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Margarethe von Trotta

Margarthe von Trotta (born 1942) is largely regarded as Germany's foremost female filmmaker. Associated with the movement known as the New German Cinema, which also includes directors Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wim Wenders and von Trotta's former husband Volker Schlöndorff, von Trotta's films typically center on complex female characters and explore feminist themes. She tends to favor emotional impact over straight narrative and often employs dream–and fantasy–like elements in her work.

Von Trotta was born on February 21, 1942, in Berlin, Germany, which was then part of the Federal Republic of West Germany. Her father, an artist, died when she was quite young, leaving von Trotta and her mother, a Russian aristocrat, with little money. Von Trotta attended trade school and worked briefly as a secretary in Germany before relocating to Paris, where she worked as an au pair and regularly visited the city's Cinématèque, where she met several directors, attended film–related discussions, and participated in a number of film collectives. Soon, she began collaborating on scripts and co–directing short films. In the early 1960s, von Trotta returned to West Germany and commenced university studies. She then enrolled in acting school in Munich. "I wanted to direct films—and then again not," she is quoted as saying in an essay by Christian–Albrecht Gollub in The New German Filmmakers. "I didn't have a role model. At that time, in the early 1960s, there weren't any female directors in the Federal Republic. So I became an actress." She married in 1964 and had a son.

Turned to Filmmaking

Von Trotta acted in the theater and on television and also landed roles in Fassbinder's Gods of the Plague and The American Soldier as well as films by Franz–Josef Spieker, Klaus Lemke, Claude Chabrol, Herbert Achternbusch, and Schlöndorff, among others. She often worked with minimal direction, developing her characters according to her own intuition. In 1969, she and Schlöndorff began collaborating on the script for his film The Sudden Wealth of the Poor People of Kombach, based on the true story of the capture, trial, and execution of a group of peasants who robbed a tax collector in the 1820s. During this time, von Trotta divorced her husband and married Schlöndorff. A custody battle for her son ensued and became the basis for her next collaboration with Schlöndorff, A Free Woman. Von Trotta co–wrote the script and played the lead role, earning a number of acting awards for her performance. The film adopted a decidedly feminist slant, depicting the difficulties of a single mother in her thirties trying to start a career and gain custody of her son in a male–dominated society.

Von Trotta made her directorial debut in 1975 with The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, also a collaboration with Schlöndorff. The film is based on the semi – autobiographical work of German author Heinrich Böll. In 1971, Böll spoke out against a sensationalized tabloid account of a bank robbery in Germany committed by the infamous Baader–Meinhoff terrorist group. Böll was quickly labeled by the authorities as an accomplice to the group and the police searched his house. Following this episode, Böll wrote a novel centering on a young housekeeper wrongly labeled as a terrorist by a tabloid newspaper. He sent the proofs of his novel to von Trotta and Schlöndorff, who were, at the time, working on an adaptation of his Group Portrait with Lady. The couple decided to switch their attention to Böll's newer work. While many critics thought the film overly slick and stereotypical, The Lost Honor of Katarina Blum became the most successful German film of the mid–1970s and earned von Trotta and Schlöndorff international recognition.

Von Trotta's final collaboration with Schlöndorff was an adaptation of Marguerite Yourcenar's 1939 novel Coup de Grâce. She served as co–scriptwriter and lead actress in the production, which centers on an aristocrat who becomes involved in both a convoluted love affair and revolutionary politics. Following this project, von Trotta and Schlöndorff worked independently. The couple later divorced.

Pursued Independent Career

Von Trotta continued to focus on complex female characters and the barriers posed by a male–dominated society. "I prefer the so–called private topics, problems of living together," she remarked, as quoted in The New German Filmmakers. "How do women try to get out of restricting situations." The Second Awakening of Christa Klages, directed by von Trotta and written in collaboration with Luisa Francia, centers on the true story of a Munich kindergarten teacher who robbed a bank to fund an alternative day–care center. The film was released in 1977. It was noted in The New German Filmmakers that von Trotta's preference for an emotionally driven plot focusing on the evolution of characters emerged in this film. "Unlike Schlöndorff, who begins with a story on which actors are imposed, von Trotta begins with fully conceived characters and asks herself, 'What could happen to them? In what relationship do they stand to one another, to their environment? What conflicts do they live?' "

Von Trotta's next film, Sisters or the Balance of Happiness, released in 1979, explores the relationship of two sisters: Maria, a hardworking secretary with controlling tendencies who supports her younger sibling, and Anna, a biology student given to episodes of depression. When Maria begins an affair with her boss's son, Anna flies into a rage and then commits suicide. After her sister's death, Maria befriends Miriam, a typist, who becomes her roommate and a surrogate for Anna. "In The Second Awakening of Christa Klages, I showed the possibilities for clarity and friendship between women," von Trotta told the New York Times, after the American release of Sisters. "But for my second film, I had to go a step further. We are contradictory and we are living in a society which is not Utopia." Again, von Trotta favored emotional impact over a straight–ahead narrative. "The main emphasis is less in the story than in the emotional flow running through the story, and this may well be a particularly female mode of expression," she told the New York Times. Soon after the release of the film in Germany, and following the death of her mother, von Trotta discovered she had a sister of her own. After the airing of a documentary about her on German television in which she mentioned her mother, von Trotta was contacted by a woman who turned out to be her sister, born 15 years before von Trotta and given up for adoption. Von Trotta's middle name is Anna and, she discovered, her sister's is Maria.

Von Trotta revisited the theme of sisters, and again drew on the troubling legacy of the Baader–Meinhoff group, in her 1981 film, Marianne and Juliane. The title characters, who are sisters, are both concerned with political reform, but Juliane pursues change through journalism and activism, Marianne through terrorism. When Marianne is arrested and dies in prison. Juliane abandons her career to raise Juliane's son and uncover the true circumstances surrounding her death, which is suspected to have been a suicide. The character of Marianne is based on Gudrun Ensslin, a member of the Baader–Meinhoff gang, and Juliane is based on Ensslin's sister Christiane, to whom the film is dedicated. The film earned the Golden Lion prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1981.

Focused on Women, Historical Themes

Von Trotta's next film, Sheer Madness, released in 1983, centers on the friendship between Olga, a feminist professor, and Ruth, a depressed female artist, as well as on Ruth's husband and his inconsolable jealousy over the women's relationship. Sheer Madness was followed in 1986 by Rosa Luxemburg, a relatively straightforward biography of the radical socialist and her activities during and leading up to World War I. The Long Silence, released in 1993, tells the story of a gynecologist's wife who continues her husband's work exposing government corruption following his murder. The Promise, released in 1995, centers on two lovers separated for almost three decades on either side of the Berlin Wall until the fall of the wall and the reunification of Germany in 1989.

Following The Promise, von Trotta spent almost a decade writing and directing films for German television. In 2004, she released Rosenstrasse, a World War II–era drama co–written with Pamela Katz. The film, based on actual events, centers on a non–Jewish woman who participated in a nine–day silent protest outside an office building on Berlin's Rossenstrasse in order to prevent Nazi officers from deporting her Jewish husband and several others, who remained inside. The film marked a turning point in German cinema, which had long shied away from themes related to noble actions of Germans during the Holocaust. "Along with its dramatization of a little–known moment of protest against the Nazi regime, Rosenstrasse also joins other recent German films—most prominently, Aimee and Jaguar—in rediscovering the Jewish role in German culture and the intertwined private lives of Gentiles and Jews before and during the Holocaust," wrote Robert Sklar in Cineaste in 2004. "For a long time, you couldn't even think of making a film about Germans who saved Jews," von Trotta told the Financial Times in 2004. "It would have been unseemly after so many cruelties. But now the time has come when we can also speak about these other people, to show that this was possible, and that much more could have been done." The film debuted in the United States in November 2003 as part of a Kino film festival retrospective of von Trotta's work.

While a small controversy arose in Germany over the historical accuracy of the film, von Trotta stated that her aim was to remain true to the numerous accounts she collected in her interviews with witnesses to the protests. "[I]t's important for me not to take the position of a historian saying, this was the way it happened," she told Cineaste in 2004. "There are historians who say, never trust an eyewitness. But for me people are more important than documents. People make me cry and touch me when they tell their stories. There's a jump from being interested to being involved. As a filmmaker you have to be moved." Von Trotta and Katz collaborated again on The Other Woman, a television film which later received limited theater distribution. The film centers on women recruited as spies for East Germany. "Her fascination with how political structures affect relationships, especially between women, is given an ideal frame in this fact–based tale of an East German Romeo sent to the West to recruit women as spies," wrote Jay Weissberg in Variety.

Von Trotta told the Financial Times in 2004 that her personal situation inspired the social criticism in her work as well as her interest in national historical events. "I was stateless as a child," she said. "My mother, who was not married when I was born, was an aristocrat, born in Moscow. Her family had to flee after the Russian Revolution and, because their roots were German, they came to Germany. But my mother, until her death, never accepted the German nationality. So on the one hand, being born in Berlin, I feel like a German. But on the other hand I've always been able to stand back and look detachedly at German society—because of having felt isolated and not totally accepted."

Books

Phillips, Klaus, New German Filmmakers: from Oberhausen through the 1970s, Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1984.

Women Filmmakers and Their Films, St. James Press, 1998.

Periodicals

Cineaste, Spring, 2004.

Detroit News, May 13, 2003.

The Financial Times, August 14, 2004.

New York Times, January 31, 1982.

Variety, June 28, 2004.

Online

Margarethe von Trotta, Contemporary Authors Online, http://galenet.galegroup.com (December 5, 2004).