The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (film)
Encyclopedia
The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (German original title: Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum oder: Wie Gewalt entstehen und wohin sie führen kann) is a 1975 film adaptation by Volker Schlöndorff
and Margarethe von Trotta of the novel of the same name
by Heinrich Böll
. The film stars Angela Winkler
as Blum, Mario Adorf
as Kommissar Beizmenne, Dieter Laser
as Tötges, and Jürgen Prochnow
as Ludwig.
.
, and at the end of Schlöndorff's cinematic interpretation of it, the following text appears:
In interviews for the 2003 Criterion Collection DVD
release of the film, Schlöndorff and other crew members argue for the film's continued relevance today, drawing an analogy between the political climate of panic over terrorism in 1970s West Germany
and the post-September 11, 2001
situation in the U.S. where unsubstantiated media hype was used to launch the invasion of Iraq.
Volker Schlöndorff
Volker Schlöndorff is a Berlin-based German filmmaker who has worked in Germany, France and the United States...
and Margarethe von Trotta of the novel of the same name
The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum
The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, or: how violence develops and where it can lead is a 1974 novel by Heinrich Böll....
by Heinrich Böll
Heinrich Böll
Heinrich Theodor Böll was one of Germany's foremost post-World War II writers. Böll was awarded the Georg Büchner Prize in 1967 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1972.- Biography :...
. The film stars Angela Winkler
Angela Winkler
Angela Winkler is a German actress.- Biography :Born in Templin, Winkler trained to be a medical technologist in Stuttgart. Interested in theater, she went to Munich, where she took acting classes with Ernst Fritz Fürbringer...
as Blum, Mario Adorf
Mario Adorf
Mario Adorf is a German film and stage actor, best known for his lead role in the 1978 film The Tin Drum.-Biography:...
as Kommissar Beizmenne, Dieter Laser
Dieter Laser
Dieter Laser is a German actor.He is known to English speaking audiences for his roles in Lexx, The Ogre and The Human Centipede , for which he won "Best Actor" at the Austin Fantastic Fest....
as Tötges, and Jürgen Prochnow
Jürgen Prochnow
Jürgen Prochnow is a German actor. His most well-known roles internationally have been as the sympathetic submarine captain in Das Boot , Duke Leto Atreides I in Dune , the minor, but important role of Neo-Stalinist dictator General Ivan Radek in Air Force One and the villain Maxwell Dent in...
as Ludwig.
Plot
The title character 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 a radical bank robber. The film, unlike the novel, ends with a scene at Tötges' funeral, with his publisher delivering a hypocritical condemnation of the murder as an infringement on the freedom of the pressFreedom of the press
Freedom of the press or freedom of the media is the freedom of communication and expression through vehicles including various electronic media and published materials...
.
Analysis
In the beginning of Heinrich Böll's bookThe Lost Honour of Katharina Blum
The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, or: how violence develops and where it can lead is a 1974 novel by Heinrich Böll....
, and at the end of Schlöndorff's cinematic interpretation of it, the following text appears:
The characters and action in this story are purely fictitious. Should the description of certain journalistic practices result in a resemblance to the practices of Bild-ZeitungBild-ZeitungThe Bild is a German tabloid published by Axel Springer AG. The paper is published from Monday to Saturday, while on Sundays, Bild am Sonntag is published instead, which has a different style and its own editors...
, such resemblance is neither intentional, nor fortuitous, but unavoidable.
In interviews for the 2003 Criterion Collection DVD
DVD
A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....
release of the film, Schlöndorff and other crew members argue for the film's continued relevance today, drawing an analogy between the political climate of panic over terrorism in 1970s West Germany
West Germany
West Germany is the common English, but not official, name for the Federal Republic of Germany or FRG in the period between its creation in May 1949 to German reunification on 3 October 1990....
and the post-September 11, 2001
September 11, 2001 attacks
The September 11 attacks The September 11 attacks The September 11 attacks (also referred to as September 11, September 11th or 9/119/11 is pronounced "nine eleven". The slash is not part of the pronunciation...
situation in the U.S. where unsubstantiated media hype was used to launch the invasion of Iraq.