The eponymous heroine of The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, Heinrich Böll's 1974 novel [made into a film in 1975 by Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta] is a candid, honest and reliable housekeeper who finds herself killing a journalist in cold blood-out of the humiliation she feels at having her self-image sullied in public after having been accidentally involved in a scandal. She had been innocent of any wrongdoing: her only fault was to have danced one night with a young man who turned out to be a dangerous criminal. But she is nonetheless eviscerated in the papers; her mother, employers and ex-husband are interrogated; and she is so ashamed of this public image in which she does not recognize herself that, blinded indeed by humiliation, she commits the crime for which she is then condemned.