We live in a free country and may speak openly and frankly with one another.
To speak openly doesn’t often mean to speak frankly. Using a privilege to express their opinions, people tend to forget about importance of honesty. The author, who is hidden under the mask of the narrator, depicts how easily people can lie. Witnesses who speak against Katharina Blum lie easily, merely considering the possible effect of their worlds. We do live in the free county, may speak openly, but we are obliged to speak frankly when it comes to other people’s lives and feelings.
Freedom of the press was not to be lightly tampered with.
The press is a power which everyone should regard as to be reckoned with. They say that information is a weapon which is supposed to be used only for good and it is impossible to disagree with a fact that the freedom of the press is important for a society’s development and the maintenance of democracy. But what if the freedom of the press is used not for good, but for bad? The narrator gives us a chance to see what real power of false information is and how destructive it can be. Propaganda and made-up facts prove to interest people more than anything else. How often do we bother ourselves to recheck things we see in newspapers? More often than not, the answer is never. Katharina Blum is not alive, she is a fictional character, but her story can easily happen to anyone. The freedom of the press is a wonderful thing until the moment it is used for nasty purposes.
Even public figures were first and foremost patients.
What is the Rubicon line for reporters? People want to get an access to information no matter what. It is true that many reporters have to lock inside their feelings and be ready to ask inconvenient questions, regardless their interviewees’ emotional and physical states. It is not easy and it could be justified when cases are genuinely serious. But would a society justify a reporter who sneaks into a hospital to take pictures of an almost dying person? The author describes Tötges, the reporter of the News, as an absolute “bastard”. But he doesn’t give his readers an answer if it is reasonably to blame only Tötges. There are people who give his false testimonies about Katharina and there are people who support him, believing that it is the way the freedom of the press works. He and the society make Katharina and her family public figures, which give them a permission to intrude in their lives. But as a doctor of Katharina’s mother says, “Even public figures are first and foremost patients” and nothing in the world gives people a right to disturb dying person just to spread a new dose of rumors.
