a century old, but it is also to see many of the questions and scourges of our own time reflected and refracted within a tortured mind that somehow feels contemporary. Hans’ jagged, eloquent voice is one that should be heard today.
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