Margarethe Von Trotta: Historical Life and Personal Life Intersect
Margarethe Von Trotta was one of the German writers who were active and important in what has come to be called New German cinema of the 1970s. The filmmakers were very different in intent and style but like the New Wave ten years earlier they energetically pursued a creative agenda very different from the filmmakers of the previous generation. Rainer Werner Fassbinder embraced melodrama as his genre of choice. Wim Wenders favored existential narratives that mixed realistic characters with fable-like events or fable-like character with real events. Werner Herzog was only interested in the fable, while Margarethe Von Trotta and her partner/husband Volker Schlondorff were most attracted to a radical or political treatment of events or people.
Von Trotta has been an important filmmaker for 30 years. Her work initially was principally as the writer of Schlondorff’s films, such as “The Sudden Wealth of the Poor People of Kalmbach.” In 1975, she co-directed with Schlondorff “The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum.” She appeared in a major role in and co-directed with Schlondorff “Coup de Grace” (1980). In 1977, she solely directed “The Second Awakening of Crista Klages.” She directed her most famous film, “Marianne and Juliane,” known as “The German Sisters” in Europe, in 1981. Since then she has made numerous theatrical and television films, the most prominent being “The Sisters of Happiness” (1985), “Rosa Luxemburg” (1994), “The Promise” (1995), and “Rosenstrasse” (2004).
Because her base of operation shifted from Germany to Italy, she has somehow received a treatment similar to the Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland, a kind of snub that has made each filmmaker a “European” filmmaker or an “international” filmmaker rather than a German or Polish film director. I attribute such treatment to each being a female director. Roland Emmerich and Paul Verhoeven have not had the same kind of experience although they went to Hollywood. They are still accepted as German and Dutch directors as well.
Before we look at a number of excerpts from Von Trotta’s work, a few observations will contextualize her director’s idea. First and foremost is the observation that Von Trotta, like Billy Wilder before her, is principally a writer and it is her writing that shapes all other directorial decisions. That writing must emotionalize the personal story and provide the historical story intersection points so as to raise the stakes within the personal story. Another way of considering the two narrative elements is to see the plot as the historical story and the personal story as the character layer, the traditional means of emotionalizing the story. An example will illustrate the point. In “Rosenstrasse,” the personal story is about a contemporary German Jew who has grown up in New York. She is engaged to a gentile. When her father dies, her mother becomes very disapproving of her fiancé. To understand why, the daughter returns to Germany to learn of her mother’s past. What she discovers is that during World War II in Germany her mother, a Jew, lost her parents and was hidden by a German non-Jewish woman who at that time was fighting for the life of her husband, a Jew. Her husband has been rounded up by the authorities for transport east. The historical narrative has two aspects—the gentile woman caring for the Jewish child and the gentile woman fighting to rescue her Jewish husband together with like-minded women whose husbands have also been taken. The daughter learns her mother’s history by interviewing the woman who had saved her, now old and living mostly with her memories. The personal history and the historical fate of those women and their Jewish husbands during World War II blend to influence how a young woman today will make a decision about her gentile fiancé.
A second take on the schism between the historical and the personal is that they are like the spokes of a wheel; they surround the core of the story. Parents in the Von Trotta narrative represent history while children represent the personal. An authoritarian pastor and his quiescent wife are the parents of the two daughters at the core of the story in “Marianne and Juliane.” Another schism in that story is the male/female divide. The men are needy and weak, and the two women are strong and goal directed; consequently, the men quickly fracture. “Marianne and Juliane” opens with Marianne’s former husband, Werner, leaving their child with Juliane and committing suicide. Near the end of the film, Wolfgang, Juliane’s boyfriend of ten years, abandons her because Marianne’s corpse is between them. In terms of the key relationship between the sisters, they are presented as bonded and allied since childhood; nevertheless, they are opposites of one another. As children, the older sister (Juliane) was responsible, the younger one irresponsible; the older less sexual, the younger highly sexual; the older political, the younger more imaginative. When the sisters become adults, their differences become more intense, and they take opposing political positions— older sister Juliane becomes a political journalist and younger sister Marianne becomes a political terrorist. Yet, the most important person for the other is her sister. It is the generational, gender, and character fault lines in the work that generate the historical–personal director’s idea.
Each of Von Trotta’s stories unfolds in the shape of a riddle with the answer telling us who will survive. In “Sisters, or the Balance of Happiness” (1979), again the story of two sisters, it is the older sister who will survive the suicide of the younger. She survives by creating a replacement relationship. A young secretary at work, who looks like her sister, becomes the new sister. Although the strategy is not permanent, it does help the older sister cope with her loss. In “The Second Awakening of Crista Klages” (1977), a woman who robs a bank to raise money for her childcare center loses her male accomplices but when finally taken by the police is rescued by the female bank employee whom she held captive during the bank robbery. The employee denies Christa was the robber, and Christa is given her second chance.
Finally, Von Trotta emphasized character, the personal, over plot, the historical. “Marianne and Juliane” is the story of a 1960s political terrorist, Marianne, yet we do not see the bank robberies or the bombings. Instead, the focus is on Marianne’s relationship with her older sister, Juliane. There is a high point that expresses the love in their relationship. Marianne is in prison, and Juliane is visiting her. A male records their conversation. Two matrons watch to contain the two women if necessary, and there is an armed guard present. We are very aware of the level of intervention, the lack of privacy. At the moment of saying goodbye Marianne asks her sister to swap sweaters, a throwback to an adolescent desire to be close to the other. Without hesitation the two strip off their sweaters and swap them and then embrace. Their intimacy with the other at a moment when they have four strangers in the room is personal and touching. All that matters at that instant is the bond between them. Everything else is excluded. It is a moment of intense love and revelation about the personal.
In terms of excerpts, I am going to alter our approach slightly. Rather than particular excerpts, I will examine the characterization of the key relationships in four of Von Trotta’s films. This approach will give us insight into how Von Trotta dramatically prioritizes her historical–personal idea. It will also lead us to a more particular set of visual choices that support her director’s idea. The films we will refer to are “The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum,” “The Second Awakening of Christa Klages,” “Marianne and Juliane,” and “Rosenstrasse.”
“The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum” (1975)
In “The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum,” the main character, Katharina Blum (Angela Winkler), is a decent working-class woman of high moral character and a rather shy woman, as well. She is seen fraternizing with a known terrorist and is considered an accomplice in helping him elude police. The police collude with a tabloid journalist to destroy her reputation. As they proceed to systematically destroy her, Katharina (the most decent person they know, say her employers) is forced to act to defend her dignity. In the end, she kills the journalist whose reports have misrepresented her and who has thrived on her public destruction. The terrorist she protected and loved succeeds in eluding the authorities. The sequence we will focus on is the opening, when the terrorist Ludwig Götten (Jürgen Prochnow) is eluding the police who are in close pursuit. He meets Katharina (the “nun,” according to police reports) at her cousin’s party, where they are all under surveillance. Katharina returns to her apartment with Ludwig and they spend the night together. In the morning, a police task force enters her apartment. Ludwig is gone but the police consider her to be an accomplice, continually insulting her in her own home. They treat her not only as a suspect but also as if she were a prostitute. She insists upon respect, as they are in her home, but none is forthcoming. The police and the prosecutor, both men, take an authoritarian and demeaning attitude toward Katharina. This is in marked contrast to the behavior of Ludwig toward her. He, the terrorist, is kind and considerate, while the authorities are aggressive and accusatory even though they are in her home.
“The Second Awakening of Christa Klages” (1977)
In “The Second Awakening of Christa Klages,” Christa (Tina Engel), a childcare worker, robs a bank. Acting with two male accomplices, she takes a bank employee hostage (Katharina Thalbach) and holds the woman while the men take the money. The hostage, Lena, becomes more important in the story as she begins to obsess about Christa. One of the robbers, Wolfgang (Friedrich Kaiser), is quickly captured by the police while Christa and the other robber, Werner (Marius Müller-Westernhagen), escape by train. They begin a journey to find a friend who can launder the money so they can turn it over to the daycare center so they can continue to care for the children. First, they visit Hans (Peter Schneider), a pastor. Hans refuses to launder the money, although he is quite taken with Christa. They visit Ingrid (Silvia Reize), a school friend. Ingrid is willing to help, but the daycare center will not take the money. In the meantime, Lena has begun looking for Christa and will do so throughout the film.
When Werner is killed by the police, Hans helps Christa leave the country using Ingrid’s passport. Ingrid joins her in Portugal. The townspeople who are conservative interpret their close relationship as a lesbian relationship and consequently turn against them. Returning to Germany, Christa is picked up by the police, and Lena is brought in to identify her as the female bank robber. She denies Christa was the robber and the film ends. Christa is free. The excerpts we will focus on are the scenes of Christa with Lena in the bank and, at the end, Christa with Ingrid and Christa with her daughter. What characterizes all of these scenes is the closeness of the females, one with the other. It is a man’s world, and, whether it is Werner or Ingrid’s husband, men are more selfish and in the end they support one another rather than their female lover or partner. It is the women who help one another. That was the motivation for Christa to rob a bank. Daycare is an issue for women. Men care about cars, money, and having sex. They are not very generous to women. Although Hans is kind, his interest in Christa seems to be sexual, and he is the most principled of the men in this film!
“Marianne and Juliane” (1981)
“Marianne and Juliane” is the story of two German sisters. The film begins with the son of Marianne (Barbara Sukowa) being delivered to her sister Juliane (Jutta Lampe) for safekeeping. The film ends with Juliane trying to take care of Marianne’s son. By now his father, Wolfgang, has committed suicide, as has his terrorist mother. And the child has been immolated, a cruel prank, because he is his mother’s son. Between the narrative bookends provided by the son, we focus on the story of the two sisters. A historical thread traces their history from young children to adolescents. The family history focuses on the father, the compliance of Marianne, and the rebelliousness of Juliane. The contemporary story is a total reversal, with Marianne now a bank robber/terrorist and Juliane a committed leftist journalist. Juliane has a ten-year relationship with an architect but no marriage and no children. Marianne enters and exits Juliane’s life with some frequency and chides her sister for not being more like her—action over words. A third of the way through the film Marianne is taken by the police, and further scenes between the sisters take place in prison. The second third of the film focuses on this period. The visits alternate between being angry and affectionate. On one of the last visits Juliane brings their mother.
When Juliane and Wolfgang are away on holiday in Italy, Juliane sees news of her sister on television. She calls home to discover that her sister has hanged herself. The last section of the film focuses on Juliane’s obsession with proving that her sister was killed rather than committing suicide. Her obsession fractures her own personal relationship with Wolfgang. In her commitment to raise Marianne’s son, Juliane is becoming closer to her dead sister. The scenes that we focus on are the childhood/adolescent scenes of the two sisters. As children they seem inseparable. Their father is a pastor, and prayer and compliance are demanded in his home, but Juliane is rebellious. The father insists that her dress code of black jeans must be set aside if she is to attend a dance. She is rebellious and asserts her right to dress as she pleases. The father rejects her and her rights. Only Marianne’s intervention leads to Juliane attending the dance. Even at the dance, though, Juliane is nonconformist. On a wager, she dances a waltz alone, and all of the students gape at her. In a later scene, the adolescent Marianne and Juliane watch concentration camp footage with their classmates. Marianne leaves, ill. Juliane joins her, in solidarity with her sister. These scenes together portray the personal relationship of the sisters and how they stood together against the past. The father represents that past, and he and what he represents is actively rejected by Juliane. On the other hand, Marianne insists that you must work with the past— father and religion and the Nazi ideology about family—in order to get by and to get your way. It is here on the matter of history that the sisters differ.
“Rosenstrasse” (2004)
The last film we will focus on is “Rosenstrasse.” Earlier in the chapter I described the narrative, the story of three women—the contemporary story of Hannah Weinstein (Maria Schrader); the 1943 story of Ruth Weinstein (Jutta Lampe), Hannah’s mother; and the 1943 story of Lena Fischer (Katja Riemann), the gentile woman who rescues Ruth. Each of these women suffers a loss that ruptures her life. That historical loss is directly embedded in the historical plot, the war against the Jews. Can a gentile save a Jew? In the contemporary story, that gentile is Lena. Hannah, a young woman, is disturbed by her mother’s rejection of her gentile fiancé, Luis. If she can discover her mother’s history perhaps she can move forward. Lena, now 90, tells Hannah about her mother, Ruth’s wartime personal history. The second story is about Ruth as a child. Early in the film she loses her mother in a Berlin sweep of Jews. A young man pulls the Jewish star from Ruth’s vest and following her mother’s advice she asks a gentile woman outside Gestapo headquarters to take care of her. The German women gathered there have Jewish husbands who have also been rounded up. It is Lena who saves Ruth. The third story, also set in 1943, is Lena’s story. From a noble family, Lena has chosen to marry Fabian, a Jewish musician. She and Fabian were a creative couple—she on the piano and Fabian playing the violin. Lena also was a Von Essenbach, the daughter of long-standing respected German aristocrats. She suffered her father’s rejection for her marriage to a Jew. When Fabian is picked up in the 1943 sweep of Jews, he is taken to a Gestapo holding area on Rosenstrasse. Lena and other gentile wives of Jews protest in front of the building. She appeals to her family to intercede but her father remains intransigent. She is no longer his daughter. Only her war-injured officer brother tries to help her. She finally offers herself to the SS leadership to secure Fabian’s release. In the end, her efforts bear results. She secures his release together with that of many other Jewish husbands of gentile wives.
In “Rosenstrasse,” we focus on the 1943 relationships of Lena with her husband, Fabian, and with the young Ruth. In these scenes, Von Trotta is interested in creating the motivation for Lena, a motivation that will make her risk humiliation, even death, in order to secure her love relationship with the Jew, Fabian, and also create a mother/child bond with Ruth. These scenes proceed in the light of insult from Gestapo officers (Lena is “a Jew-loving whore”), the rejection of her father, and the prostituting of herself with the SS hierarchy. All of these commitments are measures of selfsacrifice for love.
Text Interpretation
Margarethe Von Trotta is above all a political filmmaker. I use the term political in the sense that her stories are about personal transformation and political action, not in the formal sense, but the actions of an individual to change her interaction with the society. Von Trotta has made films that are more literally political, a film such as “Rosa Luxemburg,” for example, about the Spartacist leader killed by the German army during the 1918 workers’ revolt against the government of post-World War I Germany. Each of the four films I talk about in this chapter focuses on personal and political action. In “The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum,” Katharina, a shy, modest woman with firm middle-class values, becomes a murderer to defend herself against an exploitative journalist and the police and legal officials whose authoritarianism is all about their empowerment to the detriment of the rights of an individual such as Katharina Blum. Von Trotta sidesteps the love story, the melodrama of a woman trying to make her way in Germany, and the terrorist’s story, to focus on Katharina’s transformation.
In “The Second Awakening of Christa Klages,” Christa takes action to subsidize a daycare center and its children. Clearly, the daycare center has been forsaken by conventional government funding and the fate of the children has become precarious. Transgression on behalf of children comprises the political action in “The Second Awakening of Christa Klages.” In “Marianne and Juliane,” both sisters have already taken political action as the film begins. Marianne is a terrorist wanted by the government. Juliane is a leftist reporter focusing on women’s issues and environmental issues. The deeper political action, however, moves away from the paternalistic model that is religious and conservative. The authoritarian model of their pastor father is the basis for the deeper political action taken by “Marianne and Juliane.” They are rejecting the father and all that his generation stood for.
In “Rosenstrasse,” the political action is about the preservation of life and relationships—specifically, the life of a Jewish girl, Ruth, and a Jewish musician, Fabian. Lena, a German aristocrat and a woman, stands up against the paternalism of her family, of the army, and of the State in 1943 Germany. Her actions are pro-life rather than anti-Nazi, but in acting as she does she is also anti-Nazi. Although “Rosenstrasse” is closest to being a war film, Von Trotta minimizes the plot and stays very close to Lena and the other characters in order to highlight and personalize Lena’s political action. Which brings us to the next feature of Von Trotta’s text interpretation. The character arc at the core of each of these films is a journey, a journey of transformation from what the women were when we meet them to what they become in the course of the film. The journey may be a political or personal journey; often it is both.
For Katharina Blum, it is a journey of realization that one cannot hide behind the veneer of one’s personality and values. When we meet Katharina she is shy and modest—as her cousin describes her, she is a “nun.” The implication is that Katharina is in retreat from life. When she is attacked, her home is invaded and her life and the lives of her family are destroyed to feed the press’ appetite for gossip, negativity, and notoriety. A modest woman is transformed into a monster. Katharina reacts to protect her inner core. She transgresses and takes action. By the end, she has become engaged with society on its own destructive terms.
For Christa Klages, the transformation is different. She begins as a person of action, a transgressor, on behalf of her beliefs. The actions of Ingrid, her friend, on her behalf as well as of Lena, her captive, who lies to save her from prison, suggest that women can and should help one another. This feminist take on a male society—it does not act to save its children but rather cares more for cars and other material goods and money—transforms a political activist into a more caring woman. She cares for her daughter, for Ingrid (battered by her husband), and for Lena, who identifies with her as a woman rather than with her male employers at the bank. Also, Lena sees the male policemen persecuting another woman, in this case Christa.
For Juliane, the leftist reporter, her transformation through her commitment to her dead sister (another politically active woman) transforms her into a woman who can be a caregiver, a mother. At the end, she will care for Jan, Marianne’s son, and patiently raise him, at the very least to understand his dead mother. Juliane is a very different woman when the film ends than she was when the film began.
The transformation in “Rosenstrasse” is principally Hannah’s transformation. By developing a relationship with Lena, Hannah learns about her mother’s history, her mother’s loss in 1943 of her own mother, and her finding a surrogate mother in Lena. When we meet Hannah she is angry with her mother, Ruth, who at the funeral of her husband rejected Luis, Hannah’s gentile fiancé. Should she, too, reject Luis? She is unsure. Until she knows her mother’s history and therefore her own she is unsure how to proceed so she avoids Luis.
Only when she is given her grandmother’s ring by Lena (who has held the ring since 1945 for Ruth) does she realize the depth of the loss her mother experienced. She returns the ring to Ruth, who now feeling acknowledged by her daughter, offers it back to Hannah. This symbolic piece of Ruth’s own mother then binds the generations and Hannah has permission to move on. The film ends with her marriage to Luis. The life cycle can begin again for Hannah who will contribute to the continuity of her family.
Directing the Actor
In terms of casting, Von Trotta is very particular about the look of the actors. The women tend to have a strong look—Angela Winkler’s innocence in “The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum,” Tina Engel’s forcefulness in “The Second Awakening of Christa Klages,” Jutta Lampe’s strength in “Sisters” and “Marianne and Juliane,” and Barbara Sukowa’s charisma in “Marianne and Juliane” and in “Rosa Luxemburg.” The women are not Marilyn Monroe beautiful, but their faces are interesting and their beauty grows as we become more familiar with them as characters. It is safe to say that Von Trotta is above all interested in strong women. That is not to say she does not cast against type. Katja Riemann has a very feminine, soft look but her role as Lena in “Rosenstrasse” required her to be very forceful. The softer, more sexual side of Lena is an important presence in her character.
Beyond the look of the actor, Von Trotta looks for a reservoir of passion. All of the characters described here are believers. Marianne believes in revolution, Christa Klages believes that transgression in the name of a principled position is right, and Katharina Blum believes in middle-class values and an orderly society until she is pushed to change. Passion that can lead to action is a fundamental dimension of each of these performances.
Another dimension of these performances is that each of these women takes risks; she goes to the edge. If they succeed they live, but each knows they may have to go further and put their lives at risk. This willingness to take risks has to be part of the performance. It certainly goes to the heart of Barbara Sukowa’s performance as Marianne, the terrorist. We believe she can kill or be killed or kill herself. When she argues with her sister she is always pushing her to join her and risk it all. The performance is striking with regard to Sukowa’s risk taking as an actress. She is never still and is always moving, ever on the edge of explosion. Fierce is the word that comes to mind about her performance.
Von Trotta always brings such characters into her films. The journalist who pushes Katharina Blum, for example, is a volcanic, egotistical media star who eats his subjects for breakfast. In “Rosenstrasse,” it is the adult Ruth who is about to erupt and destroy, so deep is her despair regarding the loss of her husband, the final loss in a life of too many losses.
Finally, the performances have to explore all the dimensions of a relationship—friendship, love, jealousy, anger, envy, and sexuality, so we can experience the danger and warmth in each relationship. This is very clear in the performances of Jutta Lampe and Barbara Sukowa as Juliane and Marianne, the two German sisters. One expects the relationship of siblings to be either supportive or rivalrous. The Von Trotta version is neither. I would call the two sisters symbiotic. They are together, they need each other, they support each other, and yet there is intense anger between them as well. And there is intense love. I described the sweater exchange earlier in this chapter. It is a moment of intimacy, partially sexual. The goal of these performances was to evoke all the dimensions of the relationship. The consequent complexity of the sisters’ relationship is the subtext for their performances. It was Von Trotta’s ambition for her actresses and her challenge in modulating their performances.
Directing the Camera
“Rosenstrasse” begins with a montage of New York. “Sisters,” unusually beings with a tracking shot into the woods. This abstract image will recur throughout the film. The visual metaphor is unusual in Von Trotta’s work. More often she is straightforward with the images. Her narrative agenda is so considerable that she needs to devote the visuals to carrying us from narrative point to narrative point. In this sense, Von Trotta is not flashy visually but rather functional. She shows us what she needs to show us in order to follow the narrative. All else is excluded. Another quality of her visuals is that she prefers to focus on the performances rather than the visual power of a shot. Substance in her work triumphs over style.
Her approach to the camera is natural rather than fancy, direct rather than subtle. In “Marianne and Juliane,” the scenes that characterize the girls growing up focus first and foremost on their relationship, their closeness. The past is dominated by one person, their father. In those scenes, the focus is on the father’s authoritarian style versus the girls’ wrath, Juliane’s outrage, and Marianne’s conciliatory moves between father and the rebellious Juliane. All else, including the mother, is contextual, background. Marianne, Juliane, and their father are shown in close-ups, the others primarily in long shots.
Similarly in the classroom scene where the adolescent girls are shown concentration camp films, the focus is on the two girls and the footage. The teacher and the other students are background or simply omitted. A feature, then, of Von Trotta’s style is her focus on only the principal characters and letting all else fall away or blend into the background context. Associated with this quality is a focus on character over plot; when plot is introduced, as in the effort to free Fabian in “Rosenstrasse,” it is within the context of one of the principal characters—in this case, Fabian’s wife Lena. There are shots of Fabian being threatened with death by the Gestapo, but these shots are there to remind us of what is at stake (Fabian’s life), as well as the power of the Gestapo over the lives of the Jews being held.
Another quality of Von Trotta’s visual choices has to do with the editing. Because she is telling multiple stories, such as in “Rosenstrasse,” transitions are necessary to suggest moving from modern times to 1943. A piece of music or a bowl of soup can provide such a transition. Equally important is Von Trotta’s use of parallel action. “Rosenstrasse” has three main characters and occurs over two time periods. Moving between time periods and from one character to another, as well as maintaining the momentum of the story and its tension, are serious editing challenges. Rather than rely on pace to create an emotional arc, Von Trotta keeps the fate of the two men (Fabian in 1943 and Luis in 2003) uncertain until the end. The narrative tension consequently keeps the audience wondering and worrying if all will work out for Lena with Fabian and for Hannah with Luis. Narrative clarity and dramatic emphasis were the editing goals. Generous use of close-ups keeps the emotions high, and the periodic use of camera movement further energizes the narrative.
One element that Von Trotta does reinforce visually is the link between the historical life and the personal life. Adding to the chauvinist maleness of the Nazis are the swastikas, Jewish stars, Nazi salute, and personal embraces. The Nazis see Lena—the aristocrat, the wife, the surrogate mother of Ruth—not as another human but rather as another sexual opportunity. By embedding the historical pathology of the Nazis in such a simple personal encounter, Von Trotta allows the audience to experience the director’s idea dramatically and in a highly emotionalized way. It is this kind of deep directorial decision that raises the bar for Von Trotta’s audiences. Just as her characters risk it all, Von Trotta herself is an ambitious narrative risk taker. And when the risk pays off, as it does in each of these four films, we witness the power of passion and commitment in directing.