Summary: In the period of several days, Katharina's privacy and her honor are destroyed, first by the police who terrorize her, and then by the yellow press, which creates in her name the image of a politicized Mata Hari. Bonus features: interview with directors Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta; interview with Jost Vacano (cinematographer); excerpts from Ivo Barnabó Micheli's 1977 biographical film on Heinrich Böll (in German with English subtitles).
Margarethe von Trotta’s and Volker Schlondorff’s 1975 classic is a cautionary tale of the human costs of sensationalist, irresponsible journalism working in concert with a fascist-minded, law-and-order state: a timid woman (her friends call her ‘the nun’) spends a romantic night with a man the authorities suspect of being a terrorist. As a result her private life is mercilessly infringed upon by both the police and the yellow press. Dating from the edgy 1970s in Germany, Katharina Blum’s half century vintage hasn’t dulled its message for our own, eerily similar, current climate. If anything the film is even more relevant today. In an interesting and ironic aside, in today’s world, concerns about domestic terrorists, at least in the U.S., focus on the radicalized right. A half century or so ago it was the extreme left that caused all the huffing and puffing, both in America and Europe.
In any case the New German Cinema’s socially conscious gestalt is presented front and center in Katharina Blum, in which an otherwise blandly ordinary woman is made the target of vilification by a tabloid press. Among the tricks of the trade said press employs: distorting the woman’s own statements, publishing photographs that make her look guilty, and digging up supposed dirt on her through interviews (subsequently highly embroidered in print) with those close to her, including relatives, employers and an ex-husband [1].
“is the state unable to protect you against this garbage?”
Katherina Blum has been called ahead of its time in the trends it anticipated a half century prior. True, up to a point. But it certainly didn’t get there first: self-serving, sensation mongering media have been around, well, for a long time, perhaps most blisteringly depicted cinematically in Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole, in which an ambitious, ethically challenged (to put it generously) journalist, and not the victim, is the main character [2]. But the film that reminds me most of KB, because of the similar subject matter and era, dates from three decades and change later, and that’s The Baader Meinhof Complex, a brilliant film to be sure but somehow lacking the sharp edge of KB. This is perhaps because Katharina Blum is historically authentic – it actually dates from the era – while Baader Meinhof is retro, almost a nostalgic period piece, if you like. Moreover, Katharina Blum has a certain rough around the edges quality that contributes to its intensity and unease, as opposed to Baader Meinhof’s more polished product [3].
Whatever its many aesthetic merits and few shortcomings, The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum is just plain painful to watch (while the thuggish police browbeat Katharina relentlessly, I kept wondering: where’s the damned lawyer!). However, the story has its humor, if that is the word, perhaps most pointedly driven home with Kafka-like absurdity in the scene in which a bizarrely costumed police force conduct a grotesquely excessive SWAT-team like raid on the poor girl’s apartment, culminating in an insultingly invasive interrogation, which includes a strip search, by the way all done with nary a search warrant in sight. Indeed the police antics, brutal and heavy-handed as they are, sometimes seem more Gilbert & Sullivan than Gestapo or Stasi.
Indeed, most of the violence done to Katharina is not physical but rather psychological and emotional, and arguably not done by the police as much as the tabloid press. In an ironic twist it is Katharina who commits more physical violence than her tormenters ever inflict upon her. Somehow I couldn’t help thinking of the case of actress Jean Seberg. Hounded by her own government, along with an acquiescent press that helped spread innuendo, gossip and outright lies, Seberg, like Katharina, had few friends among the powerful she could call on. Alas, she eventually resorted to suicide. Mirroring Seberg, Katharina resorts to a kind of metaphorical suicide.
To tell their story Von Trotta and Schlondorff have opted for natural settings – drab workplaces, nondescript domestic interiors, unromanticized outdoor scenes. It all contributes to the you-are-there, slice of life feel reminiscent of the American independent films of the era. At the same time cameraman Jost Vacano favors harsh, flat lighting and spartan geometric forms that suggest an authoritarian vibe more akin to East Germany than West.
Indeed, in the difficult-to-take, Orwellian epilogue, we could be forgiven for suspecting that the vulgar, self-congratulatory pean rendered by – and for – the socio-economic power elite is a scene stage managed in the evil GDR and not the virtuous, democratic-minded Federal Republic. Corporate controlled media, then and now, relies on the sanctity of 'freedom of the press,' however extreme its manifestations, to justify its dependence on a mass audience to sustain its large profits. (Although the analogy may not be perfect, the similarity to the sanctimonious cries of ‘free speech’ of more recent times can hardly be missed).
Still, the filmmakers are to be praised for injecting a certain ambiguity into a story operating from such a moral and emotional stacked deck. The extent of Katharina’s initial culpability is left unanswered, as is the criminal guilt of Ludwig, or for that matter, how he managed to escape from her apartment building. Likewise, their eventual fates are left open-ended.
Ultimately Katharina Blum is a sober reminder that, even in ostensibly free societies, a citizen’s rights are not absolute or inalienable: rights that can arbitrarily be taken away by the state or infringed upon by an all-seeing media aren’t rights at all, but only temporary privileges.
[2] There’s also La Dolce Vita, in which an ethically indifferent journalist and his cadre of photographers dig up scandal on Rome’s beautiful people. LDV shares with KB a certain postmodern cynicism amidst the backdrop of media corruption, but the context is different: the earlier work concerns itself with the culture of celebrity, the jaded rich, and Old World decadence, while Katharina Blum has much more of a political edge. Contemporary, quintessentially paranoic, even existential in its uncompromising, take-no-prisoners attitude, Katharina Blum is actually closer in tone and spirit to Ace in the Hole than Dolce Vita.
[3] When the DVD of KB came out two decades or so ago most of the comparisons were, understandably if rather facilely, to the 9/11 attacks and the resultant paranoia in the U.S. Heavy handed government intrusions on individual liberties were buttressed by a compliant media and its uncritical acceptance of the war-on-terror meme, the ultimate result being that all news outlets, the vast majority anyway, were little more than cheerleaders of official policy. Two decades later a similar paranoia set in with the Covid 19 virus and the resultant, some might say inevitable, politicization of the situation, especially in the highly polarized U.S., where recriminations and counter-recriminations flew fast and furious, and to some extent still do.
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