Hans summarizes the failure of his romantic and professional life within a few hours. He takes refuge on the steps of the central railway station like a beggar, waiting (or pretending to wait) for the return of Marie, a woman he loved and lost, who is coming back from her honeymoon in Rome that day. A long monologue without illusions, mixed with personal memories, interrupted only by a few phone conversations and a brief visit from his father: a narrative form that fits the absolute destitution of the character, his inability to claim a complete novelistic truth. Hans comes from a bourgeois family. His decision to become a clown throws him to the margins of good society, which lives the dream of the German miracle. He belongs to the generation that, although too young to be enlisted, grew up hearing Nazi slogans. The new affluent society, built on the ruins of the war, is irrevocably suspicious in his eyes, as its protagonists, more or less exposed to Nazism, cheaply buy off their clear conscience. And the "progressive Catholicism" that prevails in the bourgeois circles of Bonn fully participates in the pervasive hypocrisy. His own mother chairs a committee for "racial rapprochement," although she previously sent her daughter to anti-aircraft defense to drive Jews out of the "sacred German land." Against all this, Hans directs his arrows, without hiding his personal bitterness. Marie left him to marry one of those modern Catholics with great prospects who are in the spotlight. To social hypocrisy, Hans contrasts the true mask of the clown. But the clown's grimace, an aesthetic-moral response, though not ideological or political, remains sadly weak. This is the novel of the end of the Adenauer era. Beneath the melancholy of the clown, which, as Böll himself says, has nothing to do with pessimism, the moment of rebellion dawns. The clown leaves, and the moment of Katharina Blum arrives.