Margarethe von Trotta

II.6 | Margarethe von Trotta on the set of Rosenstrasse (Courtesy of Margarethe von Trotta)

In the international landscape of feature film production, Margarethe von Trotta stands as the most prolific woman director and the one who has most consistently portrayed the emotional, psychic, and political universe of women.

Born in Berlin, she was drawn to cinema as a vocation while she was a young woman working and studying in Paris. She first entered the male-dominated world of filmmaking as an actress, starring in a dozen German films mostly in the 1970s, and as a screenwriter and assistant director in several other films. Her marriage to film director Volker Schlöndorff (whom she later divorced) gave her the opportunity to collaborate in the conception and screenwriting of two feature films (Summer Lightning, 1972; Coup de Grâce, 1976) and in the co-direction of a third one (The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, 1975). Her solo directorial debut occurred in 1978 with the film The Second Awakening of Christa Klages, a film that expresses some central concerns of the women’s movement of the 1970s.

This early phase of her filmic career coincided with the development of social movements and widespread political protest in Germany. This was also the context that gave rise to the “New German Cinema,” best known internationally through the work of filmmakers Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Volker Schlöndorff, Wim Wenders, and Werner Herzog. Their cinema explored a variety of social and political issues with which a new generation of West Germans were confronted. Von Trotta became very much part of this film movement, though she would soon develop her own approach to filmmaking as a feminist artist. Her activism in the women’s movement, in fact, deeply influenced her style and perspective, and from her first film to the recent Hannah Arendt, women have been at the centre of her cinematic stories.

Historical films have been part of her overall cinematic oeuvre. The four films we discuss here – Rosa Luxemburg (1986), Rosenstrasse (2003), Vision (2009), and Hannah Arendt (2013) – are the best known among a larger body of work that portrays women in a variety of contexts in German history. Taken together, they constitute a striking parallel to the development and affirmation of feminist historiography.

Our conversation sheds light on her social and political engagement as an artist as she comments on how her portrayal of a number of historical women was shaped by their relevance to present-day contexts. Also revealing is her discussion of historical sources, including personal correspondence, newsreels, and iconographic material, that she used for some of her films. The conversation also explores some of the major cinematic challenges that her commitment to portray some of those historical women entailed. For instance, she discusses her visual and dramaturgical rendering of the femininity of a medieval nun who is living in overwhelming institutional constraints, and her portrayal of the process of thinking and analyzing that is one of the main filmic accomplishments in Hannah Arendt.

BRUNO RAMIREZ: More than any other filmmaker I’m aware of, you have portrayed women who are caught in some system, whether ideological, religious, patriarchal, and their attempt to fight those systems or to free themselves from them is in many ways a struggle for self-realization. And in each of the films I’d like to discuss with you, those women are central not only to German history but also to the history of women and to history in general. So, I’d like to start by discussing how the contemporary context you were part of influenced your choice of a given topic and helped to shape the perspective you adopted in the film. If we start with your film Rosa Luxemburg, how relevant was she as a historical figure in the Germany of the 1980s?

MARGARETHE VON TROTTA: At that time in Germany there was a big peace movement because missiles had been placed in West Germany by the Americans and in East Germany by the Soviets. It was the first time in our German history that there was such a huge peace movement against this military confrontation. And so when I did Rosa Luxemburg, I wanted to emphasize her stand against the war. Of course, throughout her life as a militant she had been involved in many other issues, but I chose to focus on that particular conjuncture of her life and of German history that was so crucially important. I think that when you are making a feature historical film you cannot cover the whole historical reality; you have to search and draw out of that particular past what you think is meaningful for the present because you are living in the present. The idea is not to cover all the details as if I were writing a history book. I choose what I see as being important for the moment in which I’m doing the film.

BR: But besides the issue of militarism, wasn’t that also the time when, in most of Western Europe, communist parties and utopian visions of Marxism were in decline?

MVT: Yes, but in Germany many people became leftists after 1968. They were not leftists before because we did not have enough knowledge of our past. After the war, there was a total rupture in education, and when I went to school in the 1950s we mostly heard about ancient Greece, ancient Rome, and, in any case, much of the Germany history we were taught stopped before the First World War. Unlike people in East Germany, we knew nothing about Marxism and other radical movements, nothing about central figures such as Rosa Luxemburg. Nor were we taught about Nazism, Hitlerism, and all those murderous movements. It was as if a big silence had fallen on our past. We, my generation, learned about Rosa Luxemburg during the big demonstrations of ’68 against militarism and the Vietnam War. I remember the posters that demonstrators carried; they were mostly of Marx, Lenin, Ho Chi Minh, and Rosa Luxemburg – she was the only woman among those revolutionary icons. That’s how I saw for the first time the portrait of Rosa Luxemburg. Not only was she the only woman, but in those portraits she had a rather sad expression. It was quite a contrast with the portraits of the men who looked so energetic, so motivated by their beliefs. And so that image of her really struck me – and that was the first time I got interested in Rosa Luxemburg. But at the time I had no idea that one day I would make a film about her.

BR: What led you, then, to make a film about her?

MVT: The occasion to make the film came after the death of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. His last project before dying was in fact a film on Rosa Luxemburg. And after he passed away, his producer contacted me and said, “You have to do that film.” Peter Märthesheimer had already written the screenplay for Fassbinder, but once I read it I told the producer, “I can’t do it like this”; clearly, Fassbinder had other interests than I had. So I told him that if he gave me the permission to write my own script, to do the research and find out what I wanted to tell about her, we could go ahead with the project. The other reason why I did not want to do it is because I was a friend of Fassbinder, and for me it did not feel right to make that film right after his death. And the producer again insisted saying, “It is because you were a friend of Fassbinder that you have a responsibility to make the film, and also because you are a woman, and it’s much better that a woman treats that subject.”

BR: Once you decided to make the film, how did you orient your research?

MVT: When I read all the biographies of Rosa, mainly written by Marxist or communist authors, I could not find much about her private life. For them, what counted the most were her political ideas, as if the private person had nothing to do with those ideas. Only one historian, Peter Nettl, had written a little about her personal life. And so I had to search in her correspondence and by then there were about 2,500 letters – not all published. I went to East Berlin at the archives of the Marxist-Leninist Institute; they had all the manuscripts of her correspondence (later they were published into several volumes), so that I could read all her correspondence. I was allowed to read them but not to take notes, which means that I had to memorize as much as possible from my reading of those letters. And that was sufficient to make me aware of what I considered interesting and relevant for the film I had in mind.

BR: Because of the many scenes in the film in which Rosa engages in political controversy – whether with friends or in public forums – I imagine her correspondence must have been valuable in writing the dialogue.

MVT: For the dialogue but also to understand her, because she wrote so many letters to so many different people. By the way, this is true also in the case of Hannah Arendt, and I do think that personal letters are the best sources to understand a character; for you are writing to different persons in different manners and styles, even when these letters are more or less private or intimate. So, they allow you to discover another face of the figure you are researching.

BR: Although, as you previously said, the wider German public did not know much about Rosa Luxemburg, for Marxist scholars, orthodox or not, she must have still been a controversial figure. Were they critical about your portrayal of her?

MVT: Not all of them, but they criticized my focusing on her personal life. I don’t think it’s a fair criticism for I also portrayed her political ideas and showed her activities as a revolutionary. One is not simply “a revolutionary”: a revolutionary also has a body, a mind, feelings and emotions. All of those elements together make up a person.

BR: Moving from the First to the Second World War, from a political leader such as Rosa Luxemburg to ordinary German women, in your film Rosenstrasse you brought to light what I imagine was a little known event during the war – specifically, the demonstrations in Berlin by German wives whose Jewish husbands had been arrested by the Nazis and who were likely to be sent to concentration camps – and almost certainly to death. Although Rosenstrasse was released in 2003, you had tried to make that film in 1994 and had to give up.

MVT: Yes, I could not find the money to do the film because they said, “Oh it’s the time of the Nazis, the war, nobody is interested in that anymore.” In fact, in the early ’90s people wanted to forget about the war … It was the time for comedies, very silly comedies, and nobody wanted to talk about the past. And then at the end of the 1990s, all of a sudden, the atmosphere changed. In the original script, I was dealing with only that moment of German history, the winter of 1943, when those wives fought for the release of their husbands. But when I decided to resume the project, if I wanted to receive the financing from the film funding agencies, I could not re-present the old script – it would have not been accepted. So I had to rework it, and I added that portion of the story that happens in the present. I met Pamela Katz, who is from New York, and we worked together on the portion of the film that deals with the present. Later, Pamela and I also worked together on the script for Hannah Arendt.

BR: In the film, Lena Fischer, the fictional character who is your key figure during the wives’ demonstrations, is still alive and, in fact, in your new version of the script, it is through her remembering and recounting that those events of 1943 are portrayed in flashbacks. When you first started to work on that subject, were there still people alive who had been associated with that event and whom you could consult?

MVT: Actually, I met about ten people who had knowledge of those events because they were there when those demonstrations occurred, and they gave me firsthand information. There was also documentary information. But it was important for me to meet them to get the feeling for the moment, for the time, and for the people I wanted to portray. I also did quite a lot of reading on Jewish history up to the time of the war. For me, it’s always a pleasure to go deep into the historical material and to draw all I need for my story. This is also the case with my other historical films; and each time I have learned something quite valuable.

BR: As we know, when we write a screenplay dealing with a real historical figure, we have to invent characters and events for narrative and dramaturgical purposes. In Rosenstrasse we have one such case in that part of the film where Lena Fischer meets the Nazi minister Joseph Goebbels – an encounter that proves crucial for the release of those Jewish husbands. How would you explain your decision to people who are sceptical about mixing facts and fiction?

MVT: First of all, it was Goebbels who was responsible for the release of those detained Jews. In his diary, he mentions that event – about those women demonstrating in the street, for their number kept growing every day. In the film, I showed only up to three hundred women because we did not have the budget to have more extras. According to reports, they surpassed one thousand and some have said they were nearly three thousand. I don’t know the exact number. For me, what was important was not their exact number but the fact that at the beginning they were only a few and then that protest attracted new wives and their number kept increasing until they could not just be ignored. And it turned into a major problem because those women were Germans, they were not Jewish, and the authorities could not just shoot them down. They symbolized the virtue of being faithful to their husbands who were detained inside the building. Faithfulness was a very important issue at that particular time because the regime had sent all those soldiers abroad to various military fronts, and they needed to be certain that their wives or fiancés back home remained faithful. So that faithfulness was a highly priced value in that context. And those women were in fact being faithful but to the wrong men as they were Jews. You can see then the dilemma in which the authorities found themselves. This was the problem Goebbels had to face. In his diary he says, “I would liberate those Jewish men now, but then when the war is over I will hunt them one by one.” But he could never do that because by that time the war was so advanced and bombing campaigns by the Allied forces made it impossible. Still, he was the one who had to decide whether those men would be taken to Auschwitz or let free. So he was a key player in that story and that’s why I portrayed him in my film. Also, my son is a historian and an expert on the Nazi era; he had written his PhD thesis on Goebbels and propaganda films, and he helped me with the research (by the way he also makes documentary films, his name is Felix Moeller, and his last film is Harlan: In the Shadow of Jew Süss). Through his research, we found out that in February 1943 there were still some glamorous film premieres in Berlin, where Goebbels as the film minister was present, and therefore my main character could use the friend of both her and her brother, who was a star, and intrude herself at the film party to meet Goebbels. It is an example of fictional invention. But since Lena Fischer, my character, was part of the aristocracy, she could very well have gone to those high-society events, and so I think that her meeting Goebbels there is quite plausible.

BR: When we do the research and then move onto the writing of the screenplay, we have to be accurate in using our story material but at the same time we have to think visually. In my conversation with Paolo Taviani, he used an interesting metaphor when he said that for him and his brother it is like “writing with a camera.” Has this also been the case in researching and writing your films?

MVT: It is not always possible at the beginning of a project. For instance, if I have not yet seen the locations that will be used in the film it is difficult to think visually. But once I know those locations, then I can imagine beyond the basic storyline. I’ll give you an example. You’ll remember how Rosa Luxemburg starts: we only see a huge stone wall and the open sky in the background, and on the top of that wall a soldier comes from the right; the camera follows the soldier until he meets a second soldier; they greet each other and then they walk away in opposite directions. We understand they are guarding the place. The camera, then, goes slowly down along the stone wall – all the way to the ground. We then see Rosa Luxemburg walking on the snow with the raven, and we realize she is captive in that compound; and as she walks, she answers (in voiceover) the letter that Sonja Liebknecht (the wife of Karl Liebknecht) had written to her. In that letter, Sonja had asked why the war is lasting so long, and she says that it was such an injustice that Rosa and Karl were imprisoned. And in her answer Rosa tells her – I’m paraphrasing here – that it’s only a moment, you’ll see that better times will come and we will be the winners. So, back to the issue of imagery, there Rosa is the idealist, the utopian, with her idea of one day being in the socialist heaven; but for the moment, the heaven is full of soldiers and is run by governments, by dictators, by ruling classes. In other words, they have to go down, suffer through the struggle, but ultimately they’ll make it to the socialist heaven. For now she is forced to be where the soldiers are: it’s not yet the time to ascend to the socialist heaven.

BR: To continue on the subject of transposing visually certain narrative ideas, in two of your historical films, Vision and Hannah Arendt, you must have been confronted with a major challenge. For, in the former case, Hildegard’s visions were so central to understanding her monastic vicissitudes and, as your film shows, those visions could have sent her to the stake as a heretic. In the case of Hannah Arendt, you had to portray the process of thinking, for much of her activity in the film involves her observing, analyzing, and reaching conclusions with regard to the Eichmann trial.

MVT: As to the visions that Hildegard had, it’s so difficult to render that visually, and so I decided not to show them because they were so associated to esoteric Christian iconography and I did not know how to translate those medieval visions in terms of our time. We tried to find various ways but soon realized they were nonsense and looked kitsch, so I tried to simplify that aspect. In one case, a vision is described through a letter she dictates to her assistant, and I only showed the very first vision she had, where she sees a strong light and hears a voice. That is the only one I portrayed.

BR: In some way, it seems to me, that striking opening scene of the film where people are living through the last night of the millennium, believing that the world is coming to an end, works quite well in setting the story within a specific time frame.

MVT: Yes, I used a similar idea for the beginning of Hannah Arendt, but in that sequence of Vision, it is very fuzzy – you only see as through a thick fog and only colours, and then the image becomes clearer and clearer until you see the group of men on horses coming from the woods as they take the child to the abbey. And so for me the past is blurred because it is so far away, you can barely get into it, and you have to wait – wait until it comes to us. In Hannah Arendt, the opening sequence is all black, and then you see in the distance the headlights of a vehicle coming toward us – it’s like seeing from a distance two eyes in the dark that slowly and gradually move toward us. And that was my way of showing that my story comes from the past. It happened in 1961. It comes to us until we can understand where we are in the film and where the story begins.

BR: In Vision, a story that takes place within a very rigid and constraining religious milieu, I was struck by how well you bring out and portray the femininity of a medieval nun such as Hildegard. Would you like to comment on how you approached that aspect of the film?

MVT: As with all my female portrayals, to get close to her I used mainly her correspondence, and she corresponded quite a lot with important representatives of the Church of her time, even with Barbarossa, the king and emperor, but also with other nuns. For me, the most interesting were her letters to the family of the young nun and friend, Richardis, as she tried to get her back into her monastery. She even wrote to the pope for help to make her come back. You could feel her deep desperation in these letters, and that made her for me so human and touching: a “saint” woman who becomes a very ordinary one when personal feelings such as affection and emotions are involved.

BR: How relevant was Hildegard – for you personally and for the German context in which you made the film?

MVT: Actually, the idea of making a film about her came to me before I did Rosa Luxemburg. Our German feminist movement of the seventies searched for strong and “emancipated” women in the past, and she was one we discovered. But then in the eighties there was more interest in political filmmaking and I didn’t believe I would have a chance to find a producer interested to that kind of project. When I finally made the film she was already well-known in Germany, but mainly for her “herbal recipes” and healing methods, and I was interested in showing her total personality because for me she was truly a multitalented woman.

BR: I know from reading some of your interviews that you are uncomfortable with being labelled “a feminist filmmaker.” Yet, considering the enormous importance of your work for an understanding of women’s emotional and political universe and of the stakes involved for them in a variety of historical settings, how would you characterize your perspective?

MVT: As a matter of fact, I was a feminist and I still am – one can see it in my work. But when you are labelled “a feminist filmmaker,” it becomes too restrictive and sounds too much like being a sort of female warrior who has no interest in the “souls” of her characters. Since my master was and still is Ingmar Bergman, a rigid feminist perspective would limit my research for inner conflicts to only political and social ones.

BR: Film is a collaborative art form par excellence and we know how important can be the contribution of the various film crafts. In particular, I’m thinking of the dramaturgical dimension of filmic storytelling and of Barbara Sukowa, who you have cast as lead role in several of your films. I’m curious to know, does she prepare for her role in order to give credibility to a historical character?

MVT: She is such an intelligent actress and she prepares herself very, very thoroughly. I had already seen in Rosa Luxemburg how she works. Then I had her play the role of Hildegard in Vision, and now of Hannah Arendt – this has turned out to be our trilogy of important historical women. She reads everything I read during my research. In Rosa Luxemburg, for example, she even found an anti-war speech made by Rosa that was better than the one I had used in writing my first script. She came one day with that document and she said, “this speech is better than the one in the script.” And I took it because she was right. I must tell you something about that anti-war speech Rosa gave in 1914: a few years ago, they had a retrospective of some of my films in Israel and Rosa Luxemburg was shown also. When the film got to that sequence in which Rosa gives her anti-war speech, people in the audience started to applaud – they transposed that speech from the German past to their Israeli present and to their war! So sometimes it’s amazing how viewers watch something happening in the past – something one might say only belongs to the past – but for them it has relevance for their present.

BR: Which makes me think of the speech Barbara Sukowa delivers at the end of Hannah Arendt. In many ways, it brings together many strands of Arendt’s thought about the Eichmann trial and raises the moral issues so effectively. Still, it’s a seven-minute speech!

MVT: That speech is a sort of composition that summarizes her thoughts. Indeed, it’s the longest speech you see in a film – you never see a seven-minute speech in a film! I could do it also because Barbara Sukowa was so brilliant in delivering it – because with another actress who couldn’t be so concentrated and at the same time so emotional it would not have worked. She is really a genius!

BR: As both a historian and a screenwriter, I think that your use, in the film, of the black-and-white documentary footage of the Eichmann testimony was a brilliant idea. There we have a historical source that spectators have direct access to but also one that allows you to adopt a certain dramaturgical style. Can this be considered another example of “thinking visually” while you were doing the research for the film?

MVT: From the beginning of the project I knew I had to use those reels. But let me backtrack for a moment: when I decided to make a film on Hannah Arendt, working with Pamela Katz, we first thought of covering much of her life; we soon realized that it would have meant jumping from one event to the other of her life, and that it would be much better to focus on those crucial four years of her life. That’s when I remembered a documentary I had seen at a movie theatre several years earlier – I think it was in 2001 or so – made by an Israeli filmmaker. Its title is The Specialist, and it deals entirely with the Eichmann trial using the footage of the trial extensively. So when I thought back of that footage, I knew right away that I had to use it in my film. And I’ll tell you why: Arendt’s theory about Eichmann – that he is thoughtless, not stupid yet thoughtless, that he is a bureaucrat, a mediocre man who cannot think on his own. All this you can only see in that footage, in that real-life document. If in the film I had an actor play the role of Eichmann, as a spectator you would only see the brilliance of the actor’s performance, and you couldn’t concentrate on the appalling mediocrity of the real Eichmann.

BR: Still, you must have made a decision on how to use best that footage in the film.

MVT: Yes, when we did the research in Israel, we went to the location where the trial had taken place. We saw that below the courtroom floor, in the basement, there was the room that had been set up as a press room. At the time of the trial, they had put video monitors on the wall of that room so that journalists could follow the proceedings. Also, one could smoke in the press room but not in the courtroom. Knowing that she was such a heavy smoker, I thought it plausible that she would follow the proceedings from that room, as in fact my film shows. Putting her in the courtroom and at the same time showing the Eichmann footage separately would have undermined the film’s style. At the time, an American crew filmed the whole trial and they did it through the images coming from the monitors. But the idea of putting her in the press room among other journalists and watching those images in the monitor worked also at another level, and this is also in connection to a point you had raised earlier: and that is because we can focus on Arendt as she watches him. In this way, I could portray her while in the process of observing him, of trying to analyze him and trying to understand.

BR: In the film, thinking in order to understand is constantly contrasted to letting an ideology do the thinking for you, so to speak.

MVT: She was really an independent thinker; and I think independent thinking is very important for us today. Nazism of course was an ideology, and Eichmann gave up his faculty of thinking to serve that ideology. Everyone has that faculty – it’s like a gift from nature; but so many people give up this faculty to an ideology, to the media. To have this capacity to think on your own, every moment, to try to make sense of reality with your eyes and your mind – that’s so important.

BR: Besides the four historical films we have discussed and which I think are the most known internationally, you have turned to the German past with two other films: The Two Sisters, where you move from the war to the 1960s and onto the 1980s, and The Promise, in which you dealt with the two Germanys, from the building of the wall in 1961 up to the crumbling of the wall in 1989. Considering both the quantity and the quality of that filmic production, how would you feel then if I said that, in some important ways, you have been also a historian?

MVT: Well, I’m interested in considering it – but always artistically and through my eyes as a woman and as a German citizen. On the other hand, when I look at my life since my childhood, I have this feeling too – of being a stranger in my own country: I am in Germany but I’ve looked at Germany through the eyes of a stranger. In a way, when I die, I would like to leave a portrait of the past century.

September 2013