The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum,
106mins, 1975
Volker Schlöndorff retrospective
With Irish German-based activist – part of the Ulm Five - Daniel Tatlow-Devally currently being held in Stammheim and under terrorist legislation, this film from 1975 seems very topical.
Katharina Blum is a shy and retiring housekeeper for a wealthy couple, but she is targeted by press and police after she falls for a wanted man.
The Nobel winning author Heinrich Böll – on whose 1973 novel this film was based - has in his sights the twin targets of an intrusive yellow press and an overreaching German police force who in the early 1970s were openly at war with the Red Army Faction.
Heinrich Böll enjoyed a strong connection with the West of Ireland and wrote the influential travelogue My Irish Diary (1957), introducing a generation of Germans to a country that stood apart from an industrialised Europe. However, it was as a novelist and commentator on German post-war society that he was best known.
Director in Attendance