The Berlin Boxing Club

In the Berlin where this novel takes place, art has been put into the service of politics—that is, of the Nazi regime. Karl’s father is no longer allowed to show paintings that are deemed by the Nazis to show decadent, daring subjects or that are simply by non-Aryan artists. Rather, he must display pretty, inoffensive art that glorifies the German landscape and identity. It is a difficult situation for him both morally and financially, as these new paintings that he is obliged to show do not sell well, and it reinforces his own tendency toward rigidity and didacticism. He frequently lectures Karl on the obligation of art to disturb and to show the world in a nuanced, complicated light, rather than a simple one; gazing at the Picasso painting that he is about to sell to a wily art dealer, he muses, “‘So many ideas in one painting. It’s no wonder those savages have banned art like this’” (304). He also exercises his own sort of censorship, in dismissing Karl’s ambitions to be a comic-book artist.

What Karl’s father does not see about Karl’s comic book hobby—both his reading and his drawing of comic strips—is that it is Karl’s way of coping with totalitarianism and thought control.