This heavy-handed
political/sociological film was all but forgotten a couple of
years ago, because the themes were no longer current. Such is the
problem with political films.
Katharina Blum is a humble German worker who
goes home from a party one might with a stranger. In the morning,
the stranger is gone, but her house is filled with a heavily-armed
SWAT team and a crack unit of homeland security forces who
specialize in anti-Marxism and anti-terrorism. This is kind of a
bad break for Katharina, because she apparently chose to form a
very intimate attraction to a suspected terrorist from the Marxist
Bader-Meinhof gang. That group was terrorizing West German society
in the 70's, and the right-wing law and order forces were cracking
down hard on them and those considered sympathetic to them.
In the course of the interrogation, Katharina
realizes that many innocent events in her past, matters which were
her sole private business, seem suspicious when viewed from a
certain perspective. The police make her seem bad enough, but
Katharina also falls prey to a sensationalist tabloid journalist
who builds up every aspect of her story as if she were Lenin
himself, fanning the flames of mass hysteria, and plastering her
picture all over the tabloids, supporting the photographs with
outrageously exaggerated copy. Even if Katharina were to prove her
complete innocence, people in the streets would always remember
her as the Pinko Commie. In essence, the repressive behavior of
the police and newspapers eventually succeed in making Katharina
as radical as they thought she was to begin with. The points seem
to be as follows:
1) The government's repression of rights in
pursuit of terrorists proved to be as chilling or more so than the
acts committed by the terrorists themselves
2) The government's "need to know" about
Katharina's sex life came into conflict with her code of honor
about naming names, and her belief in a right to privacy. There
was a feminist subtext in the film. Katharina's insistence on her
privacy was viewed by the male interrogators as a challenge and an
object of suspicion. Frankly, this point was labored. If she had
told the full truth in the first place, the police probably would
have left her alone, and she could have avoided the most
unpleasant elements of the denouement. By insisting on keeping her
secrets, by saying that they had no right to pry into her sex
life, she assured that they would assume she was covering up
something more important than mere sexual trysts.
3) Katharina was not really a radical until she
was brutalized by the state and the conspiratorial right-wing
press. Through their actions, they made her into the person that
they had once falsely accused her of being.
The film was was based on a novel by Henrich
Boell. Boell was an essayist who had accused the Bild-Zeitung
tabloid of creating mass hysteria with its sensationalized
coverage of the Bader-Meinhof gang. That tabloid then labeled
Boell himself a pinko commie sympathizer for criticizing them in
the execution of their patriotic duty. Because the paper convinced
the public and the police that Boell was sympathetic to
terrorists, he and his family were harassed. Boell got in the last
word by creating Katharina Blum, into which he incorporated his
own story, making the authorities and the newspaper reporters into
the story's monsters.
I mentioned at the beginning of these comments
that the issues in this film seemed quaint in the year 2000. They
seem fresh again in 2002. All of this squabble between Boell and
the press was a lost tale of political demagoguery on both sides,
with very little current relevance until September 11, 2001, at
which time many people started to feel that the government of the
United States was repeating the mistakes made by Germany in the
1970s, trying to deal with terrorists by creating a climate of
constant fear in the citizenry, and by stripping some citizens of
the basic rights which are considered quintessential to the very
concept of America.
How far should a government go to protect its
citizens in a free society? This question will undoubtedly be
debated as long as governments and societies exist, and the
attacks of September 11th have brought the issues back into sharp
enough focus that The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum has been hauled
out of the Vault of Obscurity for another look. Before that, it
was just a fictionalized, one-sided, shrill, whiny account of one
man's squabble with a tabloid newspaper, told entirely from his
point of view, with no attempt at balance, and no attempt to
create fully-realized portraits of the antagonists or to
understand their point of view. |