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The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum

Bioskop Film, 1975, Germany | Color, 106 minutes, Drama/Thriller

A young woman’s life is ruined after she is accused of aiding a terrorist.

Director: Margarethe von Trotta

(with Volker Schlöndorff)

Producer: Eberhard Junkersdorf

Cinematography: Jost Vacano

Screenplay: Margarethe von Trotta, Volker Schlöndorff, based on a novel by Heinrich Böll

Starring: Angela Winkler

(“Katharina Blum”), Mario Adorf (“Kommissar Beizmenne”), Dieter Laser (“Werner Tötges”), Jürgen Prochnow (“Ludwig Götten”)

“I am always attracted by a woman who has to fight for her own life and her own reality, who has to get out of a certain situation of imprisonment, to free herself. That is perhaps the main theme in all my films.”

—Margarethe von Trotta

In the early 1970s, a bank in West Germany was robbed. The following day, and without any evidence, the nation’s biggest newspaper, Bild-Zeitung, attributed the robbery to the Baader-Meinhof gang. That gang, sometimes known as the Red Army Faction, was a far left-wing militant group. At the time, the country was gripped by fears about terrorism, and the newspaper seemed to be focused on fanning the flames of paranoia. Nobel-winning novelist Heinrich Böll wrote an essay condemning Bild-Zeitung for the news magazine Der Spiegel, and the paper responded by calling him a terrorist sympathizer. Böll and his family started to receive hate mail, were subject to wire taps, and encountered other police harassment. Eventually Böll turned this harrowing experience into The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum: How Violence Can Arise and What It Can Lead To, a novel about a young woman whose life is ruined by the press. The book was a bestseller, but even before it was published two politically minded filmmakers had decided to turn it into a movie.

The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum was directed by Margarethe von Trotta and Volker Schlöndorff, starring Angela Winkler in the title role. At the beginning of the film, Katharina is a beautiful, hardworking young woman who meets an attractive man, Ludwig Götten (Jürgen Prochnow), on a rare night out with friends. Their chemistry is immediate, and Blum leaves the party with him, taking him back to her place. In the morning she is startled by the police, who burst into her apartment looking for him. They claim that Götten is a terrorist and take Blum into custody on suspicion of aiding him.

At the police station, Blum is subjected to hours of questioning by Kommissar Beizmenne (Mario Adorf) and his team. They taunt her for sleeping with Götten so soon after meeting him, but she refuses to flinch or play their games. As a form of punishment, Beizmenne leaks details about the case to a brash reporter from The Paper. Based on these scant details, Werner Tötges (Dieter Laser) begins to publish scathing articles about Katharina’s love life, each becoming more sensational by the day. Blum starts to receive hate mail, obscene phone calls, and unwanted sexual advances. Her safety is threatened, her friends distance themselves from her, and she loses her job. All the while, The Paper prints more and more articles about Blum and her life, ruining her reputation and placing her under severe psychological stress.

Though this is a movie made over forty years ago, it feels as timely as ever. Watching it again, I was reminded of the book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson, which explores the type of glee people seem to experience from watching and participating in online trolling and the devastating effects on the person targeted. Katharina’s experience could also be likened to the invasive level of surveillance some individuals were subjected to following 9/11, or to how hate has been stoked by fake news posts and conspiracy theories circulated via social media.

In case von Trotta and Schöndorff’s intentions were not sufficiently clear back in 1975, the film included a scathing epitaph which reads, “Should the description of certain journalistic practices bear any resemblance to the practices of the Bild-Zeitung, this is nether intentional, nor accidental, but unavoidable.” It was a brave action on their part to speak up against such a powerful media company.

The press in the The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum have zero regard for civil liberties, and the police are portrayed as morally bankrupt. There is little nuance on either side, with their actions exaggerated to make a point about the erosion of civil liberties and the dangers involved when authorities begin acting as if they are above the law.

Angela Winkler grounds the film with a singularly powerful performance. Her steadfast silence enrages the police, who expect her to be a “good girl” and cooperate—or at the very least, to be ashamed for having a one-night stand. It’s not personal, they insist, but then decide to destroy her through the media. In this they are helped by the misogynistic Tötges, who is the type of person who believes any fame is good, even when it comes with vicious slut-shaming from members of the public. “You are news,” he tells her proudly. Soon, it doesn’t matter why the police questioned her in the first place. In the eyes of her community, Blum is guilty—her biggest crime being that she is a woman unashamed of her sexuality.

Much of the feminist point of view in The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum has been attributed to Margarethe von Trotta. This was her first feature film as a director, working alongside Volker Schlöndorff, who was her husband at the time. Though he had previously made several feature films, The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum gave Schlöndorff his first box office hit, and both he and von Trotta soon became a vital part of New German Cinema. It was to be their only directorial collaboration. After this success, Schlöndorff went on to make political films such as the Oscar-winning The Tin Drum, while von Trotta directed a string of feminist movies, joining a small but powerful group of European female filmmakers.

Margarethe von Trotta was born at a tumultuous time: the year 1942 in Berlin, Germany. After going through the war and graduating from high school, she studied business, art, philology, and drama. But in the early 1960s her world was changed by a visit to Paris, where she saw films by Ingmar Bergman, Alfred Hitchcock, and the directors of the French New Wave. As she later explained, “I came from Germany before the New Wave, so we had all these silly movies. Cinema for me was entertainment, but it was not art. When I came to Paris, all of the sudden I understood what cinema could be. I stood there and said, ‘That is what I’d like to do with my life.’ ”

Unfortunately, it wasn’t to be easy. There were few female directors working in the industry, so von Trotta started taking on small parts as an actress. She caught the attention of several directors, including Volker Schlöndorff, who later became her romantic partner and creative collaborator. She cowrote with Schlöndorff on several projects before getting the chance to prove herself as a director alongside him on The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum. Because that film went on to be such a success, von Trotta was given more opportunities as a director and proved herself by making movies centering on women. She made The Second Awakening of Christa Klages, released in 1978, based on the true story of a kindergarten teacher who robbed a bank to keep the school open.

And then, beginning in 1979, Margarethe von Trotta made her famous trilogy of films about sisters. With Sisters, or the Balance of Happiness, Marianne and Juliane (sometimes known as The German Sisters), and Three Sisters, von Trotta became an important feminist director and one of the leading filmmakers in New German Cinema.

Throughout the ’80s, ’90s, 2000s, and to this day, von Trotta continues to make films about the struggles of everyday women. Her stories are sensitively told and depict complex, three-dimensional female characters, delving into their psychology, emotions, and inner life. Comparisons have been made between her work and the films of Ingmar Bergman, who Margarethe von Trotta has cited as a huge influence. She explored this personal connection in a documentary called Searching for Ingmar Bergman, which played at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival.

Despite her focus on the stories of women, the title of “feminist” or “female” filmmaker is one from which Margarethe von Trotta has shied away. As she explained in an interview with The Observer, this was more due to the reaction of a paying audience than her own views. “When I started to make films,” she said, “I wanted to tell something about me and about us and about my experience and my knowledge. I felt also a little bit like a duty to speak about women, like I was a voice for other women who didn’t have this possibility to speak. I have nothing against feminism, and surely I’m a feminist, but the word is used now mainly by men, in an ironic way. They say, ‘Oh, that’s just a women’s film. You don’t have to go in, it’s not interesting for you as a man.’ I’m very much against this.”

And indeed, to view von Trotta as only a great female filmmaker would be to reduce her immense talents. With her remarkable body of work, unique perspective, and skills in telling engaging stories, there is little doubt that Margarethe von Trotta is one of the most important German directors in history and that she deserves to be talked about alongside the likes of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders, and Volker Schlöndorff.

THE FEMALE GAZE

Katharina Blum is treated very differently than if she were a man. When she doesn’t display the appropriate amount of shame at sleeping with someone she has just met, the male-dominated police force and a male reporter go out of their way to ruin her reputation—and show no remorse when she begins to receive anonymous hate mail calling her degrading names and threatening to ruin her life.

FAST FACTS

★The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum was one of the biggest hits of any German films in the 1970s and was released the same year as another political thriller, Three Days of the Condor, starring Robert Redford.

★On set, Volker Schlöndorff looked after the technical side of directing, while Margarethe von Trotta took care of the performances—the aspect most praised by critics.

★The success of this film led to a 1984 made-for-television remake called The Lost Honor of Kathryn Beck, starring Marlo Thomas and Kris Kristofferson.

★In 1992, the great director Ingmar Bergman was asked by the Göteborg Film Festival to list the films that had most impressed him. Among names like Charlie Chaplin, Federico Fellini, and Akira Kurosawa, he included Margarethe von Trotta. He particularly admired her film Marianne and Juliane and told her it had given him courage during a time of depression.

★When Margarethe von Trotta won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival for her film Marianne and Juliane, she was the first director to win that top prize since Leni Riefenstahl’s win for Olympia in 1938.