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.

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 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

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 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

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 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 Costa-
Gavras. A number of US reviewers compared their film of Katharina
Blum with Z.6 Both are political thrillers about individuals concerned
with the truth battling powerful adversaries who manipulate the
facts. Greek politics had remained topical: the cover story of the
edition of Der Spiegel which began the serialisation of Böll’s novel

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 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

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 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

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 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

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 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

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 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.

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 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 post-
war 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

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 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)

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 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.

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 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

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 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

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 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

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 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

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 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

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 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

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 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. Vojtěch Jasný). This

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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
Petrović) 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 avant-
garde 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 film-
makers 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.

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 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

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 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,

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 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.

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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

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 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

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 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

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 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

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 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.

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 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

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 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.

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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

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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

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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 film-
makers 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)

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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 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

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 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,

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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

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 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

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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.

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 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 non-
professional 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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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,

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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

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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

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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:

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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

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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

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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 wide-
brimmed 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)

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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 hand-
held 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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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,

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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

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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

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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

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– 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

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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.

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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

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 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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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

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 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 sound-
world 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

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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

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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.)

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open the hatch but instead a machine gun emerges from the ground
and the sister is killed. The relative political optimism of the mid-
1970s 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

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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

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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

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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

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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 far-
right 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)

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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

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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.

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Notes

1 In a letter to cinema managers, and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois

Schlöndorff called it ‘ein Krimi bzw. University Press, 2002), p. 16.
Unterhaltungsfilm’, VS A-12.10.6, 7 ‘Die Obristen treten ab’ (The
Fundus. Retirement of the Colonels), Der Spiegel,
2 Roger Greenspan, ‘Living under the 29 July 1974.
Law’, 9 October 1975, VS A-12-5_1_5. 8 Bundesfilmpreis, Filmband in Gold
No publication given. A photo of the (Federal Film Prize, Film Ribbon), now
couple meeting Hitchcock is reproduced the Deutscher Filmpreis or German
in both Renate Hehr, Margarethe von Film Prize, known also as a ‘Lola’.
Trotta: Filmmaking as Liberation (Stuttgart 9 See Annette Davison, ‘Hans Werner
and London: Edition Axel Menges, 2000), Henze and The Lost Honour of Katharina
p. 10, and Thilo Wydra, Margarethe von Blum’, in Mervyn Cooke and Fiona
Trotta – Filmen, um zu überleben (Berlin: Ford (eds), The Cambridge Companion
Henschel, 2000), p. 57. to Film Music (Cambridge: Cambridge
3 In a telegram to Schlöndorff, quoted University Press, 2016), pp. 308–23.
in Volker Schlöndorff, Licht, Schatten und 10 Böll erroneously referred to a
Bewegung. Mein Leben und meine Filme Thursday edition, making four in total.
(Munich: DTV/Zoll, 2011), p. 240. In the film the Zeitung appears to be
4 The UK publishers of the English published twice on Friday. There are
translation initially took the same mock-ups of four editions held in the
decision. Schlöndorff Collection in Frankfurt.
5 ‘Toute ressemblance avec des 11 ‘Volker Schlöndorff über den Cast’,
évènements réels, des personnes interview introducing the film on
mortes ou vivantes n’est pas le fait du the German Film Institute website.
hasard. Elle est VOLUNTAIRE.’ Available online: <https://schloendorff.
6 For example, Herald American, deutsches-filminstitut.de/filme/die-
30 April 1976, VS A-12.7.2, Sammlung verlorene-ehre-der-katharina-blum>
mit Rezensionen, Interviews, (accessed 25 July 2020).
Drehberichten – Ausland. Both films 12 Schlöndorff, Licht, Schatten und
featured in the BFI season ‘States of Bewegung, pp. 212–21.
Danger and Deceit: European Political 13 Wolfram Schütte, ‘Der Durchbruch’,
Thrillers of the 1970s’ in 2017. See Frankfurter Rundschau, 13 September
also Hans-Bernhard Moeller and 1975, and ‘“Nicht versöhnt”, fortgesetzt’,
George Lellis (who speculate that Frankfurter Rundschau, 6 November 1975.
both Schlöndorff and Costa-Gavras See also ‘Notwehr, Widerstand und
‘were similarly shaped by the cultural Selbstrettung’, Frankfurter Rundschau,
ambience of Paris in the late 1950s 10 August 1974.
and early 1960s’, which explains 14 Monika Raesch (ed.), Margarethe von
their shared choice of genre), Volker Trotta. Interviews (Jackson: University of
Schlöndorff’s Cinema: Adaptation, Politics, Mississippi Press, 2018), p. x.
and the ‘Movie Appropriate’ (Carbondale 15 Greenspan, ‘Living under the Law’.

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 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 97

16 The German title Strohfeuer means 23 A feminist reckoning with The

literally ‘straw fire’ and implies a Marquise von O came eventually in
diversionary tactic which is not Jessica Hausner’s Amour fou (2014), a
serious. Hehr (or her translator Michael reimagining of Kleist’s suicide pact with
Robinson) refers to it as Summer Henriette Vogel. It includes a moment
Lightning (Filmmaking as Liberation, p. 13). when a middle-aged female character
17 Wydra, Filmen, um zu überleben, p. 70. pulls apart the narrative premise of this
18 Angela Winkler, Q & A with Andy famous novella in discussion with its
Willis, November 2017, following the dumbstruck author.
screening of Katharina Blum in the BFI- 24 Quoted in Erinnerungen an Katharina
sponsored series ‘States of Danger and Blum (2008, dir. Christiane Habich), a
Deceit: European Political Thrillers of documentary included as an extra on
the 1970s’ (November–December 2017). the remastered Arthaus DVD (2019).
Available online: <https://www.youtube. 25 Manfred Durzak, ‘Bölls filmische
com/watch?v=in3-Hug6g3A> (accessed Metamorphosen. Am Beispiel von Das
23 January 2021). Marko Krezel and Brot der frühen Jahre und Ansichten eines
Jost Vacano, Die Kamera als Auge des Clowns’, in Lothar Huber and Robert C.
Zuschauers (Marburg: Schüren, 2005), Conard (eds), Heinrich Böll on Page and
p. 50. Screen: The London Symposium, Special
19 Interview with Carol Bergman (1984), Issue of University of Dayton Review
in Raesch (ed.), Interviews, p. 16. See also 24 no. 3 (1997): 147–61.
Moeller and Lellis, Volker Schlöndorff’s 26 Wolf Donner, ‘Sieben Fragen an
Cinema, p. 75. Volker Schlöndorff und Margarethe
20 For Wydra, working with von von Trotta’, Die Zeit, 10 October 1975.
Trotta, it does not warrant individual Wolfram Schütte picks up on the
attention – for example, in Filmen, um zu phrase in a follow-up to his review
überleben. Hehr gives it space of its own entitled ‘Nicht versöhnt, fortgesetzt’
but not as a von Trotta film (Filmmaking (Not reconciled, continued), Frankfurter
as Liberation, pp. 14–16). In contrast, Rundschau, 6 November 1975.
books by or about Schlöndorff, though 27 ‘Volker Schlöndorffs Durchbruch’,
acknowledging her involvement, give it Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 26 September 1975.
equal treatment with his other films. 28 Schlöndorff, Licht, Schatten und
21 Volker Schlöndorff, Margarethe von Bewegung, pp. 208–12. Renate Hehr
Trotta and Heinrich Böll, Die verlorene begins her discussion of the film
Ehre der Katharina Blum (Tübingen: Narr, with a recapitulation of the political
1981); transcript by Andrea Park, p. 9. background (Margarethe von Trotta,
22 Vojin Saša Vukadinović, ‘The Baader pp. 14–16).
Oedipus Complex’, in Terri Ginsberg 29 Interview with Schlöndorff in
and Andrea Mensch (eds), A Companion Die Zeit, 16 October 1975.
to German Cinema (Oxford: Blackwell, 30 Quoted in notes in the press pack,
2012), pp. 462–82, 471. VS A-12.6.3, Presseheft.

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 98 BFI FILM CLASSICS

31 Both incidents are discussed in the 42 See Petersen, Die Rezeption von Bölls
documentary Sympathisers: Our German Katharina Blum.
Autumn (2018, dir. Felix Moeller). 43 Mark W. Rectanus, ‘The Lost Honor
32 La Bande à Baader. ITI présente of Katharina Blum: The Reception of
SATELLITE. Emission de J. F. Chauvel. a German Bestseller in the USA’,
Réportage: P. A. Boutang, 22 May 1975, The German Quarterly 59 no. 2 (1986):
VS A-12.10.6. 252–69, 256.
33 Quoted by Joel E. Siegel, ‘Op[press]ive 44 R. W. Kilborn, Whose Lost Honour?
Freedom’, Washington Newsworks, A Study of the Film Adaptation of Böll’s
no date, VS A-12.7.2. The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum
34 Der Spiegel, 29 July 1974. The novel (Glasgow: Scottish Papers in German
was serialised in four instalments with Studies, 1984), pp. 17–18.
illustrations by Klaus Vogelgesang. 45 Jack Zipes, ‘The Political Dimensions
35 Heinrich Böll and Lew Kopelew, of The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum’,
Briefwechsel, ed. Elsbeth Zylla. With New German Critique 12 (Autumn 1977):
an essay by Karl Schlögel (Göttingen: 75–84, 82.
Steidl, 2011): 14 May 1972, p. 191; 46 Moeller and Lellis, Volker Schlöndorff’s
16 September 1972, p. 202. Cinema, pp. 136–41.
36 Ibid., p. 263. 47 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His
37 On the similarities between Blum World, tr. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington:
and Meinhof, see Cordia Baumann, Indiana University Press, 1984). First
Literarische und filmische Mythentradierung translated into English in 1968, its
von Bölls ‘Katharina Blum’ bis zum ‘Baader reception in Germany was delayed,
Meinhof Komplex’ (Paderborn: Schöningh, making it highly unlikely that Böll or
2012), pp. 127–9. the film-makers knew about it.
38 Quoted in Stefan Aust, Der Baader 48 Richard Sheppard, ‘Upstairs –
Meinhof Komplex (Munich: Goldmann, Downstairs – Some Reflections on
1998), p. 270. German Literature in the Light of
39 Anette Petersen, Die Rezeption von Bakhtin’s Theory of Carnival’, in
Bölls Katharina Blum in den Massenmedien Sheppard (ed.), New Ways in Germanistik
der Bundesrepublik (Copenhagen: Fink, (New York and Oxford: Berg, 1990),
1980), pp. 13–14. pp. 278–314.
40 Helmut Röster, ‘Der unaufhörliche 49 Thilo Wydra, Volker Schlöndorff und
Fall der Katharina Blum’, Hieroglyphe. seine Filme (Munich: Heyne, 1998), p. 100.
Zeitschrift für Literatur als Medium und 50 Letter from Todd McCarthy to von
Objekt der Kritik nos 7–8 (1982): 11–29. Trotta and Schlöndorff, 26 May 1976,
41 It is post-dated to 1975. Heinrich Böll, VS A-12.8.2.
The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, or: How 51 Krezel and Vacano, Die Kamera als
Violence Develops and Where It Can Lead, Auge des Zuschauers, p. 53.
tr. Leila Vennewitz (London: Secker and 52 Junkersdorf, in Habich (dir.),
Warburg, 1975). Erinnerungen an Katharina Blum.

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 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 99

53 Schlöndorff, Licht, Schatten und and Conard (eds), Heinrich Böll on Page
Bewegung, p. 218. and Screen, pp. 163–7, 169.
54 Siegel, ‘Op[press]ive Freedom’. 70 Falcon, ‘That Obscure Object of
55 Stephan Schiff, ‘Stop the Presses’, Redemption’, p. 169.
Boston Phoenix, undated, VS A-12.7.2. 71 Moeding is right, but the quotation
56 See Christoph Peters et al., Eine is truncated. See Karl Marx, ‘The Power
Ästhetik des Humanen. Böll, ed. Michael of Money in Bourgeois Society’, in The
Serrer (Düsseldorf: Virgines, 2018), p. 81. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts,
57 Siegel, ‘Op[press]ive Freedom’. written in 1844 but not published until
58 Krezel and Vacano, Die Kamera als 1932, tr. Martin Milligan, rev. Dirk J.
Auge des Zuschauers, p. 48. Struik. Available online: <https://www.
59 Interview with Schlöndorff and von marxists.org/archive/marx/works/
Trotta on the Criterion Collection DVD download/pdf/Economic-Philosophic-
(2003). Manuscripts-1844.pdf> (accessed 22
60 VS A-12-1.1, 009. November 2020), pp. 61, 62.
61 In an interview with Christian 72 VS A-12-1.1, 001, p. 27.
Lindner (Drei Tage im März) quoted in the 73 Aust, Der Baader Meinhof Komplex,
Presseheft, VS A-12.6.3. p. 198.
62 24 September 1975, Böll and 74 VS A-12-1.1, 001, p. 38.
Kopelew, Briefwechsel, p. 295. 75 VS A-12-1.1, 002, p. 124. Writing in
63 Quoted by William R. Magretta and the London Times on 5 January 1976,
Joan Magretta, ‘Story and Discourse. Paul Moor contends that Götten is
Schlöndorff and von Trotta’s The Lost ‘a reasonable facsimile for Andreas
Honor of Katharina Blum’, in Andrew S. Baader’, but German audiences
Horton and Joan Magretta (eds), Modern are more likely to have recognised
European Filmmakers and the Art of Meins. The Times was never really
Adaptation (New York: Ungar, 1981), concentrating on Katharina Blum:
pp. 278–94, 278. David Robinson’s review identified
64 Quoted by Petersen, Die Rezeption von von Trotta in the title role (The Times,
Bölls Katharina Blum, p. 78. 13 May 1977).
65 VS A-12-1.1, p. 1. 76 Mario Adorf, Himmel und Erde.
66 Zipes, ‘The Political Dimensions of Unordentliche Erinnerungen (Cologne:
The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum’, p. 83, Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2004), pp. 25–51.
quoting Robert Hatch, ‘Film Reviews’, 77 Angela Winkler, with Brigitta Landes,
Nation, 17 January 1976, p. 59. Mein blaues Zimmer. Autobiographische
67 Schlöndorff in Habich (dir.), Skizzen (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch,
Erinnerungen an Katharina Blum. 2019), p. 70.
68 VS A-12-1.1, 001, p. 32. 78 Eckhard Roelcke, ‘Mief und Moral’,
69 Richard Falcon, ‘That Obscure Object Die Zeit, 26 April 1991.
of Redemption or “Reality” in Two 79 See Jens Rostoeck, Hans Werner Henze
Adaptations of Heinrich Böll’, in Huber (Berlin: Ullstein, 2009), p. 434.

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80 10 May 1976, Böll and Kopelew, Image credits

Briefwechsel, p. 309. Images from Hunting Scenes from
81 Helen Hughes, ‘Heinrich Böll’s Bavaria (Peter Fleischmann, 1968), Rob
Contribution to the Film Deutschland Houwer Film; Viva Maria! (Louis Malle,
im Herbst’, in Huber and Conard (eds), 1965), Nouvelles Éditions de Films/
Heinrich Böll on Page and Screen, Les Productions Artistes Associés/
pp. 173–81, 178. Vides Cinematografica; Degree of
82 Charles H. Helmetag calls her ‘one of Murder (Volker Schlöndorff, 1967),
the leading feminists in the American Rob Houwer Film; The Sudden Wealth
entertainment industry’, in ‘The Lost of the Poor People of Kombach (Volker
Honor of Kathryn Beck: A German Story Schlöndorff, 1971), Hallelujah-Film;
on American Television’, Literature/Film The Morals of Ruth Halbfass (Volker
Quarterly 13 no. 4 (1985): 240–4, 240. Schlöndorff, 1972), Hallelujah-Film;
83 Richard Flanagan, The Unknown Sheer Madness (Margarethe von Trotta,
Terrorist (London: Vintage, 2016), p. 208. 1983), Munich Bioskop-Film/Les
84 Morgan had an established interest Films du Losange/WDR; Coup de grâce
in German-language sources, having (Volker Schlöndorff, 1976), Munich
adapted Arthur Schnitzler’s Reigen/ Bioskop-Film/Hessischer Rundfunk/
Round-Dance in 360 (2011, dir. Fernando Argos-Films; Michael Kohlhaas – The Rebel
Meirelles) and written the screenplay (Volker Schlöndorff, 1969), Oceanic
for Rush (2013, dir. Ron Howard), on the Filmproduktion/Gina Productions;
British–Austrian rivalry between F1 Young Törless (Volker Schlöndorff, 1966),
drivers James Hunt and Niki Lauda. Franz Seitz Filmproduktion/Nouvelles
85 Also released as Friends and Husbands Éditions de Films; Sympathisers: Our
in English. German Autumn (Felix Moeller, 2018),
86 Schlöndorff in Habich (dir.), Blueprint Film/Rundfunk Berlin-
Erinnerungen an Katharina Blum. Brandenburg/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.

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 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 Unit Managers CAST

der Katharina Blum/ Herbert Kerz Angela Winkler
The Lost Honour Jürgen Bieske Katharina Blum
of Katharina Blum Assistant Directors Mario Adorf
West Germany Alexander von Inspector Beizmenne
1975 Richthofen Dieter Laser
Gerhard von Halem Werner Tötges, a Zeitung
Directors Camera Assistant reporter
Volker Schlöndorff Peter Arnold Jürgen Prochnow
Margarethe von Trotta Lighting Ludwig Götten
Producer Honorat Stangl Heinz Bennent
Willi Benninger Heinz Sottung Dr Hubert Blorna
Screenplay Costumes Hannelore Hoger
Volker Schlöndorff Annette Schaad Trude Blorna
Margarethe von Trotta Reinhild Paul Rolf Becker
based on the novel Make-up Artists Hach, State Prosecutor
Die verlorene Ehre der Manlio Rocchetti Harald Kuhlmann
Katharina Blum by Sybille Danzer Moeding
Heinrich Böll Assistant Editors Herbert Fux
Director of Photography Heidi Handorf Weninger, a journalist
Jost Vacano Ursula Götz Regine Lutz
Musical Director Sound Else Woltersheim
Hans Werner Henze Klaus Eckelt Werner Eichhorn
Film Editor Willi Schwadorf Konrad Beiters
Peter Przygodda Wolfgang Löper Karl Heinz Vosgerau
Art Directors Alois Sträubleder
Günther Naumann uncredited Angelika Hillebrecht
Ute Burgmann Director of Photography Frau Pletzer
[first four days] Horatius Häberle
Production Companies Dietrich Lohmann Dr Korten, State
©1975. Paramount-Orion Script Supervisor Prosecutor
/ WDR [Westdeutscher Heidi Handorf Henry van Lyck
Rundfunk] / Bioskop-Film Still Photographer ‘Scheich’ Karl
Leo Weisse Leo Weisse
Executive Producer Colourist Schönner, photographer
Eberhard Junkersdorf Andreas Lautil Walter Gontermann
Commissioning Editor Pater Urbanus
[WDR] Hildegard Linden
Gunter Witte Hedwig Plotten

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102 BFI FILM CLASSICS

Stephanie Thönnessen Production details US theatrical distributor

Claudia Stern Filmed from 4 February (as The Lost Honor of
Josephine Gierens to 21 March 1975 on Katharina Blum): New
Hertha Scheumel location in and around World Pictures (showing
Peter Franke Cologne (North Rhine- at Cinema II in New York
Dr Heinen Westphalia, West City on 19 December
Achim Strietzel Germany) and in the 1975). Rated: R. Running
Lüding, publisher village of Ötztal in the time: 106 minutes.
Tyrolean Alps (Austria). Shown at the New
uncredited York Film Festival on
Bernd Nesselhut Release details 3 October 1975.
Georg German theatrical
Olivia Wredenhagen distributor: CIC – UK theatrical distributor
Anna Cinema International (as The Lost Honour
Margarethe von Trotta Corporation (released of Katharina Blum):
at the Palette in Berlin Contemporary Films Ltd
on 9 October 1975). (released in mid-1977).
Certificate: 16. Running Certificate: AA. Running
time: 106 minutes / 2,894 time: 105 minutes 44
metres / 35mm [1.66:1] / seconds.
in colour: Technicolor /
sound: mono / budget Credits compiled by
reported as $640,000. Julian Grainger
Shown at the San
Sebastian International
Film Festival (Spain) on
17 September 1975.

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 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. The London Symposium, Special Issue
Unordentliche Erinnerungen (Cologne: of University of Dayton Review 24 no. 3
Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2004). (1997): 163–71.
Aust, Stefan, Der Baader Meinhof Komplex Hehr, Renate, Margarethe von Trotta:
(Munich: Goldmann, 1998). Filmmaking as Liberation (Stuttgart and
Bakhtin, Mikhail, Rabelais and His World, London: Edition Axel Menges, 2000).
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(Paderborn: Schöningh, 2012). Contribution to the Film Deutschland
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(eds), Heinrich Böll on Page and Screen: (Düsseldorf: Virgines, 2018).

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Katharina Blum in den Massenmedien der in Sheppard (ed.), New Ways in
Bundesrepublik (Copenhagen: Germanistik (New York and Oxford:
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of Mississippi Press, 2018). schloendorff.deutsches-filminstitut.
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Die Zeit, 26 April 1991. Oedipus Complex’, in Terri Ginsberg
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