The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum) 1839024372, 9781839024375

Table of contents :
Cover
Dedication
Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
1. A Pivotal Film for New German Cinema
2. Political Context in Post-68 West Germany
3. Heinrich Boll’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

Citation preview

BFI Film Classics The BFI Film Classics series introduces, interprets and celebrates landmarks of world cinema. Each volume offers an argument for the film’s ‘classic’ status, together with discussion of its production and reception history, its place within a genre or national cinema, an account of its technical and aesthetic importance, and in many cases, the author’s personal response to the film. For a full list of titles in the series, please visit https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/series/bfi-film-classics/

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 1

20/10/2021 15:40

For Eduardo, Natasha and Oliver

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 2

20/10/2021 15:40

The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum [Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum] Julian Preece

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 3

20/10/2021 15:40

THE BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY is a trademark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2022 by Bloomsbury on behalf of the British Film Institute 21 Stephen Street, London W1T 1LN www.bfi.org.uk The BFI is the lead organisation for film in the UK and the distributor of Lottery funds for film. Our mission is to ensure that film is central to our cultural life, in particular by supporting and nurturing the next generation of filmmakers and audiences. We serve a public role which covers the cultural, creative and economic aspects of film in the UK. Copyright © Julian Preece 2022 Julian Preece has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. 6 constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover artwork: © Julia Kretschmann Series cover design: Louise Dugdale Series text design: Ketchup/SE14 Images from The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (Volker Schlöndorff/Margarethe von Trotta, 1975), Paramount-Orion Film Production/WDR – Westdeutscher Rundfunk/Munich Bioskop-Film Additional image credits are listed on p. 100 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN:

PB: 978-1-8390-2437-5 ePDF: 978-1-8390-2439-9 ePUB: 978-1-8390-2438-2

Produced for Bloomsbury Publishing Plc by Sophie Contento

To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 4

20/10/2021 15:40

Contents Acknowledgments6 1 A Pivotal Film for New German Cinema

7

2 Political Context in Post-68 West Germany

29

3 Heinrich Böll’s Novel, or How Violence Develops and Where It Can Lead

36

4 Words or Guns? Katharina Blum’s Struggle for Articulacy

55

5 Influence and Afterlives

85

Notes96 Credits101 Bibliography103

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 5

20/10/2021 15:40

6

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Acknowledgments I am grateful to Jana Jarzembowski, archivist at the DFF – Deutsches Filminstitut und Filmmuseum, Frankfurt am Main/Sammlung Volker Schlöndorff – for assistance with the selection of sources. I quote from drafts of the screenplays and other original documents, such as press clippings of reviews and interviews as well as promotional material. Catalogue numbers are listed in the notes, but clippings are sometimes truncated and/or missing dates or name of publication. I record my thanks also to Markus Schäfer at the Heinrich Böll Stiftung, Stadtbibliothek, Cologne, for assistance in locating materials by and about Heinrich Böll; to Jon Banks for his musicological expertise and Marianne Tuckman for logistical support; students at Swansea University for rekindling my interest in Katharina Blum, in particular Stephen Murphy; London’s Close-Up Cinema for precious access to DVDs during the coronavirus pandemic in 2020; and to Klaus Vogelgesang for locating his original illustrations to Katharina Blum and his permission to reproduce them here. I would like to thank also my editor Sophie Contento and her freelance team for their dedication and expertise in transforming my rough manuscript into a book which I hope does credit to this renowned series.

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 6

20/10/2021 15:40

T H E L O S T H O N O U R O F K AT H A R I N A B L U M

7

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

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 7

20/10/2021 15:40

8

BFI FILM CLASSICS

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

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 8

20/10/2021 15:40

T H E L O S T H O N O U R O F K AT H A R I N A B L U M

9

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 CostaGavras. 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

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 9

20/10/2021 15:40

10

BFI FILM CLASSICS

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

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 10

20/10/2021 15:40

T H E L O S T H O N O U R O F K AT H A R I N A B L U M

11

Tower blocks, now on the campus of Cologne University

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. 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

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 11

20/10/2021 15:40

12

BFI FILM CLASSICS

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 Cologne school pupils Stephanie Thönnessen and Josephine Gierens in their first acting roles. It is at this party, where he is the only guest not in a carnival costume, that he meets Katharina Blum, played by Angela Winkler in only her second film role. The pair are immediately drawn to one another and three hours later they return to her flat. When the police raid the next morning, Götten, who had become aware he was being followed the previous evening, is nowhere to be seen. Chief Inspector Beizmenne (Mario

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 12

20/10/2021 15:40

T H E L O S T H O N O U R O F K AT H A R I N A B L U M

13

Katharina Blum (Angela Winkler)

With Ludwig Götten (Jürgen Prochnow)

Adorf) takes out his frustration on Blum. Using the familiar ‘du’ form of address, he enquires in front of his colleagues: ‘Did he fuck you, then?’ Meeting his gaze as the camera holds her expression in the first of a series of facial close-ups which punctuate the film, she characteristically replies: ‘I wouldn’t call it that.’ The verbal exchange is transferred directly from Böll’s novel and sets the parameters for Blum’s ordeal. Blum shows that she is not easily intimidated and that she has her own distinct set of values. She had straightaway used ‘du’ to Götten the previous evening, the first time that she can remember wanting to talk in a familiar way with a man. The police conclude (rightly) that she helped Götten get out of the building and that she knows where he has gone, which makes her an accomplice to crime, though their suspicion that the couple knew each other

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 13

20/10/2021 15:40

14

BFI FILM CLASSICS

‘Communist bitch’

already is unfounded. What puzzles the police and others present at the party is why Blum was so quickly attracted to the surprise guest. The answer is that Blum and Götten are both social rebels whose gestures of refusal have taken different forms up to this point. Beizmenne is working closely with Tötges (Dieter Laser) from the Zeitung, which splashes the story on Friday’s front page, where it remains in subsequent editions over the weekend.10 The Zeitung is read by everyone Blum knows and manipulates her biography for a sensationalist and politically incendiary agenda, thus blackening Blum’s reputation and taking her honour. She starts to receive abusive phone calls that mix obscenity with anti-communist epithets, but she reaches for a gun only once she realises that even people who know her believe what they are reading.

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 14

20/10/2021 15:40

T H E L O S T H O N O U R O F K AT H A R I N A B L U M

15

As Tötges finds out from her mother’s neighbour, who is all too ready to share gossip, Blum comes from a disadvantaged postwar background. Her father returned from the war ‘a wreck’ and died when she was seven, her mother struggled with alcoholism and is currently in hospital recovering from an operation, while her younger brother is serving a jail sentence. Her origins are working class but she is upwardly mobile, already owning her own property. Gender politics and casual, unreflecting sexism define Böll’s portrayal of her. Blum married young and filed for divorce six months later after discovering an antipathy to her husband which she could not overcome. Her own neighbours tell Tötges that sometimes she is visited at home by a ‘gentleman’ or possibly more than one. This turns out to be Alois Sträubleder, a friend of Blum’s main employers, Trude Blorna, an architect, and her lawyer husband Herbert, who is in love with Blum. Sträubleder is a business leader, academic and aspiring politician who keeps his own name out of the news, even though Götten is holing up at his country villa, the key to which he has pressed on Blum hoping that she will spend carnival weekend with him there. Tötges also finds out that Blum’s aunt, Else Woltersheim, at whose house the carnival party took place, is illegitimate and that her mother lives voluntarily in communist East Germany, her father having emigrated to the Soviet Union in 1932 as a member of the Communist Party. Tötges is delighted to play the anti-communist card, smearing Woltersheim’s parents and thus by association their daughter and Blum herself as unpatriotic. Tötges smuggles himself into the intensive care ward on Friday morning to see Blum’s mother, who dies the next day, possibly as a consequence. Götten, meanwhile, is arrested on Saturday afternoon at the culmination of a massive police operation involving a helicopter, armoured vehicles and scores of personnel. Blum has already offered Tötges an exclusive interview. Unsure what she intends to do when she sees him, she takes a gun belonging to her aunt’s partner, Konrad Beiters, a former Wehrmacht soldier. When Tötges offers her money to tell him all about Sträubleder and explains that they should get to

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 15

20/10/2021 15:40

16

BFI FILM CLASSICS

know each other better by going to bed together, Blum shoots him. The film ends with Tötges’ funeral and a highly stylised oration given by his boss on the sanctity of press freedom in a democracy. Katharina Blum made Winkler a star and helped New German Cinema gain the recognition inside West Germany which it already enjoyed among art-house audiences abroad. In Schlöndorff’s next film, his adaptation of Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum (1979), Winkler and Adorf played the parents of Oskar Matzerath, the grotesque main character who stops growing on his third birthday. Heinz Bennent, who plays Herbert Blorna, also took a minor role, while his son David Bennent played Oskar. Schlöndorff recalls associating Adorf with ‘Papas Kino’, so called because it was aesthetically conventional and politically conservative and which the Young German Film-makers set out to replace in the early 1960s.11 Winkler and Heinz Bennent would also go on to work with von Trotta, appearing respectively in Sheer Madness (1983) and Sisters, or the Balance of Happiness (1979). In Katharina Blum only Hannelore Hoger (Trude Blorna) had prior experience of New German Cinema, having worked with the director Alexander Kluge. Several others were stage actors, Winkler having worked at Peter Stein’s Schaubühne in West Berlin, a crucible of new theatre in the 1970s. Schlöndorff had seen Dieter Laser in Munich productions of Harold Pinter. Winkler’s only previous film role was as the ‘village whore’ Angela Winkler as Hannelore in Hunting Scenes from Bavaria (1968, dir. Peter Fleischmann)

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 16

20/10/2021 15:40

T H E L O S T H O N O U R O F K AT H A R I N A B L U M

17

in the adaptation of the ‘critical folk play’ by Martin Sperr, Hunting Scenes from Bavaria (1968, dir. Peter Fleischmann), but she had also taken a minor role in a television adaptation of Böll’s End of a Mission (1971, dir. Hans-Dieter Schwarze), which brought her to Böll’s attention. He recommended her for the role of Blum, which was originally going to be played by von Trotta. The film’s commercial success was sought by the film-makers and depended on their manipulation of popular generic effects. It has meant too that Katharina Blum has a contested place in the New German Cinema canon, not featuring prominently in standard histories. Newsweek’s cover story for 2 February 1976, featuring a still of confetti-strewn Winkler and Prochnow from the film, was entitled ‘The German Film Boom’. Writing in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, the journalist Wolfram Schütte entitled his supportive review ‘The Breakthrough’, which Schlöndorff borrowed for a chapter in his memoirs.12 Schütte had already reviewed the novel and discussed the film again two months later.13 For von Trotta it was the first film where her name appeared alongside that of her husband, as she had previously assisted with direction and co-written screenplays while also acting in his films. According to scholar Monika Raesch, ‘the success of the film changed von Trotta’s future in the film industry’14 and her participation was key to the film’s success. An American reviewer wrote: I don’t know whether it’s because he has a collaborator, but nothing else in the career of the young West German film-maker Volker Schlöndorff has seemed as good as The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, which he wrote and directed together with his wife, Margarethe von Trotta.15

Schlöndorff’s career had been characterised somewhat by stops and starts up to now, but Katharina Blum led directly to The Tin Drum, which won a Golden Palm at Cannes and an Oscar in 1979. A professional future in the US beckoned, as it did for other German film-makers of his generation, including Wenders and Herzog.

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 17

20/10/2021 15:40

18

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Jeanne Moreau and Brigitte Bardot in Viva Maria! (1965, dir. Louis Malle)

Schlöndorff and von Trotta moved between cinematic worlds, between Brechtian art films and comedies of manners à la française, but both have always remained wedded to the principles of narrative cinema. Schlöndorff directed Anita Pallenberg in her first film, Degree of Murder (1967), with a soundtrack by Rolling Stones bassist Brian Jones, and David Warner in the adaptation of a classic German tale by Heinrich von Kleist, Michael Kohlhaas – The Rebel (1969). He met Adorf through the popular star Senta Berger, who played the lead in the comedy The Morals of Ruth Halbfass (1972, but he learnt the craft of film-making in France, assisting a trio of New Wave directors, Jean-Pierre Melville, Alain Resnais and Louis Malle. In Malle’s Viva Maria! (1965), a pair of female cabaret artistes played by Jeanne Moreau and Brigitte Bardot join the Mexican Revolution, while in-between inventing striptease. Viva Maria! was a favourite of the West German student leader Rudi Dutschke and a cult film among left-wingers. It associated female glamour with revolutionary violence – arguably with consequences not just for the development of cinema. In contrast to most of his male German colleagues, Schlöndorff – who went on to direct Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale (1990) – had an established interest in strong female characters. Degree of Murder shows how a young waitress played by Pallenberg shoots her ex-boyfriend after he returns to her apartment to collect his belongings, then violently mistreats

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 18

20/10/2021 15:40

T H E L O S T H O N O U R O F K AT H A R I N A B L U M

19

Anita Pallenberg, with gun and in white bathrobe, in Degree of Murder (1967, dir. Schlöndorff)

her, demanding sex for one last time. Though the killing is not premeditated, there are further similarities with Katharina Blum: he demands entry, shouting and banging on her front door, and she dons a white bathrobe to let him in, which she is still wearing at the time of the shooting. Katharina Blum was by no means Schlöndorff’s first female character to pull a trigger, but they gained in resilience after he started working with von Trotta. She herself played some of them, as she was originally set to play Blum. The pair initially teamed up for his adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s experimental first play, Baal (1969), about a self-destructive, misogynist poet played in the film by Fassbinder. Von Trotta co-wrote the screenplay for the historical drama The Sudden Wealth of the Poor People of Kombach (1971) and assisted with the direction of The Morals of Ruth Halbfass, taking minor roles in both films, each of which entails picking up a gun in a key scene. She then both starred in and co-wrote A Free Woman (1972), for which she

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 19

20/10/2021 15:40

20

BFI FILM CLASSICS

was nominated for a Lola for best actress.16 Finally, in Coup de grâce (1976), made after Katharina Blum, she was once again both co-author and star. Thereafter von Trotta established herself as a major independent presence in European cinema, her signature films dedicated to strong women from history, The German Sisters (1981), The Promise (1994) and Rosenstraße (2003), as well as a trio of biopics, Rosa Luxemburg (1986), Vision (2009), about the medieval nun Hildegard von Bingen) and Hannah Arendt (2012). The German Sisters was the first film directed by a woman to win the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. Von Trotta has referred to her time working with Schlöndorff as the film school which as a woman in the 1960s she could not attend.17 They were married from 1971 to 1991. In such creative partnerships, it can be impossible to establish precisely who did what as the dynamics shift and discussions take place in private. Winkler and Vacano both recall that Schlöndorff directed on set, while von Trotta, who was supposed to work more with the actors, held herself back.18 As von Trotta recalled in 1984: ‘During the shooting of Katharina Blum, Volker and I had totally different ideas about how the film should be made. I knew then that I must do my own films, to let things come out of my own person.’19 In accounts of her oeuvre Katharina Blum occupies a liminal position, usually not earning attention in its own right.20 In the rest of this book I will refer to both as co-directors but, in accounts of its production, follow the sources if they attribute decisions to Schlöndorff alone. Both film-makers were involved equally in radical politics. New German Cinema was itself part of the revolt against the materialist values of the Economic Miracle. What made Katharina Blum different from their previous work was its present-day setting and hard-hitting message. For Andrea Park, a fan who transcribed the complete film working from a VHS copy, it addressed a current social problem more directly than any other post-war work of German cinema.21 It takes up a number of familiar themes, such as justice, rebellion and the systematic (and consequently fascistic) victimisation

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 20

20/10/2021 15:40

T H E L O S T H O N O U R O F K AT H A R I N A B L U M

21

Margarethe von Trotta in The Sudden Wealth of the Poor People of Kombach (1971, dir. Schlöndorff)

of an individual by a group. The mechanisms of fascism were a preoccupation of the generation of Germans who came of age after the end of Nazism, but Katharina Blum approached the topic in a new way because the rebel is shown not only to be right but also successful. A moment in The Sudden Wealth of the Poor People of Kombach prefigures her fatal shooting of Tötges when von Trotta’s character, the partner of one of the robbers, briefly picks up a musket to help her husband get away. She is quickly overpowered, however. The Morals of Ruth Halbfass, in which von Trotta plays the wife of an art teacher (Helmut Griem) who has an affair with a wealthy married woman (Senta Berger), anticipates Katharina Blum at two moments: the first is when von Trotta’s character fires an antique rifle at the woman’s powerful husband. He survives his injuries and has resumed his marriage by the final scene when his daughter is seen reading from a newspaper about the scandal. Weary of the numerous press reports, her parents tell her to stop. A sub-theme of The Morals of Ruth Halbfass is violence as reality and the idea of violence as performance. The art teacher lover says that he is quoting the playwright Georg Büchner when he declaims ‘only violence helps where violence rules’ at a happening and asks his mistress to fire a rifle at a balloon containing red liquid. This film asks the same

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 21

20/10/2021 15:40

22

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Senta Berger in The Morals of Ruth Halbfass (1972, dir. Schlöndorff)

question as Katharina Blum, and one which fascinated sections of the left: when is it justified to take up arms and fight back? Von Trotta’s character’s motive for firing the gun is unexplained, except that her powerful male victim treated her with the same condescension as he treats his own wife. Like the women played by von Trotta in these two films, Katharina Blum is once again the standard-bearer of moral values. This time she not only holds the gun, she knows how to use it, though the camera shows only her surprised facial expressions when she fires the shot rather than the action of pulling the trigger itself. By making the central character in the first work of fiction inspired by Baader–Meinhof terrorism a woman, Böll also drew attention to the prominence of women in the RAF and related militant groupings. Indirectly, by showing how men in powerful positions interact with Blum, he offered an explanation for their presence. As a result, according to a critical account of the later film The Baader Meinhof Complex (2008, dir. Uli Edel), ‘the fight against terrorism increasingly became a symbolic fight against feminism’.22 Put another way, over five days in February, Katharina Blum becomes aware of her sexualisation in state-sanctioned discourse and strikes back. Von Trotta returned to the subject of women’s militancy in The German Sisters, which follows the parallel

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 22

20/10/2021 15:40

T H E L O S T H O N O U R O F K AT H A R I N A B L U M

23

Winkler as Ruth, pointing a gun at her coercive husband in Sheer Madness (1983, dir. von Trotta)

paths taken by Gudrun and Christiane Ensslin, as did Schlöndorff in The Legend of Rita (2000), which is loosely inspired by the case of Inge Viett. Active female roles were few and far between in West German cinema. In ‘Papas Kino’, the best female roles were as prostitutes in films such as The Sinner (1951, with Hildegard Knef, dir. Willi Forst) or The Girl Rosemarie (1958, with Nadja Tiller, dir. Rolf Thiele). Romy Schneider made her name playing the Habsburg empress in the Sissi trilogy (1955–8, dir. Ernst Marischka). New German Cinema directors were on the whole not immediately interested in strong heroines. In Wenders’ The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (1972), the central character slowly strangles an attractive young woman who has invited him back to her flat. Wenders’ male characters are often in flight from women and more likely to connect with life through children, as at the end of his first masterpiece, Kings of the Road, which was released the same year as Katharina Blum. Herzog also created few female roles. In Stroszek (1977) Eva Mattes plays a prostitute. In Woyzeck (1979) she is the cheating girlfriend of the exploited working-class hero, who takes out his anger at the world by murdering her. The Marquise von O (1976, dir. Éric Rohmer), adapted from Kleist’s famous novella, shows how

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 23

20/10/2021 15:40

24

BFI FILM CLASSICS

the eponymous heroine is obliged to marry the officer who rapes her, having suppressed the memory of their first encounter on the grounds that he initially appeared to her as a rescuing angel.23 Katharina Blum was quite emphatically an intervention in the stand-off between radicals and the establishment. Böll, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in October 1972, found himself from January that year at the heart of a vituperative argument over how to respond to the actions of the RAF. In a much-cited article printed in Der Spiegel, Böll called them ‘the six against the six million’ and the reporting of the mass-circulation Bild-Zeitung, Springer’s flagship daily newspaper, ‘incitement, lies, filth’ and ‘naked fascism’ on account of its sensationalised stories, unsubstantiated allegations and campaigns against individuals. The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum was a contribution to his feud with Springer, the German police and the wider West German state. Dirt and washing are recurrent motifs in the film, which includes several scenes in wash- or bathrooms and where dirt is associated either with the Zeitung or with the forces of law and order. The novel was serialised in four instalments in July and August 1974 in Der Spiegel and instantly became a bestseller. Böll himself wanted a film adaptation and sent the proofs to von Trotta and Schlöndorff in advance of publication with the proposal that they take it on. The often sardonic narrator of Böll’s novel refers to the cinematic qualities of the story which he tasks himself with reconstructing. Von Trotta and Schlöndorff had earlier acquired the rights to the more capacious Group Portrait with a Lady (1971) but had not secured the funding to make a film which needed to be set over four decades rather than five days. Schlöndorff recalls that Böll was thought not to be worth the risk by film funders.24 Yet he was already the most filmed contemporary German-language author. Adaptations to date were low budget, made for television or disorientatingly avant-garde. Böll worked on the script for the succès d’estime The Bread of Those Early Years (1962, Herbert Vesely), as he did on The Clown (1976, dir. Vojtech ˇ Jasný). This

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 24

20/10/2021 15:40

T H E L O S T H O N O U R O F K AT H A R I N A B L U M

25

thoughtful adaptation of his 1963 novel is sometimes judged to have been overshadowed by Katharina Blum and was released just three months later.25 Group Portrait with a Lady (1977, dir. Aleksandar Petrovi´c) also disappointed at the box office, despite Romy Schneider in the title role. Böll carried on the partnership with Schlöndorff and Winkler by contributing to the portmanteau films Germany in Autumn (1978) and War and Peace (1982), which are discussed in Chapter 4. Böll was partly inspired by an adaptation of his earlier novel Billiards at Half-Past Nine (1959), which was made into an avantgarde film entitled Not Reconciled (1965, dirs. Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet). Novel and film both include a similar shooting, in this case of a former Nazi by an elderly woman who has suffered at his hands. The title Not Reconciled comes directly from Böll, who includes several discussions of non-reconciliation between perpetrators and their victims, but the film’s sub-title, Or Only Violence Helps Where Violence Rules, is the film-makers’ invention – this is the quotation which The Morals of Ruth Halbfass attributes to Büchner. Böll responds in the sub-title of Katharina Blum – How Violence Develops and Where It Can Lead. Where Straub and Huillet appear to be condoning a violent reaction, Böll’s accent is on explaining it. Schlöndorff referred directly to Straub and Huillet’s title in a discussion of Katharina Blum: ‘Not reconciled. In the midst of an environment in which everyone has made their peace with those in power, given in, and given up their dignity as human beings, here is a person who does not let herself be reconciled.’26 The filmmakers saw Blum in the tradition of Böll’s female characters which included Leni Pfeiffer from Group Portrait with a Lady and old Mrs Fähmel from Billards at Half-Past Nine. Böll in fact transfers several experiences directly from Pfeiffer to Blum: their social ostracism on account of sexual activity judged inappropriate, their thwarted love of dancing, and their brief but disastrous marriages. The blurb on the first edition even described Katharina Blum as a new instalment of the earlier novel.

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 25

20/10/2021 15:40

26

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Von Trotta as Sophie von Reval in Coup de grâce (1976, dir. Schlöndorff)

If the socially sanctioned oppression of an individual by a group was a common theme in fictional analyses of authoritarian structures understood as fascistic, the narrative arc of Katharina Blum was new. In Coup de grâce and Hunting Scenes in Bavaria, for example, the female lead, played by von Trotta and Winkler respectively, is killed by male violence. These killings indicate political or moral defeat and the triumph of anti-progressive forces. The narrative patterning in most Fassbinder and Herzog films in the 1970s is similar. Indeed, it can seem that German culture specialises in heroic failures. Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas is a fanatic for justice who knows no moderation, which is why he is sometimes claimed as the first terrorist in German literature. Intending his film as a critique of contemporary revolutionaries, Schlöndorff’s adaptation opens with documentary footage of protest on the streets of Paris from May 1968. While Kohlhaas’ failure may be self-inflicted, his protest against abuse was justified. The Sudden Wealth of the Poor People of Kombach ends similarly with executions. Set in the 1820s at a time of poverty and political repression, the peasant robbers briefly enjoy spending some of their riches after raiding the archduke’s coffers but are quickly rounded up, tried and executed. The film’s point is that the poor do not know how to rebel; they do not even show awareness that

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 26

20/10/2021 15:40

T H E L O S T H O N O U R O F K AT H A R I N A B L U M

27

Michael Kohlhaas – The Rebel aka Man on Horseback (1969, dir. Schlöndorff)

Marian Seidowsky as Basini in Young Törless (1966, dir. Schlöndorff)

they are exploited. With the exception of Rosa Luxemburg, which, following the historical facts, ends with the revolutionary heroine being shot in the head, von Trotta’s own films show possible routes to a better life in the future. In terms of its narrative, Schlöndorff’s Young Törless, which is also scored by Henze, is an instructive parallel with Katharina Blum. Set in a military academy in pre-World War I Austria-Hungary,

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 27

20/10/2021 15:40

28

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Young Törless is also about violence, victimisation and collective behaviour. In both films the central character commits a deed with consequences. The military cadet Basini borrows money he cannot repay, then tries to gamble it back, which gets him into further debt; Blum sleeps with a wanted man, then helps him elude the police. Both Basini and Blum are hounded by others acting in a group as a result of their deeds. Basini submits to abuse at the hands of boys he has borrowed or stolen from; Blum is accused by the police and state prosecutors, her reputation trashed in public. At the climax of Young Törless, Basini is hung by his feet and assaulted by the whole school. In a perversion of justice this results in his own expulsion because his tormentors are backed by an investigating tribunal which believes their claims of Basini’s aberrant behaviour. Even Basini himself appears to accept the verdict, having internalised the value system which oppresses him. In contrast, Blum turns the tables on her tormentors. She will go to jail for her crime but she is undefeated. Unlike Basini, she has her own moral framework, as well as some supporters in the shape of Trude and Herbert Blorna, Else Woltersheim and Konrad Beiters. The difference with Young Törless is that Katharina Blum is set in a post-Nazi world in which the individual, albeit through taking the law into her own hands and committing a murder, understands her rights, asserts them and is vindicated. The Neue Zürcher Zeitung recognised that this is what makes the story of Katharina Blum new in the context of New German Cinema: ‘The Young German Film, short of heroes, rich in cases of failure and despair, has found a heroine.’27 This made Blum too a new kind of female lead. She rebels against men’s assumptions and treatment of her, in particular the language they use, before taking that most cinematic of objects in her hand – a gun – to get her revenge on her principal persecutor.

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 28

20/10/2021 15:40

T H E L O S T H O N O U R O F K AT H A R I N A B L U M

29

2 Political Context in Post-68 West Germany The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum was conceived to shift opinion on what the film-makers took to be the criminalisation of protest. This process occurs in stages in the film through increasing use of key phrases. The Austrian journalist who catches up with the Blornas on their skiing holiday on Thursday morning refers to Blum being involved in an ‘anarchist hearing’ and asks Herbert if he is a ‘sympathiser’. Beizmenne is convinced that Blum’s premises is ‘a conspirators’ flat’ and refers to ‘Götten and his gang’. State prosecutor Hach tells Blorna on Saturday morning that Götten ‘belongs to a gang of conscientious objectors’. This is a bizarre term to use as the right to refuse to enlist for military service on religious or moral grounds was guaranteed in West Germany’s Basic Law. Sträubleder is confident that his career can survive ‘a romantic affair’ but he would be sunk by news that there was ‘an anarchist’ in his villa. Blum, meanwhile, is called ‘a communist bitch’ and told ‘what Stalin didn’t manage you won’t manage either’. Novel and film were imagined and received against a backdrop of unfolding events, the public interpretation of which novelist and film-makers in turn aimed to influence. The film takes place exactly one year after the novel, in February 1975, when some of the scenes were actually filmed during that year’s carnival in Cologne and Bonn. Among the papers in the Schlöndorff Collection are interviews and pamphlets on topics contemporaneous with the making of the film. These include raids on addresses belonging to groups suspected of sheltering ‘terrorists’ (a crime which Blum is accused of), as well as so-called ‘extermination-imprisonment’ (Vernichtungshaft) – that is, the treatment of RAF prisoners, who responded with hunger and thirst strikes. Holger Meins, whose picture is stuck to a cupboard in Beizmenne’s office, starved himself to death on 9 November 1974, as

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 29

20/10/2021 15:40

30

BFI FILM CLASSICS

preparations for filming were in full swing. Jean-Paul Sartre paid a visit to Andreas Baader in Stammheim prison the following month. In February 1975, the Movement of 2 June kidnapped the Christian Democrat candidate for mayor of West Berlin, Peter Lorenz, achieving the release of several ‘political prisoners’, who were flown to the Middle East in exchange for his safe return. This capitulation to terrorism led to angry exchanges in the Bundestag, resulting in a walkout of Christian Democrat deputies. In April the RAF attacked the German embassy in Sweden. The RAF trial began in May. Schlöndorff and von Trotta were active in the organisation Red Aid which supported prisoners associated with the political struggle, some convicted of terrorist offences, but most engaged in legitimate forms of campaigning. The chapter in Schlöndorff’s memoirs preceding that on Katharina Blum is entitled ‘Red Aid’.28 Von Trotta’s first independently directed film, The Second Awakening of Christa Klages (1978), is about a woman who robs a bank at gunpoint to fund a children’s nursery and was inspired by a real case they encountered. When the film-makers received the package from Böll containing the proofs of Katharina Blum, they realised after the first few pages that it was ‘precisely the story about the criminalisation of the protest which had been consuming our energies in recent times without us having anything to show for it’.29 We had experience of this, we had gone through piles of documents because we were working on some similar material before we received Böll’s manuscript. And of course from our campaigns for prisoners’ rights, visits to jails and so forth, we had experience too, but it was different from what Böll had gone through […] In some ways the film is more hard-hitting than what Böll wrote. When he saw the plans for the raid on the flat, when he saw the masked men with the bullet-proof vests, he did not want to believe it at first.30

The uniforms and protective headgear used in this famous scene were real, though they could be taken for carnival costumes according to the screenplay. Von Trotta and Schlöndorff were genuine

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 30

20/10/2021 15:40

T H E L O S T H O N O U R O F K AT H A R I N A B L U M

31

sympathisers with practitioners of ‘armed struggle’ in ways that Böll never was. As a prominent campaigner for fairer treatment of RAF prisoners, Schlöndorff spoke to the doctor of Wittlich prison where Meins was held just hours before his death, pleading with him to intervene to keep him alive. Von Trotta was sentenced to a night in the cells for interrupting a court case in March 1978.31 Speaking on French television in May 1975, Schlöndorff explained what motivated Böll to write his novel: The general climate was so conducive to a lynching that Böll took the responsibility of speaking to the German public and saying to them: don’t believe what you read in these demagogic papers. If ever you see any of these people, don’t kill them, and that brought him an avalanche of insults and defamation in the press.32

Travelling to the US to promote the film, von Trotta explained to an underground magazine that the Springer Media Corporation was ‘a vicious, rightist organisation, an outfit backed by old Nazi money using old Nazi techniques of intimidation’.33 Der Spiegel introduced its serialisation of Böll’s novel by quoting a headline in the Bild-Zeitung from 23 December 1971, ‘Baader–Meinhof-Gang Murders Again’, after a policeman was shot during a raid on a bank.34 No connection between this crime and the Baader–Meinhof Group was ever made, however. On 10 January 1972, Der Spiegel published a response by Böll to Bild under the heading ‘Does Ulrike Meinhof Want Mercy or a Free Passage?’, in which he characterised the tabloid’s reporting as incitement to violent retribution and proposed that Meinhof be offered a way out in the form of an opportunity to discuss her actions. Bild responded by comparing Böll with Goebbels, while the magazine Quick – which for many years employed Hitler’s former secretary – claimed that people like Böll were more dangerous than Baader–Meinhof. He was even called their ‘spiritual father’ and it was insinuated in some press reports that he may have sheltered Baader–Meinhof members on

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 31

20/10/2021 15:40

32

BFI FILM CLASSICS

the run. On 1 June 1972 the police surrounded his house in the Eifel Mountains, demanding that two of his visitors prove their identity. The country villa belonging to Sträubleder where Götten is arrested is a reference to this incident. In other attacks his successful sales in the USSR were used against him. Katharina Blum was a reaction to this treatment. Yet he did not write his novel for another two years and it took a more personal incident to prompt him to do so. In February 1974, the month in which his Katharina Blum is set, Böll’s eldest son, Raimund, a 27-year-old sculptor (the same age as Blum), was interrogated by police and his Cologne flat searched after his and his partner’s passports were found in a property used by Baader– Meinhof members. The link was a young woman called Margrit Schiller, recently released from prison, who had indeed stayed in their flat during their absence, but they had not noticed her theft of their passports. The incident shows how militants wanted for terrorism indeed circulated among bohemian and left-wing young people. Bild set out to smear Raimund Böll, printing a story about his poor performance in school and mocking his abilities as an artist. On 7 February 1974, the Springer-owned Berliner Zeitung announced on its front page that the search of his and his girlfriend Lila’s rented flat had taken place already (the raid actually happened the following afternoon), evidently misunderstanding the tip-off given by the police. The mess-up showed just how closely police and press worked together. Böll had already expressed concern for Raimund to his Soviet friend Lew Kopelew (1912–97), in the context of his own actions against Springer. He explained that Raimund’s movements were restricted and he had been threatened; by September 1972 he was worried about his son’s health.35 February 1974 was an eventful month for the Böll family. Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008), a fellow Nobel Laureate, spent several days at Böll’s house in the Eifel Mountains after being stripped of his Soviet citizenship and flown to West Germany at the invitation of Chancellor Brandt. The surprise visit caught the

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 32

20/10/2021 15:40

T H E L O S T H O N O U R O F K AT H A R I N A B L U M

33

attention of the world’s media and was one reason that Böll later gave for writing Katharina Blum. One of the criticisms levelled at him was that he was soft on communism and yet here was the USSR’s number one dissident showing solidarity with him. On 15 May 1974 Böll reported to Kopelew: Two days before A.S. got here, house search for Raimund and Lila, with a few dozen police officers, dogs, state prosecutors, because Rai and Lila’s identity papers had been found in a B-M-flat. 160 newspapers printed their photos, nasty articles but no corrections once after eight hours of questioning the whole thing turned out to be harmless! […] Then, ‘on the side’, I am also writing a book – a taut, tightly constructed narrative, which I like very much myself – and which is now going into press. Meanwhile Brandt’s resignation and the preliminaries to that – as well as the knock-on effects.36

Brandt led a left-of-centre coalition of Social Democrats and Free Democrats until his resignation on 6 May 1974 when it was revealed that one of his closest aides was an East German spy. In his time Brandt suffered defamation at the hands of the conservative press. There are traces of his treatment in that of Else Woltersheim. Like Brandt, Woltersheim never met her father. Her parents were not married when she was born and, like Brandt, she was brought up by her mother in a single-parent family. Woltersheim is after Blum the second heroine of the novel. The battle against Springer had its roots in the student protests which reached their peak in 1967–8 and ultimately led to a minority resorting to the violence of terrorism, which was aimed initially at property. The groups were named The Red Cells, the Movement of 2 June, the Socialist Patients’ Collective and, most famously, the Red Army Faction, often called the Baader–Meinhof Group after two of its founders. Ulrike Meinhof joined protestors who attacked the Springer HQ in West Berlin on 11 April 1968, the day that Rudi Dutschke was shot on West Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm.

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 33

20/10/2021 15:40

34

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Else Woltersheim (Regine Lutz)

His would-be assassin was influenced by inflammatory headlines in the Bild-Zeitung. This was the high point of West Germany’s 1968; the following month their comrades in Paris took to the streets and brought the French capital to a standstill for several days. Meinhof’s own initial crime was not dissimilar to Blum’s, as she helped Andreas Baader escape from prison, where he was serving a sentence for politically motivated arson (she and Baader were never lovers, however).37 Böll was inspired too by what happened to Peter Brückner, a Hanover professor who was suspected (as it turned out rightly) of sheltering Meinhof and some of her comrades while they were on the run (as many individuals did). Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin, Holger Meins and a handful of others spent their first two years preparing a series of lethal attacks, which included training with the Palestine Liberation Organisation in the Jordanian desert. In May 1972 they struck at a series of targets connected with the police, the legal system and the US military presence, as well as the Springer Corporation. In total three people were killed. Thereafter members of

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 34

20/10/2021 15:40

T H E L O S T H O N O U R O F K AT H A R I N A B L U M

35

the public co-operated with the police, who made a series of arrests after tip-offs. The first and most spectacular, which von Trotta and Schlöndorff reference in their film, was of Baader, Meins and Jan-Carl Raspe after they found themselves surrounded inside a garage in the Frankfurt suburbs on the afternoon of 1 June 1972, the same day as the raid on Böll’s own house. The police approached the garage in an armoured vehicle, similar to that shown in the film; Baader expertly deflated each of its tyres with a well-aimed bullet, earning the admiration of the police. The men were soon arrested, Baader on a stretcher after he was wounded by a police bullet, Meins in his underpants uttering a protracted scream. The event was broadcast on the evening news, the photographs printed on the front pages of the following day’s newspapers. Katharina Blum was part of a contest for the ownership and interpretation of these images. Over the next three years, as preparations were made for their trial, there ensued another battle for public opinion, with the arrested terrorists aiming to portray themselves as victims of an authoritarian state which subjected them to inhumane conditions, including long periods of solitary confinement. Meinhof published a famous description of the effect of being locked in a cell by herself for months on end.38 Again, the film references this controversy in its depiction of the inside of a police cell where Blum spends a protracted lunch hour after refusing to share food with her interrogators. By the end of the film, Blum and Götten are under arrest and facing long jail sentences.

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 35

20/10/2021 15:40

36

BFI FILM CLASSICS

3 Heinrich Böll’s Novel, or How Violence Develops and Where It Can Lead Katharina Blum was the first work of fiction to be serialised in toto by Der Spiegel, which had a circulation approaching a million in 1974. This exposure, contemporaneous with publication, helped Böll sell 150,000 copies by September, by which time – befitting a satirical pamphlet with roots in the eighteenth century – a pirate edition was on sale too.39 Sales of the official paperback nonetheless reached a million by the end of 1982.40 It was Böll’s first book since he was awarded the Nobel Prize two years earlier. Translations into the major European languages followed quickly – the English version was available before the end of the year.41 The novel attracted more attention than the film, the reception of both in the German press becoming the subject of a book, which concluded that reviewers judged both works according to their own political sympathies rather than on any aesthetic criteria.42 The leader of the Christian Democrats in the Bundestag and future German president Karl Carstens denounced Böll in a speech in December 1974, though he was poorly informed as he understood Katharina Blum to be an authorial pseudonym rather than the name of a literary character. Yet in the following decade the novel came to be studied in school – in Germany for the Abitur, in the UK for German A level. It helped seal the reputation of the Springer Press. Günter Grass, a pall-bearer at Böll’s funeral, boycotted Springer until his death in 2015 because of its treatment of his friend and refusal to apologise. To this day Böll’s descendants continue do so. Blum is a malleable signifier, as Böll was challenging how a single young woman was perceived by her neighbours and wider society, particularly men, addressed by figures in authority, this time exclusively male, and portrayed in the popular press. The cover

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 36

20/10/2021 15:40

T H E L O S T H O N O U R O F K AT H A R I N A B L U M

37

design of the first US edition, which preceded the film, has been said to emphasise ‘the sexual aspect of the book’ and project Blum as a femme fatale surrounded only by male characters.43 This is not how Böll portrays Blum, but rather how she is objectified by the Zeitung and her interrogators and assumed to be by her neighbours once she is arrested. In other words, it is a highly constructed and hostile image. Illustrations for film posters and book covers in other European countries traded on either the vulnerability or dangerousness of an attractive young woman (usually with brown hair but sometimes blonde). They depicted Blum either with raised manacled hands and a look of defiance or on the point of being crushed by a giant hand; in a sexual pose with a gun tucked into the back of her knickers or talking sweetly on a telephone; or a mixture of all of these at the centre of a surrealist collage. The iconography of Katharina Blum began with the illustrations by the young ‘critical realist’ artist Klaus Vogelgesang which accompanied the serialisation in Der Spiegel and are reprinted in this book for the first time. Vogelgesang’s Blum, who appears three times in the seven pictures, is quite desexualised. In the first picture, her mouth is shut and expression slightly glazed, her gun pointing downwards in a reluctant grip. In the third, her face is reproduced on the first page of a newspaper, and in the sixth we see only half her face, her hand once again holding a gun but now with greater resolution. As on the US cover, she is the only female character to be depicted; in the first picture she is flanked by two men in fancy dress, one wearing an indeterminate oriental garment and turban. His mouth is open, apparently expressing an excited sound as if letting loose the spirit of carnival. He appears again in the fifth picture, but this time in triplicate to indicate how closely the forces ranged against Blum are working with each other. In the centre he wears a meditative expression, his hands cupped over his chin, to the left as police officer and to the right as judge. By now the carnival has got serious and the forces of the law, in their equally bizarre professional get-ups, are indisputably part of the grotesque performance. In the

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 37

20/10/2021 15:40

38

BFI FILM CLASSICS

fourth picture a middle-aged, balding man is listening intently on the telephone, with a uniformed police officer behind him. He appears to be the same man who, in the previous picture, is reading a newspaper. The last image shows a hand reaching for a telephone, which judging by the shirtsleeve could be that of the man in carnival costume who has the expression of a disengaged functionary. He could be playing a double role, an amalgam of newspaper boss and reader. Alternatively, he could be the politician academic and business leader Alois Sträubleder. Vogelgesang makes the gun and the telephone into central motifs. In the novel, telephones are used by anonymous callers to utter obscenities to the heroine. They are also tapped by the forces of surveillance who establish Götten’s whereabouts after Blum phones him. What is striking in these illustrations is that there is nobody who can be identified as Tötges, the reporter. The filmmakers may have followed Vogelgesang by highlighting telephone conversations. His pictures have several other features in common with the film: the deglamorisation of the heroine, which is perhaps less successful in the film; modern technology counterposed with

Klaus Vogelgesang’s illustrations accompanying the original serialisation in Der Spiegel, July–August 1974 (courtesy Klaus Vogelgesang)

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 38

20/10/2021 15:40

T H E L O S T H O N O U R O F K AT H A R I N A B L U M

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 39

39

20/10/2021 15:40

40

BFI FILM CLASSICS

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 40

20/10/2021 15:40

T H E L O S T H O N O U R O F K AT H A R I N A B L U M

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 41

41

20/10/2021 15:40

42

BFI FILM CLASSICS

domestic settings; and the pervasive spirit of a carnival which has ceased to be joyous and turned threatening. Böll’s feminism may have been bold for a male Catholic in his mid-fifties, but he drew on literary as well as religious archetypes. Scholars noted that he adapted one of the very first German crime stories, The Criminal of Lost Honour by the young revolutionary writer and playwright Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805). Published in 1786 it was said to be based on real events, just as the actions of The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum are stated to resemble the journalistic practices of the Bild-Zeitung. Schiller explains that he wants to find out what made the man at the centre of his story, Christian Wolf, commit criminal deeds which included murder, revealing at the outset that Wolf dies by execution. Böll too leaves no doubt who committed the crime in order to focus on the causes. In contrast, von Trotta and Schlöndorff leave the audience in suspense as to what Blum might do when she encounters Tötges, who himself believes that she wants to co-operate with him. Like Blum, Wolf loses his honour step by step. His family business, an inn called The Sun, turns a meagre profit, which gives him links with the hospitality industry. Again like Blum, he lost his father at a young age and was brought up by his mother. Mercy is another of Schiller’s themes. Wolf at one point writes a letter to his prince asking him to grant him a new start in life: It is mercy that I am pleading for. I do not dare to make use of my claim for justice, assuming that I may have one. – But I may remind my judge of one thing. My crimes date from the judgement that once and for all deprived me of my honour. If I had been shown more understanding at that point, it is possible that I would have no need of mercy now.

Böll uses similar language to Schiller in his article about Meinhof, believing that the state should make a conciliatory gesture and show her mercy rather than raise the stakes. Via the classical author Friedrich Schiller, Katharina Blum thus becomes a cipher for Ulrike Meinhof. Böll’s other key concept in his Spiegel article, that of freies

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 42

20/10/2021 15:40

T H E L O S T H O N O U R O F K AT H A R I N A B L U M

43

Geleit or free passage, was familiar to Schlöndorff from the work of Schiller’s contemporary Kleist. In Michael Kohlhaas, Martin Luther makes the same offer to the hero, arguing that Kohlhaas should be permitted to step back, think again and have time to wriggle out of the hole he had dug for himself. Blum is not the only character in the novel who considers resorting to violence. After the murder, Herbert Blorna wants to throw Molotov cocktails into Sträubleder’s house as well as the Zeitung’s offices. In the film he only mentions the Zeitung and expresses this wish before Blum carries out her shooting. When Blorna meets Sträubleder at a gallery opening he punches his former friend in the face, an encounter which occurred at the end of the film in the first drafts of the screenplay. The Blorna–Sträubleder clash is the novel’s secondary conflict after Blum–Tötges. Herbert Blorna, Karl Heinz Vosgerau as the predatory ‘gentleman visitor’ Alois Sträubleder

Heinz Bennent as Blum’s employer and admirer Herbert Blorna

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 43

20/10/2021 15:40

44

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Hannelore Hoger as Trude Blorna and Herbert Fux as the Austrian Bild reporter

who shares initials with Heinrich Böll, is a decent man who pays a price for letting himself be led by his emotions. He loses his livelihood after defying the police, the Zeitung and Sträubleder; Trude Blorna loses her job at a firm of architects because she had shown Blum the plans for the tower block, which knowledge she passed on to Götten so that he could escape through a ventilation shaft. Trude Blorna too is traduced by the Zeitung as ‘Red Trude’, though this is a sobriquet she acquired as a student on account of her hair colour. The novel’s subsidiary scandal is Sträubleder’s successful extrication of himself from any association with Blum and Götten. He not only avoids questioning by the police, he also keeps his name out of the Zeitung, which was initially obsessed with the identity of the ‘gentleman visitor’. It is no coincidence that the Zeitung targets the story’s three principal women: Blum, Else Woltersheim and Trude Blorna. Meanwhile Konrad Beiters, whose old Wehrmacht revolver Blum uses to shoot Tötges, muses that they spared him because he was ‘an old Nazi’. In the film Beiters is shown smoking a pipe, which in Böll’s fiction was a sign of a morally ambiguous character. The Blornas, in

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 44

20/10/2021 15:40

T H E L O S T H O N O U R O F K AT H A R I N A B L U M

45

Cigarette smokers Herbert and Trude Blorna

contrast, are like Böll both cigarette smokers, signalling their probity and good faith. Böll’s literary version of Katharina Blum is distinguished both by the voice of its anonymous narrator and how that voice pieces together his story. The story is the same as in the film but the ways in which it is told are fundamentally different. Russian Formalists coined the terms fabula, referring to the story or plot, and syuzhet, meaning the ways that the story is narrated to ‘defamiliarise’ the events by making them seem new or ‘strange’. The distinction is useful in the context of distinguishing between a film adaptation and its literary source because whereas fabula is the same each time, the syuzhet differs in subtle ways. In a literary narrative there can be more room for doubt. The question ‘Did he fuck you, then?’ is said by Böll’s narrator to have been put by either Beizmenne or Hach, but there is also doubt over whether the question was put at all. The narrator stops and starts and repeatedly goes back on himself while still leaving some gaps. He quotes extensively from his source documents and deploys a confusing metaphor about puddles and

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 45

20/10/2021 15:40

46

BFI FILM CLASSICS

channels of water, with each story flowing into the other, all of which makes Katharina Blum at times a not altogether easy read. The narrator’s flashes of ironic humour and wry understatement are offset by an often technocratic punctiliousness, as he insists that he is working from interviews and sources, some of which have to remain confidential. He occasionally enjoys making witnesses sound foolish or laughs at them when they condemn themselves out of their own mouths, as Blum’s neighbour does when he points out that he can say nothing about the gentlemen visitors received by Blum when he was not in the house to witness them. He gets hung up on linguistic definitions, which is an indication of his precision and a trait he shares with Blum herself, and shows a respect for official documentation, which has led some critics to argue that he is part of the problem which Böll is addressing.44 He betrays nothing at all about himself (assuming that he is male) and the conditions in which he carries out his work and writes up his report. As the novel is set over five days in February 1974 and was published at the end of July that same year, the literary conceit is that it was researched and written in that five-month period. Böll honed the narrative technique in End of a Mission (1966) and Group Portrait with a Lady, which are pieced together by anonymous narrators as if they are making documentaries, a style of literature in vogue in the late 1960s when fiction could be associated with the bourgeois imagination and literature itself was declared ‘dead’. The documentary theatre movement centred around playwrights such as Rolf Hochhuth, Peter Weiss and Reinhardt Kipphardt attempted to mimic journalism in similarly experimental ways to Böll’s reportage style. What distinguishes the anonymous narrator from his predecessors in Böll’s oeuvre is his humour and gradual shift from impartiality to support for the criminal. There is by the end little to distinguish the narrator from the author. The reliance on voice posed a specific problem to the film-makers as it is one literary device which cannot be transferred very easily to the screen. Von Trotta and Schlöndorff wisely dispense with it altogether.

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 46

20/10/2021 15:40

T H E L O S T H O N O U R O F K AT H A R I N A B L U M

47

The narrator of Katharina Blum has the editions of the Zeitung in front of him and quotes extensively from them. He also has transcripts of the police interrogations, which were for all intents and purposes available to the Zeitung, and he has talked exhaustively to Herbert Blorna, who became Blum’s defence lawyer, as well as to the state prosecutor, Peter Hach, who took part in the interrogations. Blorna and Hach are old friends. All the participants at the carnival party gave their impression of the two lovers’ behaviour. On account of the police interest in her personal finances, employment history and private life, readers learn all about Blum’s various sources of income and how she has afforded the mortgage on her flat in the new development at the edge of the city called ‘Elegant Living by the River’. She is obliged to reveal that she has only once been drunk, or rather made drunk, and that was when she was married and it was by her husband. Her greatest personal secret is that she often takes herself for a drive in her second-hand VW Beetle, which she bought two years ago, just heading off in the evenings along country roads. Beizmenne is proud to have calculated the extra mileage and the Zeitung speculates that she is either meeting up with Götten’s ‘gang’ or visiting ‘gentlemen’. Blum’s explanation is that because she knows so many single women who get drunk in front of the television, she gets out of the house in the evenings if she has nothing else to do. It is difficult for a single woman to go out by herself, to the cinema or somewhere she can dance, because of the unwanted male attention she knows she will receive. Instead she takes off in her car two or three times a month, always when it is raining and preferably along roads lined by trees, going as far as Holland or Belgium, where she might drink a coffee or a beer before turning round. The narrator also quotes from Blum’s statement to Blorna concerning her actions on the Sunday when she shot Tötges, how she went to a bar to see what her victim looked like in advance of meeting him for the promised interview and what he said to her before she shot him. Blorna is emotionally invested in Blum. He is open about his feelings to his wife but they colour his judgment

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 47

20/10/2021 15:40

48

BFI FILM CLASSICS

and behaviour in ways which do not necessarily help Blum. It is significant that the named sources are male. The narrator has not spoken to Blum herself or to Götten, presumably because they are awaiting trial and not available to him, but he neither states that this is so nor wonders how the absence of their viewpoint may colour his presentation of their story. The film replicates this effect to some extent by minimising the use of point-of-view shots from Blum’s perspective. Instead, we see other characters reacting to her and observe how she appears to them. There are also repeated close-ups of Winkler’s face at key moments, on four occasions showing her responses to Beizmenne’s questions and, just before the shooting, of her reaction to Tötges’ proposal. The audience is invited to read her features and interpret her motivations for themselves. The film is often criticised for replacing the novel’s narrative complications – which Böll designed to show how difficult it can be to establish the truth – with a straightforward linear plot, but this reading is to some degree superficial. It has been accused of dealing in binary opposites of good (the lovers) versus bad (the police and press) and transmitting a simplified message about state pursuit of innocents unwittingly caught up in a conflict which has nothing to do with them.45 In addition to two flashbacks, there are brief sequences of black-and-white footage which function as snippets of a film within

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 48

20/10/2021 15:40

T H E L O S T H O N O U R O F K AT H A R I N A B L U M

49

a film. The first intercuts with the film’s opening; the second captures the lovers returning to the apartment block, hand in hand, embracing in the foyer before taking the lift. The police cameraman has got there first after Sheikh Karl has given Beizmenne Blum’s name. The car chase is also reprised in black and white as it too was caught on film by the police cameraman. In addition we see newspaper headlines and hear the commentary of a television journalist on Friday afternoon. Taken together with the still photographs of Blum, such as those exchanged between Beizmenne and Tötges, and the images of her reproduced in the media, the police footage has been

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 49

20/10/2021 15:40

50

BFI FILM CLASSICS

interpreted as a Brechtian ‘distancing effect’ or a metafilmic gesture, which invites audiences to think about the action for a second time. Hans-Bernhard Moeller and George Lellis further identify complex ‘gazing structures’, with unidentified individuals staring at Blum in the semi-public space of the police waiting room. These scenes invite audiences to reflect on their own gazing at the attractive figure of Blum in her most vulnerable moments.46 These techniques contribute to the ways in which the film reflects on its narration of the story (its syuzhet), which match the syuzhet of the novel without attempting to reproduce it. In the novel Blum’s police interrogation and treatment by the Zeitung are a sudden and very public intensification of behaviour which she has endured since adolescence. Indeed, her life has been punctuated by episodes of sexual harassment which have necessitated aversive action. She has changed employers, learnt to drive so that the Blornas’ male guests do not have to take her home after parties, thus gaining an opportunity to make unwanted advances, and resisted Sträubleder’s campaign of seduction for the last two years. Hach has a reputation as a sex pest and is likely to be interested in her (in the film we see him pass an invitation to the stenographer taking minutes of the interrogation). Blum recognises him from parties, reminding him that they have danced together or rather, as she puts it with characteristic linguistic precision, that she has danced with him. The police officer who guards the bathroom door while she gets dressed and steals a glimpse of her naked declares that he would pay for her lunch. Inspector Moeding, to whom she turns herself in after her murder, even asks her out for a drink when he drives her home on Thursday evening. Blum’s reaction to all this unwanted sexual attention has been abstinence, which has earned her the nickname ‘the nun’. In other words, she has taken that evasive action which was open to women in pre-modern times by opting for celibacy. These experiences of men explain her precise definitions of zärtlich, which means affectionate, delicate or tender and depends, according to Blum, on both parties’ consent, and zudringlich,

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 50

20/10/2021 15:40

T H E L O S T H O N O U R O F K AT H A R I N A B L U M

51

which has connotations of insistent pushiness, propositioning, even harassment, and is done to one party by the other without their consent. At first the police stenographer records Götten as being zudringlich at the party but Blum insists that he is the first man she has met whose behaviour was zärtlich. Her former husband’s attentions, in contrast, always fell into the category of zudringlich, which is why she divorced him. Leila Vennewitz translates the two terms as ‘making an advance’ and ‘being amorous’, which has the advantage of retaining the alliteration but obscures the distinction on which Blum insists so strongly. Cologne is not named as the location; instead the narrator refers to fictitious places called Kuir and Gemmersbroich. Cologne landmarks appear in the film, however, and the city is also mentioned, along with nearby Bonn and Düsseldorf. Kurfürstenheim is the invented name of the location for Sträubleder’s villa (meaning ‘Home of the Elector’). Cologne is the heart of carnival, a German version of Venice or Rio de Janeiro, and ‘Women’s Carnival Day’ on the last Thursday before Lent is a public holiday throughout the Rhineland. This is why there is a fancy-dress party at Woltersheim’s house on

The bridge across the Rhine from Deutz to Cologne

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 51

20/10/2021 15:40

52

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Wednesday, why the Blornas have gone on their winter holiday to an Alpine skiing resort, and Blum has decided not to drive to the party in case she feels like drinking alcohol. Böll’s narrator is either uninterested in Rhineland Carnival or assumes that his readers know enough about its history to identify the irony of his account of one young woman’s ordeal at the hands of various men beginning on the eve of Weiberfastnacht when women, in earlier times, ruled for a day. Weiberfastnacht marks too the point when carnival, which begins officially in November, intensifies and street celebrations commence. The favoured costumes in 1974 are (for men) Arab sheikh followed by cowboy, and (for women) Bedouin followed by Andalusian. Sheikhs and Bedouins are presumably in vogue because of the oil crisis, which began the previous autumn when the Arab states in the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) quadrupled the price of crude oil after Israel defeated Egypt and Syria in the Arab–Israeli War of October 1973. Arab terrorists in the guise of the Palestinian group which kidnapped and murdered nine Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in September 1972 were also on the national mind. On the Wednesday evening in Katharina Blum there are a dozen male undercover officers patrolling the city in these costumes. In the film Blum opens a door at the police station to see a room full of officers changing into their carnival roles, including as women; the evening interrogation is interrupted by another party of undercover officers disguised as revellers leaving the station. In the novel, Moeding is wearing a sheikh costume at 7 p.m. on the Sunday when Katharina calls at his house to confess to him; even Tötges has improvised a similar disguise using a white bed sheet, against which his blood stands out when Blum shoots him. She herself was dressed as a Bedouin complete with impromptu face veil after being out and about in the city, helping behind a bar on the Saturday and hoping to see Tötges at Sunday lunchtime before their rendezvous. Put another way, the murder is the conclusion to a grotesque carnival pantomime with that year’s Arabian theme. As carnival costumes they are intrinsically comic but hint too that what is going wrong in the

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 52

20/10/2021 15:41

T H E L O S T H O N O U R O F K AT H A R I N A B L U M

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 53

53

20/10/2021 15:41

54

BFI FILM CLASSICS

highly localised Rhineland context is part of a globalised crisis. From the moment West German left-wingers began to identify with the Palestinians after the 1967 Arab–Israeli War through to the hijacking of a passenger jet by four Palestinians in support of the RAF in October 1977, the links between the conflict in the Federal Republic and the Middle East were manifold. The Arab costumes can also be read as a projection of an orientalised terror motif. While the world is upside down in carnival, everyone is a terrorist and they look like this. According to the most influential twentieth-century theorist of European carnival, Mikhail Bakhtin, the festival granted a licence once a year for satire and parody, to poke fun at authority and speak truth to power, all disguised as comedy, because the natural social order was temporarily suspended.47 In Katharina Blum it is not only the police who have infiltrated the annual festival. Local business relies on it. The novel describes the relief expressed by an official and local businessman that the murder took place just before the end because any earlier would have damaged profits. The tabloid press is now the true inheritor of the carnival spirit but misuses its licence to discredit the weak and victimise an individual.48 For Böll, the whole festival has been taken over – by business, the police, the press – and hollowed out from the inside.

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 54

20/10/2021 15:41

T H E L O S T H O N O U R O F K AT H A R I N A B L U M

55

4 Words or Guns? Katharina Blum’s Struggle for Articulacy The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum cost DM 1,700,000 to make: DM 300,000 was in subsidy, with the rest coming in equal sums from Paramount-Orion, the production company Bioskop-Film and the Rhineland-based state broadcaster Westdeutscher Rundfunk. Producer Eberhard Junkersdorf took advantage of the new ‘Film and Television Agreement’, with Westdeutscher Rundfunk gaining exclusive broadcasting rights in return for its investment. This made it important for the film to work on TV. A month after the premiere in West Berlin it was being shown in forty cinemas across the Federal Republic,49 screening at Munich’s Tivoli cinema for an impressive twenty-four weeks non-stop. Around 1,250,000 cinema tickets were sold in West Germany and a similar number abroad. It also took $10,000 in its first week in Washington DC and was still drawing significant audiences two weeks later.50 When it was finally shown on German national television on 28 May 1978 it reached 7,500,000 viewers. It was the first work of New German Cinema to excite such a level of interest from domestic audiences. Filming took place on location in Cologne and Bonn between 4 February and 19 March 1975, thus coinciding with carnival. The film-makers used mainly original sound and employed some nonprofessional actors. The only aerial shot is at Tötges’ funeral; there is repeated use of the close-up, especially on Angela Winkler, showing her expressions under pressure and during interrogation. They opted also for new high-speed Zeiss lenses with customised Kodak film, a combination which was said to permit the filming of people and objects just as they were. Cinematographer Vacano quickly worked out that this was not the case, but belief in the new technology encouraged the taking of risks, which was ultimately to the film’s advantage.51 Vacano

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 55

20/10/2021 15:41

56

BFI FILM CLASSICS

recalls being excited at the prospect of working with Schlöndorff when he got a call from Junkersdorf asking him to drop what he was doing and join them on set the following day because Dieter Lohmann had been taken seriously ill. Vacano arrived promptly at the hotel to find his colleague apparently in the best of health eating breakfast. Acutely embarrassed, Vacano explained his presence; understandably furious to be fired from a film, Lohmann stormed out. The carnival scenes, including the party, were already in the can, however, and are Lohmann’s work. The bright colour of carnival supplemented by catchy tunes is part of the film’s aesthetic, first in the Café Polkt, then at the party, giving way to greyer tones for the interrogations at the police station but also in Blum’s ultra-modern flat. Colouring is matched each time by soundscape, with Henze’s disconcerting score associated with police surveillance, the Zeitung and modernist architecture. The film was made in the face of government-led opposition. Junkersdorf relied on his wits to get round the ban imposed by the Federal Interior Minister on police co-operation. He tracked down the company which manufactured the protective equipment worn in the raid on Blum’s flat, which happened to be based in Cologne and was ready to lend the gear free of charge.52 He faced potentially graver difficulties when it came to the interior of the police station until he found newly commissioned premises in Bonn which were

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 56

20/10/2021 15:41

T H E L O S T H O N O U R O F K AT H A R I N A B L U M

57

yet to be occupied. It was still technically the property of the constructors, who gave their permission. On seeing the ‘glass, steel, transparency everywhere matched by the greatest possible degree of anonymity and coldness’, Schlöndorff said straightaway, ‘we have to shoot the film here’. He recalls too that ‘the cells were grey, brightly neon-lit, the toilet bowls made of steel, scratch-proof covering on the walls with non-see-through glass bricks instead of old-fashioned barred windows’.53 The gleaming new police station even had an atomic bomb-proof underground car park which they used for the unintended meeting of the two prisoners in the film’s penultimate scene. Westdeutscher Rundfunk allowed their Cologne HQ to be used as the building’s exterior. US reviewers commented on the film’s visual aesthetics. Joel Siegel related the cinematography to the modernist score: The look of the film is extraordinary. Jost Vacano’s crisp cinematography captures the cold, hard-edged, poured-concrete public buildings and apartment houses of the New Germany, the ghastly inheritances of the Bauhaus style. This intriguing visual coldness is enhanced by Hans Werner Henze’s icily metallic, Schoenbergian score. The movie appears to be made of dead matter, a portrait of how the world will look after humanity is cloned.54

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 57

20/10/2021 15:41

58

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Stephan Schiff, writing in the alternative magazine The Boston Phoenix, also noted: ‘The relentless grayness of the color, the jagged cutting and angular camera work, the staging of the shots to emphasize the empty space around Katharina (and hence her isolation) or the lack of it (or else her confinement).’55 The new tower block is a classic such location – anonymous, ultra-modern, on the edge of an urban settlement. The building in the suburb of Sülz to the south of Cologne, now known as the Uni-Center, consists of four differently coloured towers or wings, the highest of which, with forty-five floors and the capacity to house up to 2,000 people, was two years old at the time of the film. It remains one of the largest such accommodation blocks in Europe. Two years after the film’s release a flat here was indeed rented by the RAF as a possible venue to hold their kidnap victim, Hans Martin Schleyer.56 Von Trotta told Siegel: ‘After the war […] we had a chance to rebuild our cities, and this is what we made! Volker and I are very angry, very hot about this coldness.’57 According to Vacano, who was never tempted to team up with him again, Schlöndorff directed from behind the camera, always starting ‘from the image’: that is, first figuring out what a scene would look like on screen before he filmed it, rather than acting the scene first, then making it work on film. Vacano once returned to the set, where the directors were supposed to be rehearsing with the actors, only to find Schlöndorff sitting in his place behind the camera. Schlöndorff’s behaviour made Vacano’s role as cinematographer potentially redundant but explains the painterly quality of much of Katharina Blum, segments of which can be viewed as a succession of tableaux vivants.58 Schlöndorff has cited the American figurative painter George Tooker (1920–2011), who depicted the sameness of modern-day experience in institutional settings, as an influence.59 In the middle section of the film covering Thursday and Friday there are several sequences in the police station which are Tookeresque, either in the open-plan office or in one of a succession of ante-rooms and galleries with secret doors and mysterious entrances. The scenes depend for their dramatic effect on subtle camera angles, reverse

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 58

20/10/2021 15:41

T H E L O S T H O N O U R O F K AT H A R I N A B L U M

59

George Tooker, The Subway (1950). Egg Tempera on compositional board. 18 1/2 x 36 1/2 inches (© Estate of George Tooker. Courtesy of DC Moore Gallery, New York)

shots, the juxtaposition of facial expressions and, above all, careful choreographing and the positioning of actors in relation to each other and to the office furniture. In the first interrogation, for example, a scene lasting a little over four minutes, Beizmenne, sitting in front of a movable dividing screen, addresses Blum face to face. Both are seated as he questions her on her relationship with Götten; the back of her head is first presented to the camera until she turns to the side, showing her face in profile but meaning that she no longer speaks to him directly. Beizmenne’s expressions are highlighted against the blank grey screen but he is speaking now to the back of her head, their two faces in close-up filling the screen and conveying a false sense of intimacy. He modulates his tone until he breaks the scene by getting up suddenly, raising his voice and striding across the room to the two state prosecutors, who are also standing. When the prosecutors appear together they frequently take on the role of a Kafkaesque comic duo, with Hach as the straight man. Beizmenne’s unexpected movement reveals a row of co-workers going about their business with typewriters and telephones, highlighting how private moments have a public audience. Blum stays seated, thus spatially in a position of weakness, but soon gains the moral high ground with

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 59

20/10/2021 15:41

60

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Inspector Beizmenne (Mario Adorf)

Hach (Rolf Becker) and Korten (Horatius Häberle), state prosecutors

her distinction between zärtlich (tender) and zudringlich (intrusive) in describing the way men treat her. Beizmenne is forced to concede her point and, having lost this exchange despite his superior power demonstrated in his ability to change position, he sits down again,

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 60

20/10/2021 15:41

T H E L O S T H O N O U R O F K AT H A R I N A B L U M

61

now at the other side of the room. He asks why she decided not to drive to the party the previous evening, as his face and the back of her head are once again directed at the camera. Hach then takes over the questioning and shows an interest once again in her sexual behaviour, until the scene is concluded when the dividing screen is moved to the side as the office breaks for lunch. Blum’s confrontations with Beizmenne punctuate the film and thus become key components of its structure. The next day, she takes a seat at the edge of the same room near the window as Beizmenne perches on the desk in front of her, the state prosecutors now seated behind them. The camera switches to Moeding taking press cuttings and sitting behind a desk next to the poster of Holger Meins. It then pans to Beizmenne, now standing in front of a wall screen with notices posted on it, posing questions about Blum’s personal finances. The mood is more relaxed and Blum accepts refreshments, even taking a pill which is handed to her with a glass of water. Beizmenne attempts a risqué joke about her state of semi-undress the previous morning and has by now taken a seat as he gestures to her to come forward to take a look at the fuel receipts for her car. As we know by now, this is a green VW Beetle and one of Blum’s key requisites. She now stands as he sits, looking down at him as she once again gains an upper hand in the exchange. She is under pressure because the figures do not add up and she has driven thousands more kilometres than she needs to for her daily business. The moment becomes ever tenser as the camera closes in on Blum’s face, holding her silence for some fifteen seconds. She then realises how the discrepancy in the figures has come about and confesses her lonely evening drives and her fear of ending up in front of the television in the evening with nothing better to do than get drunk. At the mention of the word ‘fear’ (angst), Henze’s score intervenes and the scene switches to the uncanny location of the waiting room. There are three drafts of the film script among the boxes of papers relating to Katharina Blum in the Schlöndorff Collection at the Filminstitut in Frankfurt. The first is dated 3 October 1974,60

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 61

20/10/2021 15:41

62

BFI FILM CLASSICS

barely two months after the novel was published. All are written by von Trotta and Schlöndorff, with extra dialogues supplied by Böll. The trio met several times, the first occasion in the offices of Böll’s publishers, Kiepenheuer & Witsch. Böll also visited the film set. It was a productive working relationship, and one that Böll and Schlöndorff reprised two years later in their contribution to Germany in Autumn, which included most of the main actors from Katharina Blum, and for a third time in another omnibus film, War and Peace, in which Bennent, Prochnow and Winkler are also reunited. Böll explained his understanding of the various characters, what motivated them and whether they had models in real life. He insisted that as men in their thirties or early forties, the villains were too young to have been Nazis and had acquired their authoritarian mental habits in the post-war republic. Sträubleder was based on the up-and-coming Christian Democrat politician Kurt Biedenkopf (b.1932), who would spend twelve years as the first post-reunification Minister President of Saxony. ‘A very dangerous man’, Böll told Schlöndorff. Katharina Blum was Schlöndorff’s fourth literary adaptation but his first by a living author. He found the change refreshing because of the opportunity it afforded for collaboration with the writer. Of the major authors he went on to adapt – Marguerite Yourcenar (his last collaboration with von Trotta), Günter Grass, Marcel Proust, Arthur Miller, Margaret Atwood, Max Frisch and Michel Tournier – only Proust was no longer alive. Böll was always generous in his comments about the film, often maintaining that this or that scene was better than its equivalent in the book – for example, Tötges, immediately before Blum shoots him, behaving as if he were in a brothel by scattering banknotes on Blum’s sitting room table while he explains that they can make much more money together if she does as he says.61 Böll wrote to Kopelew just before the German premiere that ‘Katharina-Blum-Film is finished, turned out very well.’62 Schlöndorff has explained that their strategy of adaptation was different from similar projects because the imperative to respect

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 62

20/10/2021 15:41

T H E L O S T H O N O U R O F K AT H A R I N A B L U M

63

the source and find visual or filmic equivalents no longer held. The question was not: How to transpose to the screen what there is in the book, but how to transpose to the screen what there is in reality, and that Böll treated in his book. Both of us refer to a common point of departure which is reality, and we think about it in one way for the book, in another for the film.63

He also explained that the film was an index for the present and in dialogue with both the past and future: It is as if we are reminding ourselves at a point in the future: this is what the atmosphere of the 1970s was like, the hysteria, the demonisation of an enemy. – At the same time I want to treat Böll’s story almost like a nineteenth-century literary source: somebody about whom we know nothing becomes involved in events which could befall any one of us.64

The novel was their starting point and the drafts of the screenplay stick more closely to it than the final film. Ideas for visual images emerged during filming and editing, and their decision-making was guided by what they could make work on screen. In particular, it took the screenplay authors a good while to get the beginning and ending right. The first version starts with Blum’s confession to Moeding that she has shot Tötges. Instead of putting her under arrest and taking her into custody, Moeding returns with her to see Tötges’ body. The next scene shows the discovery of the second body, that of the Zeitung’s photographer Schönner, in woods outside the city. There follows a statement by the carnival official expressing relief that the murder happened at the end of the festival season and thus did not damage takings, then a cut to Tötges’ funeral, which Böll originally passed over in a line and a half. The oration is given by Lüding as the Zeitung boss. In the drafts, Lüding comes across rather more like a vicar who has read a little too much contemporary philosophy, musing:

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 63

20/10/2021 15:41

64

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Soon none of us will understand each other anymore. Conceptual confusion in practice has reached a level which would be unimaginable in theory. As a means of communication language is failing too: it is as if we were all speaking in different tongues.65

The funeral was located alternately at the start or the end of the film. In one draft it is the locus for the flashback, thus placed at the beginning and the end, which is similar to the narrative structure of The Lost Honor of Kathryn Beck. Most bizarrely, von Trotta and Schlöndorff entertained the idea of giving this speech to the renowned editor of the liberal weekly Die Zeit, Countess Marion von Dönhoff. The version of this scene in the final film was criticised for its apparent heavy-handedness by critics such as Jack Zipes, who argued that Schlöndorff tries to make us incensed by ending with an unctuous graveside eulogy by the reporter’s boss, who acclaims the democratic virtues of freedom of the press in phrases dripping with complacent hypocrisy that might be taken as provocation for a general smashing of the city’s newspaper plant.66

Schlöndorff insists that the last scene, which is billed as an epilogue, is intended as a grotesque cabaret performance and is not part of the film proper but designed to defuse the tension which has built up.67 The film’s ending developed over the various drafts. In the final version the funeral oration is delivered in a menacing but highly theatrical tone by a male character not previously encountered but who readers of the novel know to be Lüding. The statement about similarities with journalistic practices is then written over a shot of funeral wreathes before a fade-out, there being no final credits. Originally, the film-makers planned further scenes, including the fight between Blorna and Sträubleder when the gallery owner declares the two drops of blood on a tissue to be a work of art and gives it the title ‘End of a long male friendship’. The Zeitung’s headline is slanted

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 64

20/10/2021 15:41

T H E L O S T H O N O U R O F K AT H A R I N A B L U M

65

differently: ‘Conservative politician attacked physically by leftwing lawyer’. There was also the problem of engineering a meeting between Blum and Götten, which Henze insisted was necessary. This was initially to happen in a corridor outside the court. Instead they meet as each is being led by armed police from or to interrogations, and the underground concrete location is significant in terms of the film’s neon-lit aesthetic. Once again, this is a change that makes the film more powerful as a work of cinema. Sträubleder is potentially more compromised than Hach, but is so confident that there is one law for him and another for the young woman whom he professes to

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 65

20/10/2021 15:41

66

BFI FILM CLASSICS

love that during his argument with Blorna he fails to realise the irony of his defence that ‘we live after all in a free country’, as he pleads for his name to be left out of the scandal. The camera momentarily switches to Saturday’s edition of the Zeitung to show that the same freedom did not help Blum. In the first draft, after establishing the facts of the murder, as the novel’s narrator does in his first three sections, there is now a flashback to the carnival party on Wednesday night. Tötges and Schönner have larger roles than in the novel, which is mainly a function of the cinematic dramaturgy and the need for a showdown between Tötges and Blum. When they get out of their black Porsche in the village where Frau Blum senior lives, pausing first to buy a bunch of flowers, the screenplay specifies that they look ‘like killers in a western’.68 Reminiscent of a cowboy, Tötges sports a widebrimmed black hat, and he is also constantly in a hurry, whether on foot or in his Porsche. This is a visual reference to the pre-war investigative journalist Egon Erwin Kisch, who was known as the ‘racing reporter’.

Reporter Werner Tötges (Dieter Laser) and photographer Schönner (Leo Weisse)

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 66

20/10/2021 15:41

T H E L O S T H O N O U R O F K AT H A R I N A B L U M

67

None of the drafts contains the film’s opening scene in which Götten, already being watched by an undercover police cameraman, crosses the Rhine on one of the many small car ferries which ply the river multiple times every hour. The sequence is one of the most cinematic in the film and is intercut with the first ‘film within the film’, that made by the undercover police cameraman posing as an amateur film-maker. The viewer sees Götten on the ferry from two points of view. The sequence shot in black and white on 16mm, using a handheld camera, anticipates other brief black-and-white documentary sequences made by the police as well as media photos. The opening efficiently establishes the police or thriller genre: here is a man in the sights of his pursuers. The brief car chase en route from Café Polkt to Woltersheim’s party, again captured by the police cameraman, is also a late addition. It replaces a scene in the drafts showing the two lovers taking the lift to Blum’s flat, their conversation once inside being picked up by police officers using a stethoscope from next door. They are presumably disappointed to hear Götten confide that he needs to cut his toenails, which Blum then does for him while he takes a bath. Götten is seen getting up to draw the curtains, denying the audience the opportunity to participate in the love scene itself. The explanation in the novel for this absence is that only Blum and Götten know what happened between them once they were in her flat and the narrator

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 67

20/10/2021 15:41

68

BFI FILM CLASSICS

interviews neither. The film also respects their privacy, leaving their intimacy indeterminate, a gap in the story which the audience must fill in for itself. The decision distinguishes Katharina Blum from the US remake, not to mention Richard Flanagan’s Sydney-based literary thriller The Unknown Terrorist (2006), which delights in sexual descriptions. There is multiple doubling of scenes in Katharina Blum. For example, toilets and bathrooms are part of a network of imagery involving dirt and disorder, associated in particular with Blum’s flat after the police raid, which are offset by scenes of washing. Toilets convey a sense of general social ‘besmirchment’ and are associated each time with the police.69 Sheikh Karl sits on a toilet at the carnival party to relay the results of his undercover work to Beizmenne and Moeding waiting in a squad car in the city centre. Blum must clean the toilet in the police cell when she is locked up at her own insistence during the lunch break. She is also sick in the police station bathroom on Friday morning after trying to digest what the Zeitung has written about her. She is joined in the women’s bathroom by the female officer who helped her get dressed the previous morning in her own bathroom, which genders places of washing as female. Blum is shown cleansing herself under the shower after her first interrogation and washing her mother’s body after her death following Tötges’ illegal

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 68

20/10/2021 15:41

T H E L O S T H O N O U R O F K AT H A R I N A B L U M

69

visit, one of at most three scenes in which there is no male character in shot. Beiters and Woltersheim discuss how to clean up red wine spilt at the party directly after their surprise guests have turned up. After Trude and Herbert Blorna return from their winter holiday, we see a street-cleaning truck spraying water as they negotiate their way to a taxi. There are also two scenes of female nudity. The film’s promoters failed to realise that neither was intended to serve an erotic purpose when they included a full-frontal shot of Winkler double-framed by the bathroom doorway getting dressed in view of an armed male

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 69

20/10/2021 15:41

70

BFI FILM CLASSICS

guard. The other scene involves the washing of the mother’s body. The image was meant to shock, as the naked female body is not usually presented on camera in this way. The scene was added by the film-makers, as in the novel Blum is only granted the opportunity of seeing her mother’s face. In the earlier bathroom scene she first bends for a rectal examination, underlining how Blum’s private space has been invaded and she is being stripped of her dignity as a preliminary to the taking of her honour. As Blum then struggles into her clothes in semi-public view, her nakedness is presented at peculiar angles, her gaze distressed and face turned partially downwards. The image may still satisfy a voyeuristic impulse. Blum has been told to change out of her bathrobe because she is putting herself ‘on public display’, according to Hach, to which she has replied that she is not displaying herself because she is at home. Hach is not only deflecting attention from his acquaintance with Blum by telling her to dress, but also shifting the sexual blame in a way which will continue throughout the film. We also see a raid of sorts by Herbert and Trude Blorna on Hach at his home on the Saturday morning, when he emerges wearing a dark bathrobe, complaining loudly about the intrusion. One of the film’s structuring principles is thus to pair up scenes from its opposite halves; the two most dramatic sequences are the confrontations at Blum’s apartment – first her arrest by Beizmenne and then her

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 70

20/10/2021 15:41

T H E L O S T H O N O U R O F K AT H A R I N A B L U M

71

shooting of Tötges. Carnival celebrations and long shots of her apartment block, accompanied by loud bursts of music, precede each. The two nude scenes are similarly paired, the second offering a correction to the voyeuristic pleasure potentially available in the first. The film returns on three occasions to Blum’s apartment, the first time that evening when Blum decides against sleeping there after the devastation wrought by the police searches, not to mention the anonymous notes posted under her door. The second occasion is on Friday evening in the company of Woltersheim and Beiters when she throws food at the walls and upturns the furniture, destroying

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 71

20/10/2021 15:41

72

BFI FILM CLASSICS

its qualities as a home. This is a reaction to the intensification of the defamation and the realisation that Tötges has broken into the hospital to see her mother. The third and last occurrence is when she shoots Tötges, by which time the physical surroundings are a metaphor for her ruined public reputation. Henze’s influence on the film’s narrative structure appears to have been considerable. His concert suite has three themes: Katharina’s lament; violence emanating from the state and press; and hope represented by Götten and the prospect of being reunited with him. Their unexpected meeting marks the point in the music when their two themes coincide, though it is striking that this scene in the film is not scored. The music signals that even though Blum must go to prison for murder, she has overcome her despair. Henze’s dissonant extradiegetic score contrasts with the music heard in the film, first at the Café Polkt and the carnival party, and finally with the church choir at Tötges’ funeral. It accompanies only certain characters (Blum herself, Götten and Beizmenne, but not Sträubleder, the Blornas or any of Blum’s other friends), objects (telephones, the Zeitung, Blum’s car), locations (the apartment block and the police station) or sequences (the black-and-white surveillance of Götten). Tötges’ appearances are unscored, presumably because he does not intrude directly into Blum’s life until their fatal meeting, when his arrival at her door is greeted with the first crescendo of noise, the second occurring right at the end of the film as the false disclaimer appears on the screen. Following Blum’s second car journey, when she travels to see Götten, only to discover that he has already been apprehended, intra- and extradiegetic sound briefly merge as Henze’s composition gives way to a police siren. As well as signalling the uncanny qualities of events or objects which are not in themselves usually threatening, Henze scores Blum’s inner journey, with all its discordances and anxieties, and suggests the nightmare contained within the everyday. Henze himself had been the object of press campaigns after the premiere of his oratorio The Raft of the Medusa, which he dedicated to Che Guevara, was cancelled in November 1968 on account of

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 72

20/10/2021 15:41

T H E L O S T H O N O U R O F K AT H A R I N A B L U M

73

disturbances by protesters, whom Henze said he supported. Like Böll, he wanted to express the fruits of his experience in an appropriate format and contribute to a fightback. Songs and music are integral to carnival. There are snatches from three carnival pop songs (in German Schlager), each of which includes a foreign location where carnival is celebrated – Mexico, Barcelona and Rio de Janeiro. ‘Carnival in Rio’ is sung to the tune of ‘Cielito Lindo’ beloved of Mexican mariachi bands, sometimes known as the ‘Ay, ay, ay song’ because of its refrain. The musical references are missing in the novel, but they match the exotic sources for the costumes. The finished film has two flashbacks, both of which are to the lovers’ meeting at the carnival party. They are lyrical interludes which risk becoming sentimental, as does their phone call on Friday evening when Blum’s decision to call alerts Beizmenne to Götten’s whereabouts. Each flashback is prompted by Blum coming across a memento from the previous evening and the switch in time is accompanied by music. The first memento is a handkerchief still full of confetti which the other partygoers threw over her and Götten as they danced together oblivious of those around them. She takes the handkerchief out of her handbag after being locked in the cell during the lunch hour of Thursday’s interrogation. The memory contrasts sharply with her present location, which is further emphasised by a clash in colouring and background noise. The second flashback occurs on the evening of the same day and is triggered by an artificial flower she finds in her bathroom and which she had worn behind her ear the previous night. It returns to the conversation she had with Götten when she explains that he is the first man for four or five years that she has immediately wanted to call ‘du’. In contrast, when she is summoned by Father Urbanus on Friday to meet Sträubleder, who is attending a business conference at the abbey, they stick to the formal ‘Sie’. Something remarkable occurred to Blum on the eve of Women’s Carnival Day. The party conversation is private, not picked up by Sheikh Karl,

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 73

20/10/2021 15:41

74

BFI FILM CLASSICS

who is tailing them, and she has not told Beizmenne about it either during the course of the day. But her confession to Götten anticipates explanations of her behaviour which she makes to Beizmenne during the interrogations on Thursday and Friday, in particular about her solitary nocturnal driving. For its narrative force the film depends on solving successive mysteries. The first surrounds Götten’s disappearance, which is revealed when Blum calls him on the Friday evening, and his crime, which is cleared up the following evening after his arrest. The second is the identity of the ‘gentleman visitor’, which Blum refuses to reveal and we learn on Saturday is Sträubleder. The third is the reason for the extra kilometres recorded on her VW Beetle. Finally, there are Blum’s intentions in the last sequence of scenes on Sunday after she has arranged an exclusive interview with Tötges. Depicting the lovers’ meeting three times follows a principle of musical composition: two of Henze’s three themes are woven ever more closely together through repetition in variation. In the first shots of the party, in the film’s third scene, Blum cannot be heard speaking. While she is the object of others’ speech and we hear her name, she does not say anything herself until the following morning. We do not hear her side of the conversation when Claudia Stern phones her from Café Polkt (which is indirectly her film entrance), but we catch her first name (‘Hallo, Katharina’) and understand that her attitude is regarded as nunnish when the topic of bringing back men to the party is brought up. We first see her as she is walking past, slightly hunched, hardly the usual entrance expected of the film’s star. Her silence and semi-invisibility show that she is not an obvious choice as a principal character and is only made into one by unexpected circumstances. Her name has already been said out loud on three occasions by the time she leaves the party. It is first revealed by Claudia to Sheikh Karl when he asks ‘who is the good-looking one?’ Locked in the lavatory, he then repeats it through his walkie-talkie to Beizmenne, who says it again when he makes a phone call, ordering wire taps for ‘Blum, Katharina’ and ‘Woltersheim, Else’. Blum’s first words uttered the

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 74

20/10/2021 15:41

T H E L O S T H O N O U R O F K AT H A R I N A B L U M

75

following morning, ‘He has left’, refer to one man (Götten) and are directed at another (Beizmenne). The same is true of her last words, also directed at Beizmenne, when, following her second arrest, he asks her if she has also shot Schönner the photographer and she replies, ‘Well, why not him too?’ For Richard Falcon, Blum’s last words represent the film’s climax, which he notes coincides with ‘the tightest close up of Katharina’s face in the film’.70 It doubles with the longest close-up of her face when she tells Beizmenne about her solitary night-time driving. The film sharpens the novel’s critique of the Catholic Church, a central concern in much of Böll’s fiction and especially poignant given the prominence of Catholicism in the Rhineland. Böll’s Blum has opted out of paying the ‘church tax’, which means that she no longer properly counts as a Catholic, though, after her crime and seeking some peace and time to think about her mother, she takes herself to a church, as it is the only place offering some tranquility on the Sunday of carnival. The film introduces the figure of Father Urbanus, the sole added character, who summons her to the abbey on the Saturday morning. She first of all apologises to him for revealing that he was the source of a Marx quotation Beizmenne found among her possessions, but then he leads her into a surprise meeting with Sträubleder, who beseeches her to return the key to his villa and not to mention his name to the police. Father Urbanus is thus seen to collaborate with one of the villains, which shows the Church and business operating hand in glove, as they are seen to do repeatedly in Böll’s fiction. When Blum flees the scene, she jumps into a Renault 4 driven by Woltersheim and Beiters, passing a long row of black Mercedes limousines waiting for the businessmen. The quotation, which Blum keeps inside a book, is read out by Beizmenne and aligns both the film and more poignantly Father Urbanus briefly with the rhetoric of the student movement: I am bad, dishonest, unscrupulous, stupid; but money is honoured, and hence its possessor. Money is the supreme good, therefore its possessor is

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 75

20/10/2021 15:41

76

BFI FILM CLASSICS

good. The divine power of money – lies in its character as men’s estranged, alienating and self-disposing species-nature. Money is the alienated ability of mankind.

It must have been Böll’s addition, even though the quotation does not feature in the novel, because an overlapping passage from the same source is used in the film version of The Clown, which went into production simultaneously with Katharina Blum. Böll once again co-wrote the screenplay. Here Beizmenne and Hach are caught in a double bind because, while on the one hand it would suit their purposes to pin knowledge of Marx on their suspect, to do so would give her a status which in their eyes she does not warrant. They would also prefer the quotation to come from her supposedly anarchist lover rather than her priest. Moeding reveals his own status by identifying the quotation as coming from Marx’s Early Writings.71 Blum gradually gains articulacy in her confrontations with the police and in other conversations – with Sträubleder at the abbey or with the hospital doctor after her mother’s death. After he promises to sue if it turns out Tötges really did intrude on her mother’s ward, Blum gives the doctor the benefit of her views on tabloid journalists: ‘These people are murderers, of people and reputations – all of them

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 76

20/10/2021 15:41

T H E L O S T H O N O U R O F K AT H A R I N A B L U M

77

– that is just what their job consists of, depriving innocent people of their reputations, sometimes of their lives – otherwise nobody would buy their articles from them.’ The doctor is dumbfounded and asks whether she is a Marxist. The scene doubles with the earlier discussion of Marx. Blum is not a political person. She becomes radicalised because of what happens to her, which she is not prepared to accept (any longer), rather than through reading abstract theory. The two scenes involving references to Marx thus show Blum’s growth over a 48-hour period. Blum ends the film as she begins it, however: in silence. She is reticent on Saturday evening after Götten’s capture and her mother’s death, only asking Herbert Blorna how long Ludwig will stay in prison. She says nothing at all on the Sunday morning in the build-up to the meeting with Tötges. After she has had beer and insults thrown in her face at a bar full of early-morning carnival revellers, she says nothing in response, instead fetching the gun from Beiters’ flat. The revellers are at ‘Frühschoppen’, as Claudia explains, or early-morning drinking, a carnival custom on the Sunday before Lent. Blum also remains silent while Tötges explains his plans for them to make their fortunes with her revelations, starting with her account of her relationship with Sträubleder. In response to his final suggestion that they sleep together, she shoots him without saying a word. Tötges uses the vulgar verb bumsen, which was employed for comic effect in the English-language German film Cabaret (1972, dir. Bob Fosse) by the performer Sally Bowles (Liza Minnelli). It is a reprise of the exchange which took place at the same location between Blum and Beizmenne on Thursday morning when the frustrated police inspector asked: ‘Did he fuck you, then?’ When Tötges throws money about the room he is also enacting the meaning of the Marx quotation about money. In structural terms, Sunday morning repeats Wednesday evening: a fancy-dress carnival gathering in a café or at a party (on Sunday Blum too is dressed as a Bedouin and wearing a makeshift veil) precedes an assignation at her apartment with a man. For the second time, the camera dwells on a long shot of her residential tower

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 77

20/10/2021 15:41

78

BFI FILM CLASSICS

block in full profile. We saw the tower first on Thursday morning as Beizmenne’s squad prepared their raid and the music indicated something threatening was about to happen. The new complex stands on mud beyond other human habitation. On Sunday the same music is repeated but the shot of the tower block comes straight after a framed photograph in Beiters’ flat of bombed-out Cologne in 1945. The juxtaposition belongs to the film’s architectural critique, suggesting that the city, and by extension Germany, has exchanged one set of ruins for another. As in Böll’s novel, the name Cologne is not uttered by anyone, but Saturday begins with a shot of the railway bridge from Deutz overlooked by the cathedral, Cologne’s unmistakable landmark. The most famous scene in the film is the police raid. An early note describes their kit as ‘a mixture of Chicago gangster and Teutonic Knight’.72 There are around a dozen officers, looking threatening but also as if they could be in fancy dress, and half a dozen police dogs. Blum is once again in a domestic interior, as she was at the party the previous evening, and is now wearing a white bathrobe (in the novel it is described as green with embroidered daisies). She is not being formally arrested, only taken to the station for questioning – the purpose of the raid was to apprehend Götten, and the audience should be as surprised as the police that he is gone.

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 78

20/10/2021 15:41

T H E L O S T H O N O U R O F K AT H A R I N A B L U M

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 79

79

20/10/2021 15:41

80

BFI FILM CLASSICS

For all intents and purposes, however, it is an arrest and it happens in a private home which has become a public place. As Blum is led out of the building, there is already a scrum of press photographers and onlookers waiting for her. The film now includes its first visual quotation from Baader–Meinhof iconography. When 23-year-old Margrit Schiller, whose passport would later be found in Raimund Böll’s flat, was presented to the press after her arrest in connection with the fatal shooting of a police officer on 22 October 1971, she hung her head, trying to hide her face behind her hair. The historian of the RAF, Stefan Aust, writes: A female officer held her in a neck lock, a male officer lifted her legs, her skirt rose up, as photographers took their pictures and the television crew was filming. A reporter shouted out: ‘Hair out of the face!’ At this point another officer pulled her hair upwards. In the evening the scene was shown on national television.73

Schiller had not fired the fatal shots, but helped the gunman get away and had a pistol in her handbag at the time of her arrest. The police manhandling of her looked inhumane. Blum is presented to the cameras as a trophy in a similarly brutal way, though it is the female police officer who grabs her hair. This is the photograph reproduced

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 80

20/10/2021 15:41

T H E L O S T H O N O U R O F K AT H A R I N A B L U M

81

Margrit Schiller under arrest: Sympathisers: Our German Autumn (2018, dir. Felix Moeller)

on the front page the following morning. In von Trotta’s play the stage direction states: ‘the police officers grab her hair and thrust her face towards the photographers’ (p. 13). In the 2018 documentary Sympathisers: Our German Autumn, directed by von Trotta’s son Felix Moeller, footage of Schiller is juxtaposed with the foyer scene from Katharina Blum, revealing that Winkler’s hairstyle and colour were modelled on Schiller’s. The film borrows from similar iconography at several other moments. Each cue indicates the film is taking sides, embedding its fictional visual narrative in the representation of recent events and offering a corrective. On the afternoon of Blum’s interrogation the audience glimpses a poster of Holger Meins in Beizmenne’s office under a caption about ‘hunger strike’ and ‘isolation torture’. Meins starved himself to death in prison three months before Katharina Blum went into production. The poster is a reminder of Götten’s physical resemblance to him. Beizmenne is also filmed in front of a wanted poster showing multiple mugshots resembling those of the ‘Violent Anarchists’ which were displayed prominently in public buildings throughout the republic. Blum’s refusal to break bread with her interrogators during the lunch break on Thursday and stated preference to be locked in a cell, where she declines further offers of

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 81

20/10/2021 15:41

82

BFI FILM CLASSICS

food and drink, constitute a mini-hunger strike. Her first action in the cell is to clean the open toilet after a previous occupant has been sick over it. But the following evening after two editions of Die Zeitung have caused neighbours to think the worst of her, she throws bottles and food at the walls of her flat, which recalls too the ‘dirty protests’ carried out by RAF prisoners in their prison cells, a tactic copied by the IRA in Northern Ireland. The first draft of the screenplay includes a description of the police station: Photo of Götten. An extensive office space, the walls of which are covered with wanted posters for ‘Anarchists, Radicals etc.’, as well as photos which are just of demonstrations against the Vietnam War or restrictions on university places [numerus clausus].74

After Götten’s arrest there is a shot, lasting several seconds, of an armoured police vehicle of the type deployed in the apprehension of Meins and Baader on 2 June 1972. It is mentioned in the drafts in connection with the police raid on Blum’s tower block, though not seen in the finished film at that point. In the third draft there are clearer visual reminders of the apprehension of Baader and Meins: Götten is wearing only swimming trunks when he comes out of

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 82

20/10/2021 15:41

T H E L O S T H O N O U R O F K AT H A R I N A B L U M

83

the house with his hands up, which recalls Meins’ arrest on 2 June; Götten has been wounded in the exchange of fire, as Baader was, and is placed on a stretcher and lifted into an ambulance, again like Baader and as shown on live TV.75 Meins, once a film student, has ghostly presences in other contemporary German films. Straub– Huillet dedicated Moses and Aron to him in 1975 and The American Friend (1977, dir. Wim Wenders) includes the graffiti ‘Murder of Holger Meins’. In the final scene of The Second Awakening of Christa Klages, the eponymous central character stands in front of a poster of Meins similar to that shown in Katharina Blum after her arrest. The filming of Götten’s arrest attracted the attention of the police who visited the outdoor set. One of the extras playing a member of the police was told off by a senior officer for having hair which was too long. The extra swore back at him and Schlöndorff was concerned that his film would be confiscated in retaliation. The police relaxed only after Mario Adorf posed with them for souvenir photos.76 Finally, the unexpected encounter between the lovers after their separate arrests was inspired by a similar unintended meeting between two captives. None of these images is a visual translation of a motif in the book. They were all added by the film-makers. The references align the film to the Baader–Meinhof subject matter in ways the book did not.

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 83

20/10/2021 15:41

84

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Film and reality merged in other ways. In the month the film premiered, the film-makers’ Tuscan holiday house was raided by Italian police looking for a member of the Red Brigades, the Italian version of the RAF. Winkler recalls being manhandled in September 1986 by police in Italy who mistook her for a gypsy wanted for robbery. After Katharina Blum she would be sent hate mail just like the character she played, and she was reported more than once to the police by passers-by, one of whom once followed her home. The police even searched her flat while she was out: ‘It reminded me of the cinema, as if I was Katharina Blum.’77 Posters for the film were pasted next to mugshots of the wanted ‘Violent Anarchists’, and not everyone could distinguish between the two. To others, on the other hand, Katharina Blum was a hero, even a contemporary Joan of Arc.

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 84

20/10/2021 15:41

T H E L O S T H O N O U R O F K AT H A R I N A B L U M

85

5 Influence and Afterlives Katharina Blum, book and film, were prominent chapters in the anti-Springer campaign of the 1970s, the greatest achievement of which was the abandonment of the company’s tactics of anti-left intimidation. Axel Springer’s son committed suicide the day after Rudi Dutschke’s funeral, on 3 January 1980, depriving the company which his father founded of an heir. René Böll believes the conflict took its toll on his father’s health and was the cause of his early death in 1985 at the age of sixty-seven. Katharina Blum has a significant artistic legacy. The story has often been adapted for the stage in Germany, as well as in France, Italy and Switzerland. It was dramatised by BBC Radio 4 for Woman’s Hour in April 2012 and repeated in Böll’s centenary year of 2017. Twenty-first-century theatrical productions highlight contemporary relevance in an age of ‘post-truth’, social media trolling and resurgent misogyny. Theatre and radio adaptations acknowledge Böll’s book or von Trotta’s original stage version rather than the film, though dialogues are sometimes lifted from the film script and dramatisations often follow the film narrative. A number of American, Australian, British and German works reference the film implicitly. In April 1991 an opera version by the GDR-trained Tilo Medek (music) and Dorothea Medek (libretto) premiered in Bielefeld, though it was performed on tour a total of only four times and of all the spin-offs is the only one which has to count as a failure.78 The first independent work in another medium which the film inspired was of course its own soundtrack. Henze’s Katharina Blum: Concert Suite for Small Orchestra was premiered on 6 May 1976 at the Brighton Festival with Henze conducting. Commissioned before filming started and influencing the film-makers to include two scenes not in the novel (the Rhine crossing at the beginning and the meeting

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 85

20/10/2021 15:41

86

BFI FILM CLASSICS

between Blum and Götten at the end), the suite has seven movements: 1. The Poisoned River; 2. The Lovers; 3. Lament; 4. Memories; 5. Rush Hour (Great Fugue); 6. Fear; and 7. The Poisoned River. The style throughout is self-consciously modernist – intense, concentrated, atonal and dissonant, thus very different in tone and method from Böll’s prose or the film. As a result the textures are complex and polyphonic, and the music characterised by gestures rather than sharply profiled melodies. Technically, it is grounded in the 12-tone serial technique and projects a similar kind of expressionist soundworld to the modernist composers of the previous generation, Arnold Schönberg, Alban Berg and Anton Webern. Henze further uses a full catalogue of avant-garde tricks – the orchestra includes a huge percussion section and he notates slides, microtones, instrumental special effects and some elements of improvisation. The effect is tense, atmospheric and occasionally violent in a chaotic kind of way, and is not relieved by more conventional or popular styles. There are occasional moments of soaring violin melody which recall the lyricism of Berg’s 1935 Violin Concerto. Henze himself mentioned Wagner’s Rheingold in relation to the ‘The Poisoned River’ but it is an ironic allusion and a long way from an instantly recognisable quotation. The later movements are more fragmented, being compiled from a number of shorter cues. The serial procedures are highly abstract and not apparent to a listener. Henze was reacting with his own artwork in the language of music to the same set of contemporary political circumstances.79 He is also more hopeful than Böll in that he sees the lovers’ brief reunion as a vindication of their actions. The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, or: Where Violence Comes From and Where It Can Lead by Margarethe von Trotta (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch) premiered at the Werkstattbühne der Stadt Bonn on 8 May 1976, two days after Henze’s suite in Brighton. While the title page claims that this play is based on Böll’s novel, it also derives from the various versions of the film script, though diverges at times sharply from them. The action is divided

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 86

20/10/2021 15:41

T H E L O S T H O N O U R O F K AT H A R I N A B L U M

87

this time into six scenes: 1. Katharina’s Apartment; 2. Police Station; 3. Lüding’s Office; 4. Police Station; 5. Blornas’ Villa; 6. Prison, Cell Block. The newspaper boss Lüding is now a key character and Father Urbanus has an even bigger role than in the film, his function being to explain the political context. The play assumes knowledge of the novel and/or film as the shooting itself is neither depicted nor discussed. The play was performed at a number of regional venues over the next couple of years. Böll was generous about it in a letter to Kopelew: The play is better than the film in some scenes (which I wrote, but I am not the author of the play, which is written by Margarethe von Trotta), even better than the book (which is not that bad, even if feeble).80

In November 1977 it was due to be staged in Würzburg but the production was postponed on account of the political atmosphere in the wake of recent events, which included the kidnapping and murder of Hans Martin Schleyer, the hijacking by Palestinians of a plane carrying German tourists and the staged suicides in Stammheim of the convicted RAF terrorists, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe. The incident gave Schlöndorff and Böll the idea for their contribution to Germany in Autumn, which, with contributions from Fassbinder, Edgar Reitz, Alexander Kluge and many others, was made in reaction to the events of September and October 1977. Antigone Postponed (1978, dir. Volker Schlöndorff, in Germany in Autumn) is written by Böll, uses some of Henze’s score and borrows a high-tech, concrete look from Katharina Blum (this time against a backdrop of the Stuttgart television tower). It takes the form of a scene in which a committee discusses whether they can risk broadcasting a production of Sophocles’ Antigone given its current resonance after the prison deaths of the RAF leaders and the controversy over their burial, documentary footage of which concludes the film. They decide against screening on account of the contemporary echoes of words such as ‘violence’ and the depiction

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 87

20/10/2021 15:41

88

BFI FILM CLASSICS

of ‘rebellious women’. As the episode also features many of the same actors, all of whom take roles either compatible with those they played in Katharina Blum or in counterpoint to them, including (a heavily pregnant) Angela Winkler as Antigone, Mario Adorf, Heinz Bennent, Horatius Häberle (the junior state prosecutor) and Dieter Laser, it is a kind of epilogue to the film and included as bonus material on the 2019 DVD. Helen Hughes has commented: ‘The wider connection between these two films, the one which goes behind the scenes of the newspaper industry and the other which goes behind the scenes of television, would surely not have been missed by a German audience.’81 In discussing the classical play Antigone, they are also discussing Katharina Blum. Böll and Schlöndorff collaborated again four years later with editor Beata Mainka-Jellinghaus and film-maker Alexander Kluge to make War and Peace, a mixture of commented documentary footage and acted scenes centring on the escalation of the nuclear arms race in Europe. Winkler resumes the role of sister from Antigone Postponed. This time she has wandered across a devastated landscape and knocks on a window in the ground, beseeching her brother to open it and let her shelter with him. Just as Schlöndorff takes back Blum’s revenge shooting by showing Rita Vogt being shot at the border checkpoint in The Legend of Rita, here he revises both Katharina Blum and Antigone Postponed when the brother at first indicates that he will War and Peace (1982, dir. Alexander Kluge et al.)

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 88

20/10/2021 15:41

T H E L O S T H O N O U R O F K AT H A R I N A B L U M

89

open the hatch but instead a machine gun emerges from the ground and the sister is killed. The relative political optimism of the mid1970s has dissipated by the beginning of the next decade. In the US, the 1980s was similarly marked by a turn to conservatism, symbolised most clearly by the election of the Republican Ronald Reagan to the presidency in 1980. The Lost Honor of Kathryn Beck, retitled Act of Passion for VHS release, was an oppositional film, though more from a feminist perspective than the original novel or film, which bizarrely it nowhere acknowledges. The producer and leading actress Marlo Thomas was associated closely with the women’s movement.82 It was Thomas who pitched the idea to CBS and recruited box-office draw Kris Kristofferson to play the fugitive lover Ben Cole. Thomas was also well known in the US as a comic actress, later playing Rachel’s mother in the long-running sitcom Friends. Thomas (forty-seven) and Kristofferson (forty-eight) were both considerably older than Winkler (thirty-one) and Prochnow (thirty-four) when they played the equivalent roles, rendering the remake, which transposes the entire plot to a Midwest American context, a more knowing film and the heroine in some respects worldlier. For example, Beck has slept with the Sträubleder character. What is added and left out contributes to an understanding of what makes Schlöndorff and von Trotta’s film distinctive. As it was made for primetime television audiences in the US, the profane language used by Beizmenne and Tötges is toned down or left out. In other respects, it is more conventional. The camera follows the lovers back to Kathryn’s apartment, where viewers discreetly participate in their love-making. Beck is still in bed, covered up but clearly naked, when the police raid the apartment the following morning. The police accuse her directly during the interrogation of selling her body on a regular basis. Cole is a suspected activist for a fictitious radical grouping named the ‘armoured truck drivers’, for which he is accused of carrying out bank robberies. He was bugged at the party where he meets Beck, which means that the police can quote Beck’s sweet nothings back to her during questioning. There is an

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 89

20/10/2021 15:41

90

BFI FILM CLASSICS

extended flashback, as the film starts and ends with Beck being led past a pack of journalists after her arrest. There is no equivalent at all for carnival or the Springer Press and the Bild-Zeitung, as the unscrupulous journalist Donald Catton works for a small-town newspaper. There is controversy, however, over the rights of witnesses – Beck is questioned for information on Cole and told that she could spend the rest of her life in jail if she does not help the police. There is also rivalry between the FBI and the local police. The turning point in the film is the death of Beck’s mother after the journalist’s illegal visit. Beck is shown her mother’s face only after she has died and does not participate in washing the corpse, but she does visit the funeral parlour and is arrested for shooting Catton. The lovers are clearly fond of each other but they are not in love. What is more remarkable is that a left-wing film inspired by German events in the previous decade should be remade in the US in the Reagan era. The next significant adaptations are Australian and British and from the twenty-first century. After the 9/11 attacks in New York, interest in the literature of terrorism revived across the West. Richard Flanagan’s The Unknown Terrorist, a literary thriller, with sex, drugs and suspense, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, belongs to this trend. Set in Sydney’s criminal and red-light underworld in the aftermath of atrocities committed by Islamic extremists in Bali, Beslan, Madrid and London, it recounts a night of passion between the pole dancer Gina Davies, referred to throughout by her nickname ‘the Doll’, and a chance male encounter whom she knows only as Tariq. It is Mardi Gras, Sydney’s equivalent to Cologne’s carnival. The novel is divided into four sections corresponding to the four days over which the plot unfolds. Most of the plot elements have an equivalent in the original novel and/or film adaptation. Tariq disappears, however, before Davies wakes up. Moments after she has left what she took to be his flat, it is surrounded by police and journalists. Fairly soon details of her life story are splashed across the media as she has been recognised by one of her clients, a failing television presenter called Richard Cody intent

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 90

20/10/2021 15:41

T H E L O S T H O N O U R O F K AT H A R I N A B L U M

91

on making a comeback. Like Blum, Davies endured a challenging childhood and the media track down her terminally sick father. In the novel’s final sequence she shoots Cody before being gunned down herself. The last chapter recalls the final scene of the film as both Cody and the cop who shot Davies are celebrated. Flanagan was clearly impressed by the film as well as the novel. There is CCTV footage of Gina and Tariq entering the super-modern building where he says that he lives which recalls the grainy police film of Blum and Götten returning to her apartment. Davies’ best friend Wilder was subjected to a police raid which recalls that made on Blum in the film: They didn’t look like soldiers. They didn’t look like armed police or security guys. They looked like … like, unbelievable, really, Gina. I couldn’t believe them, they were out of Star Wars, aliens, they were all in black, but their suits had special pockets and bumps and gadgets and what with their helmets and goggles they looked kind of like amphibious monsters, like killer toads crawled out of the sewers to kill us all, that’s what I felt. I mean, they were so weird. They looked like death, Gina, like what happens when you die, and I just thought, I’m going to die.83

Flanagan acknowledges his debt to Böll but reviewers were quick to point out how their styles diverged: in particular, Flanagan depends on excitement and suspense and deploys genre effects of the contemporary thriller. It seems likely that the film impressed him more. The Lost Honour of Christopher Jeffries (2014, dir. Roger Michell), from a script by Vienna-based Peter Morgan, is inspired by a true story which occurred at the end of 2010 in Bristol.84 Press intrusion rather than manufactured hysteria over terrorist suspects is now the main theme. At the centre is an innocent man arrested for the murder of a young female neighbour. Christopher Jeffries was convicted by the media, making his face the most recognisable in Britain, before he was released without charge. He loses his ‘honour’ because so many of his neighbours and even his former employer

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 91

20/10/2021 15:41

92

BFI FILM CLASSICS

believe the defamation. His honesty under interrogation only makes him seem more suspicious. Once again the police (and the media) work from assumptions rather than evidence. Once again the police pass information to the press, which surprises Jeffries as much as it surprised Blum. The television miniseries draws on Böll’s novel but nods towards Schlöndorff and von Trotta’s film at certain points, notably the arrest, confirming that particular scene as the film’s locus classicus. The Bristol police knock loudly at his door while he is still in bed rather than breaking the door down. Jeffries puts on a white bathrobe to let them in similar to the one Blum wears in the film. Jeffries is then told, as Blum is, that he must get dressed to accompany them to the police station. He is fairly soon vindicated, sues for damages and takes part in the Leveson Inquiry, which curbed the ability of the press to defame individuals, which is a more democratic conclusion than in the original West German material. When Katharina Blum was screened in UK cinemas, Schlöndorff gave the reason for its relative failure compared with many other European countries the comparatively benign nature of the British press. By 2014 this was no longer a tenable view. Not fully accepted into the canon of New German Cinema, the original film was nevertheless influential cinematically in Germany. Von Trotta and Schlöndorff were the first film-makers to deal with the state response to Baader–Meinhof. These films often focused on cases of mistaken identity or on a bystander who intervenes in a violent stand-off, as in Knife in the Head (1978, dir. Reinhard Hauff), in which Winkler again played the female lead. They also often identified female characters with critical opposition, as in von Trotta’s two follow-ups, The Second Awakening of Christa Klages and The German Sisters, or Schlöndorff’s post-unification The Legends of Rita. There is a gunwoman too who fires at a male victim in Fassbinder’s The Third Generation (1979). In this cinematic postscript to the German Autumn of 1977, where violence is no longer ideologically motivated, a terrorist kidnapping of a complicit businessman is performed as carnival farce in fancy dress. In The

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 92

20/10/2021 15:41

T H E L O S T H O N O U R O F K AT H A R I N A B L U M

93

Legend of Rita, however, the rebellious heroine is herself shot after crashing through a roadblock in the film’s final sequence. This ending diverges from the historical source and is a signal of Schlöndorff’s reversion to more conservative values in the Berlin Republic at the turn of the millennium. Katharina Blum signalled a change in the ways in which women were represented on screen. There is surely a line linking Blum with the heroines of von Trotta’s trio of biopics and Run Lola Run (1998, dir. Tom Tykwer), through to the leading women in Victoria (2015, dir. Sebastian Schipper) and In the Fade (2017, dir. Fatih Akin). Akin’s Katja S‚ ekerci (Diane Kruger) is treated as the guilty party after her husband and son are killed in a neo-Nazi bomb attack. When the courts fail to convict her family’s killers, she takes justice into her own hands as a lone suicide bomber. In the Fade was conceived as an intervention into contemporary politics, ending with a statement about the murders carried out between 2000 and 2007 by the National Socialist Underground. In a film about farright violence against hybrid contemporary identities in a German metropolis, Akin focuses on a white woman who adopts a means to avenge herself on her family’s killers hitherto associated with Middle Eastern terrorism. In the Fade is the first fiction film on the NSU and it is dated, again like Katharina Blum, at the time it was filmed. If Schlöndorff’s politics came full circle in the quarter of a century which separates The Legend of Rita from The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, its legacy in von Trotta’s oeuvre is more Diane Kruger as the wrongly incriminated Katja Sekerci in Fatih ‚ Akin’s In the Fade (2017)

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 93

20/10/2021 15:41

94

BFI FILM CLASSICS

nuanced. Christa Klages is no more a terrorist than Blum; von Trotta underlines their contextual similarity by presenting her in front of a poster of Holger Meins after her arrest. In Sheer Madness,85 Winkler’s character is a painter imprisoned in an emotionally abusive marriage. Here again she wields a gun, shooting her husband at the film’s climax. There are references to Blum in each of von Trotta’s biopics of remarkable twentieth-century German women – RAF founder Gudrun Ensslin, Communist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg and exiled Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt, each played by Barbara Sukowa. The male gaze is challenged as it is in Katharina Blum by the sight of partial female nudity in The German Sisters when Julianne (Jutta Lampe) and Marianne (Barbara Sukowa) hastily swap shirts at the end of a prison visit. Once in custody Luxemburg submits to a rectal examination as Blum was obliged to do in her own bathroom. In Hannah Arendt, the eponymous lead is vilified for her reporting of the Adolf Eichmann trial. At one point she receives a hand-delivered note to her apartment from a New York neighbour with the words: ‘DAMN YOU TO HELL – DU NAZIHURE’. True to the saying that you should weigh your reviews rather than read them, Schlöndorff estimated that The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum amassed some 10 kilograms of press cuttings from across the world, which he deposited in the Schlöndorff Collection in the Frankfurt Film Museum in 1992. The film was well received in France and other countries which bordered on Germany, especially Switzerland and Scandinavia, as it was in Israel and Eastern bloc states, including the USSR. Invited by the Goethe-Institut to Uzbekistan with von Trotta and Werner Herzog, Schlöndorff was astounded to see posters for their film in the capital Tashkent. He ventured into a screening to witness audience reactions, noting that they laughed at the same points that German audiences laughed. His hosts explained that the theme of an individual from a modest background in a battle with authority was recognisable to them, as was the notion that all that was left to her was her honour, which she had to defend.86 Schlöndorff attributed the less enthusiastic

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 94

20/10/2021 15:41

T H E L O S T H O N O U R O F K AT H A R I N A B L U M

95

reaction in Italy to the wealth of home-produced political films. Anglo-Saxon audiences also made less of the film, which he put down to the absence of a media conglomerate comparable with the Springer Corporation. The equivalent Hollywood production about journalism running concurrently was Alan J. Pakula’s All the President’s Men (1976), which heroised two reporters working for The Washington Post in uncovering Watergate and directly led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon on 8 August 1974 (the same month which saw the serialisation of Katharina Blum in Der Spiegel). Inspired by one of the first German crimes stories published on the eve of the French Revolution about injustice in a class-based legal system, Katharina Blum has migrated across the media (fiction, drama and film) in remakes and adaptations since first (re-)imagined in 1974 by Heinrich Böll and translated to the screen for release the following year by Margarethe von Trotta and Volker Schlöndorff, who worked closely with the author. The film was received in the book’s wake and reinforced its impact. The directorial duo, specialists in literary adaptations, turned a political pamphlet in the form of an ironic short novel into an eerie, suspenseful thriller. The film benefits from an amalgam of international styles, American, French, Greek, and a mix of high modernism, documentary and popular forms in its reconfiguring of a tale of group victimisation of an individual. In contrast to so many twentieth-century German narratives of fascistic behaviour, the individual fights back, which is what has made Katharina Blum emblematic in contemporary Germany and beyond.

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 95

20/10/2021 15:41

96

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Notes 1 In a letter to cinema managers, Schlöndorff called it ‘ein Krimi bzw. Unterhaltungsfilm’, VS A-12.10.6, Fundus. 2 Roger Greenspan, ‘Living under the Law’, 9 October 1975, VS A-12-5_1_5. No publication given. A photo of the couple meeting Hitchcock is reproduced in both Renate Hehr, Margarethe von Trotta: Filmmaking as Liberation (Stuttgart and London: Edition Axel Menges, 2000), p. 10, and Thilo Wydra, Margarethe von Trotta – Filmen, um zu überleben (Berlin: Henschel, 2000), p. 57. 3 In a telegram to Schlöndorff, quoted in Volker Schlöndorff, Licht, Schatten und Bewegung. Mein Leben und meine Filme (Munich: DTV/Zoll, 2011), p. 240. 4 The UK publishers of the English translation initially took the same decision. 5 ‘Toute ressemblance avec des évènements réels, des personnes mortes ou vivantes n’est pas le fait du hasard. Elle est VOLUNTAIRE.’ 6 For example, Herald American, 30 April 1976, VS A-12.7.2, Sammlung mit Rezensionen, Interviews, Drehberichten – Ausland. Both films featured in the BFI season ‘States of Danger and Deceit: European Political Thrillers of the 1970s’ in 2017. See also Hans-Bernhard Moeller and George Lellis (who speculate that both Schlöndorff and Costa-Gavras ‘were similarly shaped by the cultural ambience of Paris in the late 1950s and early 1960s’, which explains their shared choice of genre), Volker Schlöndorff’s Cinema: Adaptation, Politics, and the ‘Movie Appropriate’ (Carbondale

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 96

and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002), p. 16. 7 ‘Die Obristen treten ab’ (The Retirement of the Colonels), Der Spiegel, 29 July 1974. 8 Bundesfilmpreis, Filmband in Gold (Federal Film Prize, Film Ribbon), now the Deutscher Filmpreis or German Film Prize, known also as a ‘Lola’. 9 See Annette Davison, ‘Hans Werner Henze and The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum’, in Mervyn Cooke and Fiona Ford (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Film Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 308–23. 10 Böll erroneously referred to a Thursday edition, making four in total. In the film the Zeitung appears to be published twice on Friday. There are mock-ups of four editions held in the Schlöndorff Collection in Frankfurt. 11 ‘Volker Schlöndorff über den Cast’, interview introducing the film on the German Film Institute website. Available online: (accessed 25 July 2020). 12 Schlöndorff, Licht, Schatten und Bewegung, pp. 212–21. 13 Wolfram Schütte, ‘Der Durchbruch’, Frankfurter Rundschau, 13 September 1975, and ‘“Nicht versöhnt”, fortgesetzt’, Frankfurter Rundschau, 6 November 1975. See also ‘Notwehr, Widerstand und Selbstrettung’, Frankfurter Rundschau, 10 August 1974. 14 Monika Raesch (ed.), Margarethe von Trotta. Interviews (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2018), p. x. 15 Greenspan, ‘Living under the Law’.

20/10/2021 15:41

T H E L O S T H O N O U R O F K AT H A R I N A B L U M

16 The German title Strohfeuer means literally ‘straw fire’ and implies a diversionary tactic which is not serious. Hehr (or her translator Michael Robinson) refers to it as Summer Lightning (Filmmaking as Liberation, p. 13). 17 Wydra, Filmen, um zu überleben, p. 70. 18 Angela Winkler, Q & A with Andy Willis, November 2017, following the screening of Katharina Blum in the BFIsponsored series ‘States of Danger and Deceit: European Political Thrillers of the 1970s’ (November–December 2017). Available online: (accessed 23 January 2021). Marko Krezel and Jost Vacano, Die Kamera als Auge des Zuschauers (Marburg: Schüren, 2005), p. 50. 19 Interview with Carol Bergman (1984), in Raesch (ed.), Interviews, p. 16. See also Moeller and Lellis, Volker Schlöndorff’s Cinema, p. 75. 20 For Wydra, working with von Trotta, it does not warrant individual attention – for example, in Filmen, um zu überleben. Hehr gives it space of its own but not as a von Trotta film (Filmmaking as Liberation, pp. 14–16). In contrast, books by or about Schlöndorff, though acknowledging her involvement, give it equal treatment with his other films. 21 Volker Schlöndorff, Margarethe von Trotta and Heinrich Böll, Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum (Tübingen: Narr, 1981); transcript by Andrea Park, p. 9. 22 Vojin Saˇsa Vukadinovi´c, ‘The Baader Oedipus Complex’, in Terri Ginsberg and Andrea Mensch (eds), A Companion to German Cinema (Oxford: Blackwell, 2012), pp. 462–82, 471.

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 97

97

23 A feminist reckoning with The Marquise von O came eventually in Jessica Hausner’s Amour fou (2014), a reimagining of Kleist’s suicide pact with Henriette Vogel. It includes a moment when a middle-aged female character pulls apart the narrative premise of this famous novella in discussion with its dumbstruck author. 24 Quoted in Erinnerungen an Katharina Blum (2008, dir. Christiane Habich), a documentary included as an extra on the remastered Arthaus DVD (2019). 25 Manfred Durzak, ‘Bölls filmische Metamorphosen. Am Beispiel von Das Brot der frühen Jahre und Ansichten eines Clowns’, in Lothar Huber and Robert C. Conard (eds), Heinrich Böll on Page and Screen: The London Symposium, Special Issue of University of Dayton Review 24 no. 3 (1997): 147–61. 26 Wolf Donner, ‘Sieben Fragen an Volker Schlöndorff und Margarethe von Trotta’, Die Zeit, 10 October 1975. Wolfram Schütte picks up on the phrase in a follow-up to his review entitled ‘Nicht versöhnt, fortgesetzt’ (Not reconciled, continued), Frankfurter Rundschau, 6 November 1975. 27 ‘Volker Schlöndorffs Durchbruch’, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 26 September 1975. 28 Schlöndorff, Licht, Schatten und Bewegung, pp. 208–12. Renate Hehr begins her discussion of the film with a recapitulation of the political background (Margarethe von Trotta, pp. 14–16). 29 Interview with Schlöndorff in Die Zeit, 16 October 1975. 30 Quoted in notes in the press pack, VS A-12.6.3, Presseheft.

20/10/2021 15:41

98

BFI FILM CLASSICS

31 Both incidents are discussed in the documentary Sympathisers: Our German Autumn (2018, dir. Felix Moeller). 32 La Bande à Baader. ITI présente SATELLITE. Emission de J. F. Chauvel. Réportage: P. A. Boutang, 22 May 1975, VS A-12.10.6. 33 Quoted by Joel E. Siegel, ‘Op[press]ive Freedom’, Washington Newsworks, no date, VS A-12.7.2. 34 Der Spiegel, 29 July 1974. The novel was serialised in four instalments with illustrations by Klaus Vogelgesang. 35 Heinrich Böll and Lew Kopelew, Briefwechsel, ed. Elsbeth Zylla. With an essay by Karl Schlögel (Göttingen: Steidl, 2011): 14 May 1972, p. 191; 16 September 1972, p. 202. 36 Ibid., p. 263. 37 On the similarities between Blum and Meinhof, see Cordia Baumann, Literarische und filmische Mythentradierung von Bölls ‘Katharina Blum’ bis zum ‘Baader Meinhof Komplex’ (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2012), pp. 127–9. 38 Quoted in Stefan Aust, Der Baader Meinhof Komplex (Munich: Goldmann, 1998), p. 270. 39 Anette Petersen, Die Rezeption von Bölls Katharina Blum in den Massenmedien der Bundesrepublik (Copenhagen: Fink, 1980), pp. 13–14. 40 Helmut Röster, ‘Der unaufhörliche Fall der Katharina Blum’, Hieroglyphe. Zeitschrift für Literatur als Medium und Objekt der Kritik nos 7–8 (1982): 11–29. 41 It is post-dated to 1975. Heinrich Böll, The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, or: How Violence Develops and Where It Can Lead, tr. Leila Vennewitz (London: Secker and Warburg, 1975).

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 98

42 See Petersen, Die Rezeption von Bölls Katharina Blum. 43 Mark W. Rectanus, ‘The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum: The Reception of a German Bestseller in the USA’, The German Quarterly 59 no. 2 (1986): 252–69, 256. 44 R. W. Kilborn, Whose Lost Honour? A Study of the Film Adaptation of Böll’s The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (Glasgow: Scottish Papers in German Studies, 1984), pp. 17–18. 45 Jack Zipes, ‘The Political Dimensions of The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum’, New German Critique 12 (Autumn 1977): 75–84, 82. 46 Moeller and Lellis, Volker Schlöndorff’s Cinema, pp. 136–41. 47 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, tr. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). First translated into English in 1968, its reception in Germany was delayed, making it highly unlikely that Böll or the film-makers knew about it. 48 Richard Sheppard, ‘Upstairs – Downstairs – Some Reflections on German Literature in the Light of Bakhtin’s Theory of Carnival’, in Sheppard (ed.), New Ways in Germanistik (New York and Oxford: Berg, 1990), pp. 278–314. 49 Thilo Wydra, Volker Schlöndorff und seine Filme (Munich: Heyne, 1998), p. 100. 50 Letter from Todd McCarthy to von Trotta and Schlöndorff, 26 May 1976, VS A-12.8.2. 51 Krezel and Vacano, Die Kamera als Auge des Zuschauers, p. 53. 52 Junkersdorf, in Habich (dir.), Erinnerungen an Katharina Blum.

20/10/2021 15:41

T H E L O S T H O N O U R O F K AT H A R I N A B L U M

53 Schlöndorff, Licht, Schatten und Bewegung, p. 218. 54 Siegel, ‘Op[press]ive Freedom’. 55 Stephan Schiff, ‘Stop the Presses’, Boston Phoenix, undated, VS A-12.7.2. 56 See Christoph Peters et al., Eine Ästhetik des Humanen. Böll, ed. Michael Serrer (Düsseldorf: Virgines, 2018), p. 81. 57 Siegel, ‘Op[press]ive Freedom’. 58 Krezel and Vacano, Die Kamera als Auge des Zuschauers, p. 48. 59 Interview with Schlöndorff and von Trotta on the Criterion Collection DVD (2003). 60 VS A-12-1.1, 009. 61 In an interview with Christian Lindner (Drei Tage im März) quoted in the Presseheft, VS A-12.6.3. 62 24 September 1975, Böll and Kopelew, Briefwechsel, p. 295. 63 Quoted by William R. Magretta and Joan Magretta, ‘Story and Discourse. Schlöndorff and von Trotta’s The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum’, in Andrew S. Horton and Joan Magretta (eds), Modern European Filmmakers and the Art of Adaptation (New York: Ungar, 1981), pp. 278–94, 278. 64 Quoted by Petersen, Die Rezeption von Bölls Katharina Blum, p. 78. 65 VS A-12-1.1, p. 1. 66 Zipes, ‘The Political Dimensions of The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum’, p. 83, quoting Robert Hatch, ‘Film Reviews’, Nation, 17 January 1976, p. 59. 67 Schlöndorff in Habich (dir.), Erinnerungen an Katharina Blum. 68 VS A-12-1.1, 001, p. 32. 69 Richard Falcon, ‘That Obscure Object of Redemption or “Reality” in Two Adaptations of Heinrich Böll’, in Huber

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 99

99

and Conard (eds), Heinrich Böll on Page and Screen, pp. 163–7, 169. 70 Falcon, ‘That Obscure Object of Redemption’, p. 169. 71 Moeding is right, but the quotation is truncated. See Karl Marx, ‘The Power of Money in Bourgeois Society’, in The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, written in 1844 but not published until 1932, tr. Martin Milligan, rev. Dirk J. Struik. Available online: (accessed 22 November 2020), pp. 61, 62. 72 VS A-12-1.1, 001, p. 27. 73 Aust, Der Baader Meinhof Komplex, p. 198. 74 VS A-12-1.1, 001, p. 38. 75 VS A-12-1.1, 002, p. 124. Writing in the London Times on 5 January 1976, Paul Moor contends that Götten is ‘a reasonable facsimile for Andreas Baader’, but German audiences are more likely to have recognised Meins. The Times was never really concentrating on Katharina Blum: David Robinson’s review identified von Trotta in the title role (The Times, 13 May 1977). 76 Mario Adorf, Himmel und Erde. Unordentliche Erinnerungen (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2004), pp. 25–51. 77 Angela Winkler, with Brigitta Landes, Mein blaues Zimmer. Autobiographische Skizzen (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2019), p. 70. 78 Eckhard Roelcke, ‘Mief und Moral’, Die Zeit, 26 April 1991. 79 See Jens Rostoeck, Hans Werner Henze (Berlin: Ullstein, 2009), p. 434.

20/10/2021 15:41

100

BFI FILM CLASSICS

80 10 May 1976, Böll and Kopelew, Briefwechsel, p. 309. 81 Helen Hughes, ‘Heinrich Böll’s Contribution to the Film Deutschland im Herbst’, in Huber and Conard (eds), Heinrich Böll on Page and Screen, pp. 173–81, 178. 82 Charles H. Helmetag calls her ‘one of the leading feminists in the American entertainment industry’, in ‘The Lost Honor of Kathryn Beck: A German Story on American Television’, Literature/Film Quarterly 13 no. 4 (1985): 240–4, 240. 83 Richard Flanagan, The Unknown Terrorist (London: Vintage, 2016), p. 208. 84 Morgan had an established interest in German-language sources, having adapted Arthur Schnitzler’s Reigen/ Round-Dance in 360 (2011, dir. Fernando Meirelles) and written the screenplay for Rush (2013, dir. Ron Howard), on the British–Austrian rivalry between F1 drivers James Hunt and Niki Lauda. 85 Also released as Friends and Husbands in English. 86 Schlöndorff in Habich (dir.), Erinnerungen an Katharina Blum.

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 100

Image credits Images from Hunting Scenes from Bavaria (Peter Fleischmann, 1968), Rob Houwer Film; Viva Maria! (Louis Malle, 1965), Nouvelles Éditions de Films/ Les Productions Artistes Associés/ Vides Cinematografica; Degree of Murder (Volker Schlöndorff, 1967), Rob Houwer Film; The Sudden Wealth of the Poor People of Kombach (Volker Schlöndorff, 1971), Hallelujah-Film; The Morals of Ruth Halbfass (Volker Schlöndorff, 1972), Hallelujah-Film; Sheer Madness (Margarethe von Trotta, 1983), Munich Bioskop-Film/Les Films du Losange/WDR; Coup de grâce (Volker Schlöndorff, 1976), Munich Bioskop-Film/Hessischer Rundfunk/ Argos-Films; Michael Kohlhaas – The Rebel (Volker Schlöndorff, 1969), Oceanic Filmproduktion/Gina Productions; Young Törless (Volker Schlöndorff, 1966), Franz Seitz Filmproduktion/Nouvelles Éditions de Films; Sympathisers: Our German Autumn (Felix Moeller, 2018), Blueprint Film/Rundfunk BerlinBrandenburg/Südewestrundfunk/ARTÉ; War and Peace (Alexander Kluge/Stefan Aust/Axel Engstfeld/Volker Schlöndorff, 1982), Bioskop-Film/Kairos-Film/ Pro-ject Filmproduktion/Filmverlag der Autoren/Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen/Filmförderungsanstalt; In the Fade (Fatih Akin, 2017), © Bombero International GmbH @ Co. KG/Macassar Productions/Pathé Production/Corazón International GmbH & Co. KG/Warner Bros. Entertainment GmbH.

20/10/2021 15:41

T H E L O S T H O N O U R O F K AT H A R I N A B L U M

101

Credits Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum/ The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum West Germany 1975 Directors Volker Schlöndorff Margarethe von Trotta Producer Willi Benninger Screenplay Volker Schlöndorff Margarethe von Trotta based on the novel Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum by Heinrich Böll Director of Photography Jost Vacano Musical Director Hans Werner Henze Film Editor Peter Przygodda Art Directors Günther Naumann Ute Burgmann Production Companies ©1975. Paramount-Orion / WDR [Westdeutscher Rundfunk] / Bioskop-Film Executive Producer Eberhard Junkersdorf Commissioning Editor [WDR] Gunter Witte

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 101

Unit Managers Herbert Kerz Jürgen Bieske Assistant Directors Alexander von Richthofen Gerhard von Halem Camera Assistant Peter Arnold Lighting Honorat Stangl Heinz Sottung Costumes Annette Schaad Reinhild Paul Make-up Artists Manlio Rocchetti Sybille Danzer Assistant Editors Heidi Handorf Ursula Götz Sound Klaus Eckelt Willi Schwadorf Wolfgang Löper uncredited Director of Photography [first four days] Dietrich Lohmann Script Supervisor Heidi Handorf Still Photographer Leo Weisse Colourist Andreas Lautil

CAST Angela Winkler Katharina Blum Mario Adorf Inspector Beizmenne Dieter Laser Werner Tötges, a Zeitung reporter Jürgen Prochnow Ludwig Götten Heinz Bennent Dr Hubert Blorna Hannelore Hoger Trude Blorna Rolf Becker Hach, State Prosecutor Harald Kuhlmann Moeding Herbert Fux Weninger, a journalist Regine Lutz Else Woltersheim Werner Eichhorn Konrad Beiters Karl Heinz Vosgerau Alois Sträubleder Angelika Hillebrecht Frau Pletzer Horatius Häberle Dr Korten, State Prosecutor Henry van Lyck ‘Scheich’ Karl Leo Weisse Schönner, photographer Walter Gontermann Pater Urbanus Hildegard Linden Hedwig Plotten

20/10/2021 15:41

102

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Stephanie Thönnessen Claudia Stern Josephine Gierens Hertha Scheumel Peter Franke Dr Heinen Achim Strietzel Lüding, publisher uncredited Bernd Nesselhut Georg Olivia Wredenhagen Anna Margarethe von Trotta

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 102

Production details Filmed from 4 February to 21 March 1975 on location in and around Cologne (North RhineWestphalia, West Germany) and in the village of Ötztal in the Tyrolean Alps (Austria). Release details German theatrical distributor: CIC – Cinema International Corporation (released at the Palette in Berlin on 9 October 1975). Certificate: 16. Running time: 106 minutes / 2,894 metres / 35mm [1.66:1] / in colour: Technicolor / sound: mono / budget reported as $640,000. Shown at the San Sebastian International Film Festival (Spain) on 17 September 1975.

US theatrical distributor (as The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum): New World Pictures (showing at Cinema II in New York City on 19 December 1975). Rated: R. Running time: 106 minutes. Shown at the New York Film Festival on 3 October 1975. UK theatrical distributor (as The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum): Contemporary Films Ltd (released in mid-1977). Certificate: AA. Running time: 105 minutes 44 seconds. Credits compiled by Julian Grainger

20/10/2021 15:41

T H E L O S T H O N O U R O F K AT H A R I N A B L U M

103

Bibliography Adorf, Mario, Himmel und Erde. Unordentliche Erinnerungen (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2004). Aust, Stefan, Der Baader Meinhof Komplex (Munich: Goldmann, 1998). Bakhtin, Mikhail, Rabelais and His World, tr. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). Baumann, Cordia, Literarische und filmische Mythentradierung von Bölls ‘Katharina Blum’ bis zum ‘Baader Meinhof Komplex’ (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2012). Böll, Heinrich, The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, or: How Violence Develops and Where It Can Lead, tr. Leila Vennewitz (London: Secker and Warburg, 1975). Böll, Heinrich and Lew Kopelew, Briefwechsel, ed. Elsbeth Zylla. With an essay by Karl Schlögel (Göttingen: Steidl, 2011). Davison, Annette, ‘Hans Werner Henze and The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum’, in Mervyn Cooke and Fiona Ford (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Film Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 308–23. Donner, Wolf, ‘Sieben Fragen an Volker Schlöndorff und Margarethe von Trotta’, Die Zeit, 10 October 1975. Durzak, Manfred, ‘Bölls filmische Metamorphosen. Am Beispiel von Das Brot der frühen Jahre und Ansichten eines Clowns’, in Lothar Huber and Robert C. Conard (eds), Heinrich Böll on Page and Screen: The London Symposium, Special Issue of University of Dayton Review 24 no. 3 (1997): 147–61. Falcon, Richard, ‘That Obscure Object of Redemption or “Reality” in Two Adaptations of Heinrich Böll’, in Lothar Huber and Robert C. Conard (eds), Heinrich Böll on Page and Screen:

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 103

The London Symposium, Special Issue of University of Dayton Review 24 no. 3 (1997): 163–71. Hehr, Renate, Margarethe von Trotta: Filmmaking as Liberation (Stuttgart and London: Edition Axel Menges, 2000). Helmetag, Charles H., ‘The Lost Honor of Kathryn Beck: A German Story on American Television’, Literature/Film Quarterly 13 no. 4 (1985): 240–4. Hughes, Helen, ‘Heinrich Böll’s Contribution to the Film Deutschland im Herbst’, in Lothar Huber and Robert C. Conard (eds), Heinrich Böll on Page and Screen: The London Symposium, Special Issue of University of Dayton Review 24 no. 3 (1997): 173–81. Kilborn, R. W., Whose Lost Honour? A Study of the Film Adaptation of Böll’s The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (Glasgow: Scottish Papers in German Studies, 1984). Krezel, Marko and Jost Vacano, Die Kamera als Auge des Zuschauers (Marburg: Schüren, 2005). Magretta, William R. and Joan Magretta, ‘Story and Discourse. Schlöndorff and von Trotta’s The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum’, in Andrew S. Horton and Joan Magretta (eds), Modern European Filmmakers and the Art of Adaptation (New York: Ungar, 1981), pp. 278–94. Moeller, Bernhard and George Lellis, Volker Schlöndorff’s Cinema: Adaptation, Politics, and the ‘Movie Appropriate’ (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002). Peters, Christoph et al., Eine Ästhetik des Humanen. Böll, ed. Michael Serrer (Düsseldorf: Virgines, 2018).

20/10/2021 15:41

104

BFI FILM CLASSICS

Petersen, Anette, Die Rezeption von Bölls Katharina Blum in den Massenmedien der Bundesrepublik (Copenhagen: Fink, 1980). Raesch, Monika (ed.), Margarethe von Trotta. Interviews (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2018). Rectanus, Mark W., ‘The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum: The Reception of a German Bestseller in the USA’, The German Quarterly 59 no. 2 (1986): 252–69. Roelcke, Eckhard, ‘Mief und Moral’, Die Zeit, 26 April 1991. Röster, Helmut, ‘Der unaufhörliche Fall der Katharina Blum’, Hieroglyphe. Zeitschrift für Literatur als Medium und Objekt der Kritik nos 7–8 (1982): 11–29. Rostoeck, Jens, Hans Werner Henze (Berlin: Ullstein, 2009). Schlöndorff, Volker, Licht, Schatten und Bewegung. Mein Leben und meine Filme (Munich: DTV/Zoll, 2011). Schlöndorff, Volker, Erinnerungen an Katharina Blum (2008, dir. Christiane Habich), Arthaus DVD (2019). Schlöndorff, Volker and Margarethe von Trotta, interview on Criterion Collection DVD (2003). Schlöndorff, Volker, Margarethe von Trotta and Heinrich Böll, Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum (Tübingen: Narr, 1981); transcript by Andrea Park. Schütte, Wolfram, ‘Notwehr, Widerstand und Selbstrettung’, Frankfurter Rundschau, 10 August 1974. Schütte, Wolfram, ‘Der Durchbruch’, Frankfurter Rundschau, 13 September 1975. Schütte, Wolfram,‘“Nicht versöhnt”, fortgesetzt’, Frankfurter Rundschau, 6 November 1975. Sheppard, Richard, ‘Upstairs – Downstairs – Some Reflections on German Literature in the Light

9781839024375_txt_app.indd 104

of Bakhtin’s Theory of Carnival’, in Sheppard (ed.), New Ways in Germanistik (New York and Oxford: Berg, 1990), pp. 278–314. ‘Volker Schlöndorff über den Cast’. Available online: (accessed 25 July 2020). ‘Volker Schlöndorffs Durchbruch’, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 26 September 1975. Vukadinovi´c, Vojin Sasˇ a, ‘The Baader Oedipus Complex’, in Terri Ginsberg and Andrea Mensch (eds), A Companion to German Cinema (Oxford: Blackwell, 2012), pp. 462–82. Winkler, Angela, with Brigitta Landes, Mein blaues Zimmer. Autobiographische Skizzen (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2019). Winkler, Angela, Q & A with Andy Willis, November 2017, following the screening of Katharina Blum in the BFI-sponsored series ‘States of Danger and Deceit: European Political Thrillers of the 1970s’ (November– December 2017). Available online:

(accessed 23 January 2021). Wydra, Thilo, Volker Schlöndorff und seine Filme (Munich: Heyne, 1998). Wydra, Thilo, Margarethe von Trotta – Filmen, um zu überleben (Berlin: Henschel, 2000). Zipes, Jack, ‘The Political Dimensions of The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum’, New German Critique 12 (Autumn 1977): 75–84. Other quoted sources are available at the Deutsches Filminstitut und Filmmuseum, Frankfurt am Main/ Sammlung Volker Schlöndorff.

20/10/2021 15:41