The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1975) is based on a novel by Nobel Prize-winning German writer Heinrich Böll, who wrote it following a harrowing personal experience. After he criticized a lurid West German tabloid for inciting mass hysteria through its coverage of the Baader-Meinhof terrorist gang, the tabloid labeled Böll a terrorist sympathizer, and he and his family endured harassment by the police. This prompted him to write the novel, which is about a housemaid, played by Angela Winkler, who is unfairly victimized for harboring a terrorist. The right-wing press browbeats her and destroys her privacy and honor, driving her to pick up a gun and attack the journalist who defamed her. A key film of the New German Cinema movement, it remains an important, ever timely work dealing with the dangers of media manipulation. The film was written and directed by then husband and wife team Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta. Schlöndorff was already an established filmmaker who would go on to direct the international sensation The Tin Drum (1979). In short order, Von Trotta would direct a series of feminist films and become one of the most notable female filmmakers in Europe. In a 2018 interview for Film Comment, she reflected on this film, musing that it is still of the moment because of the ability “with your cellphone to immediately share your meaning and sometimes your hate and all these terrible feelings you have -- to give it away to so many others. It becomes very dangerous, much more so than in the time of Katharina Blum. Now with this popular right-wing party, AfD [Alternative für Deutschland, or “Alternative for Germany”], what we have is exactly what the Bild-Zeitung did in the time of Katharina Blum. But that was only one newspaper which was radically right-wing and popular. Now it’s a whole party who are speaking exactly like the Bild-Zeitung did then.”
by Jeremy Arnold
