The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum

A political invective that doesn’t require background knowledge of 70s Germany to follow, so pervasive and continually relevant is this attack on yellow journalism. Katharina is a young divorcee with a modest job serving a wealthy couple; she’s so straight-laced her friends call her “the nun.” One night, rather at random, she decides she wants to get drunk at a party she’s been invited to, altering her usual routine to take the bus, and once there meets, flirts and dances with, and finally goes home with an attractive young man. The next morning, the police raid her apartment, interrogate and incarcerate her. The man is under investigation for terrorist activities, and she is accused of harboring and protecting him; the detectives seize on every unusual detail of her behavior that night and taunt her with sordid distortions of the facts. Soon the story is picked up by a sensationalist reporter who hounds her family and friends, makes up quotations and events, and drags her name through the mud. Her situation develops slowly but deliberately into a nightmarish existence of lurid phone calls and hate mail, building to a violent climax and jarring conclusion. It is a matter of slowly wearing away her personal honor, her sense of self, from the start when she insists what passed between her and her lover was “tenderness” and not “an advance” to more serious and intimate details; from all sides, the attack — and it is an attack — is personal and vicious. The film is powerful if not subtle, but one hardly expects it to be, based on events the novel’s author Heinrich Böll endured and born of resistance movements and youthful outcry against government power.