Monologue from a victim

The monologue of an affected person is a story by Rolf Bongs that appeared in 1961 with an afterword by the author in the Reclam Verlag in Stuttgart.

The focus of the story is the 50-year-old writer with heart disease, Christian Schramm, who lives in Berlin and has finally published a successful novel after many years: The story of two people who met during the Second World War and a closer, albeit fleeting one Enter into relationship. When he returned home after the war, they became strangers. A blackmailer causes them to flee the Eastern Zone together. The moment the man tries to enforce his marital rights by force, she shoots him. The murder is never solved, the guilt is not suppressed. But it is reduced to an individual problem.

This prepares for the theme of the story: the guilt problem of people in the National Socialist era . The writer Christian Schramm “confesses” to a young journalist, who comes to him for an interview, his own entanglements during this time. The background to this is the fact that after his literary success he received letters from anonymous people with threats and insults ("Nazi pig"). The past catches up with him and forces him to argue.

In his “ monologue ” Schramm tells the young visitor about the creeping, disgusting changes in the years 1932/33: the increasing spread of National Socialist sentiments, the growing militarization of society. As a "loner" he is not ready to adapt. And so he has to give up his position in the publishing house somewhere in the Rhineland and moves to what he thinks is freer Berlin. But here, too, he encounters the regime's terror, which manifests itself in the nocturnal arrests of opponents of the regime, in the forced flight abroad, in the rumors of concentration camps and the constant fear of spying. In his economic hardship Anton helps him, who finally persuades him to join the NSDAP. A job at the Völkischer Beobachter is the reward for betraying one's own convictions. In 1943 he was drafted into the Wehrmacht and reported - privileged as a war correspondent - from the front.

In addition to this admission of guilt, which relates to the political level, Schramm tells of personal guilt that he has incurred in the private sphere. During the time at the Völkischer Beobachter he begins a sexual relationship with an editor, Josy. She becomes pregnant and refuses to have an abortion, arguing that in the course of the relationship she began to love him. He does not want to betray his own principles again and refuses to enter into marriage. Josy enforces her rights in court. Schramm's conscription to the Italian front leads to a temporary separation. In a bomb attack on Berlin, Josy and her child are buried, the child does not survive. Josy is freed from the buried basement after three days. Confused and insane, she is admitted to a mental institution. Schramm gets home leave, seeks her in her cell, but - like the doctors - cannot change her condition. When he returned to the front, he learned of her death: euthanasia through lethal injection.

Schramm's conclusion from this double experience of guilt is: Guilt cannot be atoned for. It continues ... from father to son and his children until guilt dries up in the sands of time. This monologue, which has strongly autobiographical traits of the author, is embedded in a framework plot. The first-person narrator , editor of a newspaper, entrusts the task of interviewing the famous writer Christian Schramm on his 50th birthday to a young editor. He has no respect for traditional values. But he is - also for Schramm - a bearer of hope, since he can give new life to the guilt of the "fathers".