The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum)

Julian Preece

• Publisher: British Film Institute
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781839024375
• eBook ISBN: 9781839024382
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

"Brisk [and] forceful." Sight & Sound
"Lucidly argued." Total Film Margarethe von Trotta and Volker Schlöndorff's The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (1975) was a pivotal film for the New German Cinema movement. Julian Preece considers what makes Katharina Blum new and radical, in particular in respect of women's cinema and its portrayal of the ordeal of its female lead in a world run by men. Drawing on archival material including drafts of the screenplay, brochures and props, reviews and interviews, Preece traces the conception of the film and its development from Heinrich Böll's original novel. Preece analyses how the film continues to resonate with our contemporary moment and has influenced film-makers from the German-Turkish director Fatih Akin to the British screenwriter Peter Morgan.

1 A Pivotal Film for New German Cinema

Co-directed by Margarethe von Trotta and Volker Schlöndorff in 1975 and adapted from Heinrich Böll’s polemical short novel, The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum is a hard-hitting intervention in a public controversy about the criminalisation of left-wing dissent. Billed as a ‘crime thriller’ and ‘entertainment film’ by Schlöndorff himself,¹ it was recognised as melodramatic, suspenseful, even ‘Hitchcockian’ by US critics.² According to Austrian-born director Billy Wilder, it was ‘simply the best German picture since Fritz Lang’s M’.³ Like Lang, von Trotta and Schlöndorff exploited popular forms to reach mainstream filmgoers, which was to some degree a novel venture for New German Cinema. Directors such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, with whom both collaborated, were interested in genre cinema but their avant-garde style appealed mainly to art-house audiences. Politics too was largely new territory for the loosely knit group of Young German Film-makers, which included Wim Wenders and Werner Herzog, all still in their early thirties in 1975. While Fassbinder exposed social attitudes to race and sexuality in his portrayal of an interracial love affair in Fear Eats the Soul (1974), Schlöndorff and von Trotta now addressed the terrorist question, which over the next decade would become one of the movement’s defining topics. What is remarkable given this localised background is that Katharina Blum transcends its context. Audiences today see that the heroine has experienced forms of everyday sexism and male condescension throughout her life, which reaches crisis point during the five days depicted in the film when she finally fights back and becomes a killer herself.

Twenty-seven-year-old Katharina Blum is an inconspicuous citizen from a modest background who works as a housekeeper (Böll would refer to her as a ‘maid’). She shoots an unscrupulous news reporter four days after spending the night with a young man she meets at a carnival party who turns out to be wanted by the police for armed robbery and murder. The police suspect that he is part of a gang, possibly of ‘anarchists’ or ‘conscientious objectors’, but the truth is – while he is indeed armed – he is a lone wolf, neither politically motivated nor part of any group. He has deserted from the army with a cash box containing a large sum of money. In the novel, he also stole a gun and hopes to flee the country. When The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum was shown in West German cinemas, leading members of the Red Army Faction (RAF), or Baader–Meinhof Group, were facing trial. Members of the public who expressed understanding for their motives or criticised the response of the state and sections of the media, as Böll had done, faced vilification. The popular press owned by the Springer Media Corporation tarred all radicals with the ‘terrorist’ brush; intellectuals who disagreed were ‘sympathisers’. Katharina Blum’s subject could not have been more topical and contemporary reactions to it in West Germany were duly polarised, just as the question of how to respond to self-styled left-wing revolutionaries who emerged from the protest movements in the late 1960s split the country.

Over the course of five days of carnival in February 1975, Blum’s reputation is shredded in a tabloid called simply Die Zeitung or ‘The Newspaper’ – ‘The News’ in the published English translation. Its reporter exchanges confidential information with the police, while his boss ensures that the name of a local bigwig, who has pursued Blum to be his mistress, is kept out of the headlines. Böll’s novel carried a sub-title dropped by the filmmakers but which applies equally to their film, How Violence Develops and Where It Can Lead. Readers and filmgoers alike were invited to conclude that the state and the press provoked a violent response from a hitherto law-abiding citizen. The novel begins with a programmatic statement which parodies disclaimers placed at the start of topical fiction, a version of which is typed over the last image in the film before a fade to black (there are no final credits). Böll insisted that title, sub-title and statement were integral: ‘The characters and plot in this story are entirely fictional. Should there be similarities between the description of certain journalistic practices and the practices of the Bild-Zeitung, then these similarities are neither intended nor accidental, but rather unavoidable.’

The film-makers left out mentioning Bild by name fearing that Springer could sue.⁴ The statement underlined to readers that they were reading a literary pamphlet in the guise of a fiction. The various ‘speaking names’ bolstered this impression: Werner Tötges for the reporter and principal villain contains töten (to kill); Beizmenne for the Chief Inspector has beizen meaning to stain but also to bait in the context of hunting, making him a ‘hunter of men’; Blum’s lover Ludwig Götten meanwhile suggests Götter (gods) or göttlich (divine), which is how he appears to Blum at their chance meeting. Derived from the Greek, the name Katharina in Catholic terminology denotes the ‘pure woman’. Blum is a common surname in the Cologne area where the film is set, its most famous bearer the campaigner for liberty Robert Blum (1807–48), who was executed in Vienna for his reformist advocacy and is still commemorated in his native city. Katharina Blum was thus a name with a theological and political pedigree.

A statement of this sort was not a wholly original idea in recent European cinema. In Z (1969, dir. Costa-Gavras), made in French but set in Greece prior to the military coup d’état of 1967, a similar notice is posted on screen in sequential chunks of text while the opening credits are rolling and the action of the film has already begun: ‘Any similarity to real events, to personas living or dead, is not coincidental. It is INTENTIONAL.’⁵ The similarity with the ending of Katharina Blum is too striking to be a coincidence: even if Böll was unaware of the connection, von Trotta and Schlöndorff knew Costa-Gavras. A number of US reviewers compared their film of Katharina Blum with Z.⁶ Both are political thrillers about individuals concerned with the truth battling powerful adversaries who manipulate the facts. Greek politics had remained topical: the cover story of the edition of Der Spiegel which began the serialisation of Böll’s novel on 29 July 1974 was on the end of the military junta which had ruled Greece for seven years starting in 1967.⁷ Von Trotta and Schlöndorff were indirectly comparing the political chaos in Greece a decade ago with that of West Germany under its Social Democrat Chancellor Willy Brandt, a former anti-Nazi resister. The national situations of Greece and West Germany differed but the disrespect for truth drew them together against a background of Cold War tensions. In an attempt to forestall criticism that he was soft on communism as he forged new relationships with Eastern bloc states, Brandt introduced the notorious ‘Radicals Decree’ restricting access to state employment to left-wing critics of the state.

Premiered on 17 September 1975 at the San Sebastian Film Festival in Spain’s Basque Country in the dying months of Franco’s dictatorship, where it won a Film Critics’ Prize awarded by the Circulo de Escritores Cinematográficos, and screened at the New York Film Festival the following month, Katharina Blum was released in West German cinemas on 10 October 1975. It won Lolas for Angela Winkler in the title role and its director of cinematography, Jost Vacano.⁸ Winkler also won the German Critics’ Prize. Despite limited cinematic release, it was welcomed in the US, in particular by remnants of the counterculture; in 1984 CBS commissioned a remake entitled The Lost Honor of Kathryn Beck (dir. Simon Langton), transposing the action from the Rhineland to the Midwest, with Kris Kristofferson as the heroine’s fugitive lover. Vacano, who was responsible for its alienating neon-lit look and modernist imagery, went on to work on Das Boot (1981, dir. Wolfgang Petersen), set in the confined space of a submarine, and on dystopian blockbusters such as Robocop (1987) and Total Recall (1990) directed by Paul Verhoeven. With composer Hans Werner Henze, Vacano ensured the film’s discordant, frequently uncanny atmosphere which stands in counterpoint to the more conventional plotline and fast-paced action. Cinemagoers’ most recent exposure to Henze was The Exorcist (1973, dir. William Friedkin) where a segment from his Fantasia for Strings, originally composed for Schlöndorff’s first literary adaptation, Young Törless (1966), played over the final credits. There are several eerie moments in Katharina Blum, each intensified by a soundtrack which would not be out of place in a horror movie. When the first anonymous note is posted under Blum’s door, it is as if the building itself has disgorged it. The ultra-modern tower block complex where she lives is a locus of horror: shots of it are shown immediately prior to the twin events of her first confrontation arrest with Beizmenne and final shooting of Tötges.

Tower blocks, now on the campus of Cologne University

Henze composed Katharina Blum: Concert Suite for Small Orchestra following musical cues from the film-makers after seeing the finished film – which he was convinced he needed to rescue. He had already influenced the shape of its narrative. He explained that for his musical idea to work, the Rhine (‘the poisoned river’), which flows through Böll’s Cologne but which is not mentioned in the novel, must feature at the beginning and the lovers must meet for a second time before the end.⁹ Schlöndorff brought Vacano into the production team after filming had started in place of Fassbinder veteran Dietrich Lohmann. He trusted him to translate images of dehumanising modern cityscapes and anonymous, mass-produced work spaces, which von Trotta and Schlöndorff took to be alienating. They meant their depiction of what the French sociologist Marc Augé would later call ‘non-places’ to be part of the film’s critical punch, but the same modernist aesthetic was already being celebrated in music by Rhineland bands such as Kraftwerk. Katharina Blum’s sharp cinematic look is contrastive as a result, with bright carnival colours clashing with greyish institutional anonymity and modernist domestic interiors.

The film is divided into five consecutive days, dated 5–9 February 1975, which are followed by an epilogue. As the credits roll, we first see a man around thirty years old, Ludwig Götten (Jürgen Prochnow), crossing a wide river by car ferry unaware that he is under observation by plain-clothes police, one of whom is filming him. Once on dry land he opportunistically steals a sports car and heads into the city, where the population is in festive mood and fancy dress. The car is a Porsche, the same make as driven later by Tötges. It is the last Wednesday before Lent, the beginning of the so-called ‘crazy days’, and the eve of Weiberfastnacht when, traditionally, power structures between the sexes were reversed and the patriarchal order is turned upside down. Thursday, 6 February, when Blum is taken into custody for questioning and her ordeal begins, is the only one of the film’s five days to be named: ‘Women’s Carnival Day’. Pitching up in a city-centre café, now tailed by a policeman in an Arab sheikh costume, Götten is invited to a party by two teenagers, played by Co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• BFI Film Classics
• dedication
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 A Pivotal Film for New German Cinema
• 2 Political Context in Post-68 West Germany
• 3 Heinrich Böll’s Novel, or How Violence Develops and Where It Can Lead
• 4 Words or Guns? Katharina Blum’s Struggle for Articulacy
• 5 Influence and Afterlives
• Notes
• Credits
• Bibliography
• eCopyright