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The Presence of Self-Sacrifice in Heinrich Boll's The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum as Compared with Its Absence in Naguib Mahfouz's Midaq Alley The answer as to why the motif of self-sacrifice appears to have very important in Heinrich Bolls novel The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, whereas in Naguib Mahfouz Midaq Alley we have a hard time trying to find even a traces of it, is actually self-evident, and there is no need to refer to the theory of psychoanalysis, in order to explain it. The events described in Bolls novel take place in Germany in 1974, before the ideological poison of multiculturalism had deprived Germans of their spiritual qualities that that allowed them to build and to maintain a great European civilization. For example, the reason why Germans contributed to the development of philosophy more then any other nation in the world, is because they are highly idealistic people by nature. This is the reason why they were able to operate with abstract concepts in the first place. It also explains why the existential mode of great many Germans, throughout the history, used to be affected by self-sacrificial motifs.
We can say that peoples ability to sacrifice for the sake of others is one of the most distinctive features of Western civilization, as whole. Boll describes Katharina Blum as ordinary woman, who exemplifies the essence of female virtues. Even her biography, at the beginning of Bolls book, provides us with the insight on highly idealistic properties of Katharina's character: I had to start doing housework at an early age because my father was often sick, which meant reduced pay, and my mother took on the number of jobs as a cleaning woman. I had no difficulty in school, although even while I was still there I had to do a lot housework, not only at home but also in the homes of neighbors and others living in the village, where I used to lend a hand at baking, cooking, preserving and slaughtering.
I also did a lot of housework and helped with the harvest, because I loved my parents and wanted to help them, even at expense of depriving myself of academic prospects (Boll, p. 22). Even Katharina's physical features reveal her as idealistic individual; author describes her as blond and blue-eyed woman, whose moral stance derives out of her physiology rather then out of her religious or social affiliation. It is not by pure accident that novels storyline has a strong connection with the rise of left-wing terrorism in Germany in seventies. Communist terrorists from RAF were highly idealistic individuals, despite the fact that they believed in purely materialistic political doctrine. They had an inner urge to sacrifice for the sake of proletariat, despite the fact that their activity would often result in many innocent people being killed.
Therefore, we can say that it is peoples racial affiliation that define who they are German left-wing terrorists never ceased to be typical European idealists, even despite their affiliation with Marxism. In the similar manner, people in Third World countries, never ceased to be nothing but artificially civilized savages. This is the reason why the characters in Naguib Mahfouz Midaq Alley can be the least typified by their willingness to sacrifice for the sake of some higher good. It cannot escape readers attention that the daily routine of these characters consists of mimicking the act of White men, but their true spiritual essence still comes out through the thin layer of cultural superficiality: Not far from the entrance, on a couch, sits a man in his fifties dressed in a cloak with sleeves, wearing a necktie usually worn by those who affect Western dress. On his nose perches a pair of expensive-looking gold-rimmed spectacles He sits as stiffly as a statue, as silent as a corpse. He looks neither to the right nor to the left, as though lost in a world all his own, and then he farts loudly (Mahfouz, p. 15).
The matter of fact is people who populate Egypt at present time, have nothing to do with ancient Egyptians, who had build pyramids, because of never ending process of racial mixing, to which these people were being subjected, throughout the millennia. Such process results in people being deprived of idealistic spiritual qualities, with which we closely associate individuals ability to engage in self-sacrificial acts. Mahfouz novel describes the lives of people in Cairo's ghetto and one does not have to be a genius to realize that their lifestyle remind us a lifestyle of immigrants from Third World who celebrate diversity by dumping garbage out on the street in front of their houses. Apparently, it is the anomalistic urges that define the existential mode of such people, which can be hardly be referred to as beneficial for society, as whole. Bibliography: Boll, Heinrich The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum.
London: Penguin Classics, 1994. Mahfouz, Naguib Midaq Alley. New York: Anchor, 1991. Abstract: This paper discusses the presence of self-sacrificial motifs in Heinrich Bolls The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum and their absence in Naguib Mahfouz Midaq Alley.
Outline: Part one p. 1 Part two p. 2
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