Margarethe Von Trotta - Career

Career

Her first input on a film, before making a solo-career out of it, was on Volker Schlöndorff’s The Sudden Wealth of the Poor People of Kombach (1971), which she also acted in. In 1975, they proceeded to co-write and co-direct The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, which was based off of an adaptation of Heinrich Bölls novel that dealt with “political repression in the Federal Republic.” Within this first film of von Trotta’s, one can see the conflict “between the personal and the public” that resonates throughout her early film career. The female characters within the story must occupy suffocating spaces that von Trotta uses to represent the confinement that women are subjected to in a world run by men. Von Trotta was in charge of supervising the performance aspect while Schlöndorff dealt with the film’s mechanics. As a director, he was not considered to be very audacious, while von Trotta’s strong suit was in how she directed the film’s actors “through whom she creates her story.” Therefore, the two were able to complement each other. Their film was considered to be “the most successful German film of the mid-1970s.” The couple collaborated on one more film, Coup de Grâce (1976), where von Trotta helped to write but not direct the work, before von Trotta branched off into her own career.

Trotta’s first solo film was Das zweite Erwachen der Christa Klages, or The Second Awakening of Christa Klages (1977), which focused on “a young woman’s political radicalization.” This film presented multiple subjects that Trotta’s films would be known for in the future: “female bonding, sisterhood, and the uses and effects of violence.” The film’s script used real-life information about the seizure of school teacher Margit Czenki from Munich.