The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum marks the directorial debut for actress Margarethe von Trotta, who co-directed the film with her then-husband Volker Schlöndorff. At a costume party, Katharina Blum (Angela Winkler) meets Ludwig Goetten (Jürgen Prochnow ) and spends the night with him. The next morning, he's gone and the police bust into her apartment looking for him with the belief that he is a dangerous terrorist. She is taken into police custody and interrogated by Kommissar Beizmenne (Mario Adorf), who questions her about her every action. Meanwhile, sleazy reporter Werner Toetges (Dieter Laser) makes her story into a scandal in the papers by writing sensational stories about her personal life and portraying her as a criminal in photos. He exaggerates the testimonies of her ex-husband, neighbors, and even her elderly mother who is dying of cancer in an intensive care hospital. With the fear-induced public thinking she is a Communist and terrorist sympathizer, Katharina receives hate mail and personal threats until she is finally driven over the edge.



The story deals with the sensationalism of tabloid news and the political climate of panic over Red Army Faction terrorism in the 1970s Federal Republic of Germany. The main character, Katharina Blum, is an innocent housekeeper whose life is ruined by an invasive tabloid reporter and a police investigation when the man with whom she has just fallen in love turns out to be wanted by the police because of a bank robbery. Later it turns out that he is not a bank robber: he is a deserter from the Army who had stolen money from his camp before deserting. Ultimately she shoots the reporter, after he arrives at her house for an interview that she requested. The book's fictional tabloid paper, Die Zeitung (The Newspaper), is modelled on the actual German Bild-Zeitung.


The story is written from a first-person plural perspective. That is, the narrator is, as it were, presenting a confidential report to the reader on the basis of sources. The technique is documentary, as with Group Portrait with Lady, but with a much more disciplined focus on essentials. The reader is sometimes left to infer who the sources are for many of the reports, and even to wonder whether the narrator may not be one of the characters in the novel. This technique avoids the use of character-zoning by an omniscient narrator who assumes the authority to enter the minds of his characters. Instead, the narrator is reduced to a dependency on characters and the information they impart. The narrator becomes a researcher and critic of his source material, and in this novel is implicitly contrasted with the journalists who irresponsibly distort their sources. The attack on vulgar journalism is thus mounted from the perspective of a narrator whose moral authority is enhanced by the use of the 'regal' first-person plural form.


Release Date: December 19, 1975


Distrib: New World Pictures