Heinrich Böll: Views of a Clown (1963)
I also asked her to explain to me exactly what they had done to her in the hospital, she said it had been a „woman thing“, „harmless, but shy“. The word woman thing flö&foreign;t frightens me. It sounds mysterious to me in a böse way, because I am completely ignorant in these things. I had already been with Marie for three years when I first heard about this „woman thing“. I knew how women have children, of course, but I didn't know anything about the details. …. The second person who told me about it was Karl Emonds, my schoolmate, who was always fiddling with his horrible tables of fertility.
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In the afternoon, when the vice squad came, I was glad that Marie was gone, although the fact that she was gone was embarrassing for me. … „You must understand that“, said the officer, „we have to do certain spot checks when transients have abortive – she hüstelte – diseases.“ „I understand everything“, I said – I had not read anything about abortive in the dictionary.
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Getämpft the petulance in the voices, never persönlich; sie riß nur manchmal aus der gleichmäßigen Kurve aus und kratzte Zacken in den Nachbarschaftshimmel, immer aus nichtlichen, nie aus den wahren Anlässen: when a saucer broke clinking, a rolling ball bent flowers … - the voices become shrill, which must not become shrill because of cheating, adultery, abortion.
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Später my mother even wrote that she had „disowned me“. It can be distasteful to the point of idiocy, because she quoted the expression from a novel by Schnitzler called ‚Herz im Zwiespalt‘. In this novel, a girl is „disowned“ by her parents because she refuses to give birth to a child conceived for her by a „noble but weak artist“, I believe, an actor.