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From George Orwell to Franz Kafka, the image of an all-pervasive state and media working in conjunction to control the people has been a powerful one within western culture. The imagery became even more important during the 1970s in West Germany, where the ever-expanding police force and the journalism world seemingly cooperated together to take isolated incidences of terrorism and create a mass hysteria in the public, justifying state abuses of civil powers with sensationalistic news stories and prominent political prisoners. Two of the best films made specifically dealing with the brutality and increasing broadness of terrorist investigations, 1975’s Die Verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum and 1978’s Messer im Kopf, attack the question of how violence--either mental abuse, actual physical harm, or both--can lead to further violence out of desperation and an overwhelming sense of loss of power over one’s own life. However, while Die Verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum seems to almost glorify the vigilante action taken by its heroine, Messer im Kopf takes a more ambiguous approach that leads the viewer to question the idea of truth and justice, and ultimately brings the audience to the question of who should stop this cyclical cruelty in society.
While both films could be enjoyed and analyzed without an introduction to the specific political climate that spawned them, especially in today’s setting of terrorist fears and government intervention, the historical background is important to fully understand the messages the directors are trying to convey. Starting in the late 1960s and lasting throughout the 1970s, domestic terrorism, mainly connected to the extremist group known as the Red Army Faction, was seen as an increasing and severe problem in West Germany. The early domestic terrorist actions, coupled with the international terrorists actions and a spectacularly bungled German police intervention at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich which led to seventeen deaths, were a major impetus to the newly-empowered Social Democratic Party to reform and technologically modernize the police forces in the early 1970s. The reforms brought a 25 percent expansion in the West German police force and an almost fourfold growth of federal budgetary allocations for police activities, and significant changes in the technology used to track criminal activities: for example, Rasterfahndung, a computer matching system, was developed to scan large amounts of data to identify overlapping “suspicious traits” to attempt to target police work. At one point in the 1970s, Rasterfahndung was utilized with files from West German utility companies, which were scanned to identify customers who paid only in cash or through third parties. Those customers were then scanned to check any residence registration, which was compulsory at the time, automobile registration, and receipt of social security or child care payments, among many criteria. Those who did not receive pensions, were not registered, and had no automobiles from the initial group of people who paid utilities only in cash were then considered to be suspicious persons, and traditional police investigations such as surveillance, would then be concentrated on these individuals. In 1975, the computer programs were expanded to include a method to reconstruct contacts between these suspects and their environment--other people and places they might have had dealings with. The new method included increasingly large segments of the population as potentially relevant to any police investigation, even as mere fringe contacts to a suspect. In other words, the mission of the West German police force was no longer strictly a reactive response to emergencies and current criminal behavior, but also included more invasive “preventative” measures as well.
The increased police surveillance technology was also accompanied by an increased police interaction with the press, specifically the extremely conservative Springer newspapers. Headed by rabid anti-communist Axel Springer, the Springer Press owned over half of West Germany’s newspapers and erected an enormous headquarters building, which blared headlines targeted to “enslaved Germans” in the Eastern Bloc, only yards away from the Berlin Wall. They became infamous for their hysteria-inducing stories and their lynch-justice mentality, often turning their sensationalist accounts of terrorist activity into links to any leftist group. To name just one example, Heinrich Böll, the author of Die Verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum, was heavily defamed by the Springer Press after he advocated the fair trial and safe carriage of Ulrike Meinhof, one of the Red Army Faction leaders. He was then subjected to police surveillance and searches and was denounced by right-wing politicians, despite the fact that Böll was generally an apolitical figure who was never involved in any radical activity. The Böll example of press baiting resulting in disastrous results for the individual was not uncommon; an even earlier example was Rudi Dutschke, the leader of the student radical movement Außer-Parliamentarische Opposition (APO). Dutschke, a popular target of the Springer Press, was shot outside his home on April 11th, 1968, by a young housepainter. The assault was commonly assumed to be political in basis, a form of vigilante justice enacted by a young right-winger after the constant, slanderous attacks on Dutschke by the newspapers. The Springer papers were also known to occasionally print stories about raids on houses, for example, before the raids had actually occurred, resulting in the accusation by many leftists that they were working in conjunction with one another to exacerbate a “witch-hunt mentality” used to justify the violation of civil liberties.
The two forces combined for an atmosphere which social theorist Oskar Negt described as having a “nightmare quality [...] which breeds fear of contact and self-censorship,” particularly for leftist intellectuals and sympathizers but also for the society as a whole. For example, in a 1974 survey, the police force in West Germany had a very good reputation, with 88 percent of the respondents finding them to be very sympathetic or sympathetic. In a survey conducted in 1980, however, the percentage of respondents marking the police as very sympathetic or sympathetic was down to only 41 percent, with only 24 percent of those between fourteen and twenty-nine years old responding positively. While these differences could be partially accounted for by differences in survey techniques--for example, the original study did not cite numbers for age groups, so it is possible the later survey included a far higher number of younger people, who are generally less likely to be sympathetic towards authority and more likely to be left-leaning, than the earlier one did--the data still implies some kind of decrease in public perception of the police as to whether or not their causes and the methods used to catch criminals were considered sympathetic or positive. Additionally, the later survey also indicated that only 15 percent of the population found the West German police to be tolerant, and only 17 percent characterized them as intelligent. The intellectual left was even less positive, warning that the combination of a rabid press confusing the public and a police force with increasing technological capacity and seemingly free reign was leading towards a surveillance of ideas, and not actual criminal activity. Or, in other words, the violent and isolated actions of the Red Army Faction and the need to defend against actual criminal activity had dissipated into a more general blighting of the entire left by the state and the media as potentially dangerous and a possible incitor of violent activity--regardless of whether or not violence was actually being perpetrated.
Heinrich Böll wrote his book, Die Verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum, after his lengthy brush with the Springer Press and police intrusion, which was quickly adapted into film format by Volker Schlöndorff and Maria von Trotta in 1975. The story unfolds over an incredibly short period of time and tells the story of Katharina (Angela Winkler), a young, apolitical, and respectable young woman who starts a love affair with a man believed by police to be heavily involved in underground activities. Katharina helps him briefly elude the police but then finds herself in the middle of an abusive, humiliating investigation and the subject of vicious news stories basically equating her with terrorism. The subtitle of both the written work and the film can be translated as “How Violence can Develop and Where it Can Lead,” and the story details exactly how the intrusion of state power and media manipulation into Katharina’s individual freedom leads her from being a quiet, polite, thoughtful woman to becoming a person who, ultimately, commits murder.
Schlöndorff and von Trotta tends towards utilization of melodrama to achieve their goal. There is a significant amount of black and white in the film: Katharina’s careful and judicious use of the language, even to the point of refusing to sign a police statement until the writer replaces the word “advances” with “tenderness” when describing her lover, starkly contrasts with the brash and abusive journalist Tötges (Dieter Laser), who continually refers to Katharina by the insulting and childish diminutive, Blumchen. The world here is mainly made up of good people and bad people, the corrupt and the just, though the film notably leaves two ambiguities: Katharina herself and her paramour. While Katharina is an extremely sympathetic figure, it is impossible to discern exactly just how involved she was in hiding a “known criminal,” and just how much she knew of her new boyfriend’s past before the police and journalist intrusion into her life. Her companion, on the other hand, never supplies any information about himself to the viewer in regards to his affiliations of his activities. He is completely unknown, referred to repeatedly as an “anarchist” without any reasoning, and it is apparent by the end of the film that his supposed terrorist activity is less interesting to the police and media than Katharina’s supposed role as an accomplice. The viewer is left with fairly limited information about the actual activities that precluded this investigation and its subsequent consequences, and has to make a judgment call about Katharina based more on the behavior of others than on her own statements and activities.
Schlöndorff and von Trotta, as noted previously, do give the audience a significant amount of ammo to make a judgment favoring Katharina by creating a world that is otherwise fairly unambiguous and slightly surreal. The world of news and state enters Katharina’s sphere in a very memorable scene, where a team which more resembles a guerilla warfare unit than any kind of recognizable police force enters her apartment by force, pointing their semiautomatic rifles right at Katharina, who has just sat down in her bathrobe for some coffee and breakfast. The sight of the slight, young Katharina, not even dressed or washed yet, juxtaposed with a virtual army of force is incredibly comic and jarring. The cops are ostensibly there to arrest Katharina’s friend, who is no longer in the apartment--but even he is somewhat slight, and very young. The sheer size of the group of police deemed necessary to catch these two, and the horrible attitudes they then display towards Katharina, is enough to turn a viewer away from the side of this so-called law and order. Meanwhile, the press is a far worse character to Schlöndorff and von Trotta: Tötges is all but directly blamed for the death of Katharina’s elderly and sickly mother, as he comes to her hospital bed and shows her photos of her blighted daughter and the accompanying headlines. The viewers get to watch Mrs. Blum’s vital signs go haywire as Tötges storms out of the room. Tötges is seen exchanging information with the lead police officer on the case repeatedly and can easily be described as the most reprehensible person in the film, writing story after story that is nothing but lies and exaggerations about Katharina and her acquaintances. The newspaper is the most horrible part of the ordeal for Katharina, because she is now being tried in public as well as in private. By the final scene, when he comes to Katharina’s apartment to convince her to sell her story to the tabloids, trying to gain sexual favors from Katharina while she sits, rigid and distant, in the dead center of a completely destroyed room, a completely destroyed life, the audience wants something hideous to happen to him. No one is saddened when Katharina shoots him point blank, because it is the violence he enacted against Katharina’s mental being that has caused the violence against his physical being. Katharina’s single act of violence was borne out of the despair of realizing that all other solutions to this conflict were impossible.
Reinhard Hauff’s 1978 film, Messer im Kopf, can be seen as both a complete opposite and a compliment to Die Verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum. While Schlöndorff and von Trotta dealt with a black and white depiction of villains and a somewhat ambiguous heroine, Hauff gives the audience a very unambiguously innocent hero in Hoffmann (Bruno Ganz), but a villain that suddenly seems sympathetic by the final shot, while supposedly sympathetic radicals and leftists seem almost like vultures surrounding the struggling hero. Messer im Kopf details the story of a well-known and respected biogeneticist whose estranged wife, Ann (Angela Winkler, again), has become involved with a radical student group. Hoffmann, in an effort to make amends, ends up at the student center the night of a police raid. Panicking, he runs inside to search for Ann and is followed by a young police officer, Schurig (Udo Samel). The officer then shoots Hoffmann in the back of the head, after which Hoffmann is apparently beaten as well, according to a doctor’s report later in the film. The brilliant scientist, when he arises from his coma, is suddenly left having to relearn all of his activities, from speaking onwards, from scratch, while attempting to reconstruct the events of that evening to find out exactly why he was put in this condition.
The film deals very subtly with the issues presented in Katharina Blum. The press is present throughout Messer im Kopf but only in glimpses: the viewer learns while Hoffmann is incapacitated in bed that the press is presenting him as a member of a terrorist organization, restating the police line as to why he was shot--namely, he supposedly stabbed Schurig. No one addresses the question at all as to how Hoffmann could have been in the motion of stabbing Schurig while getting shot in the back of the head. Another scene shows Hoffmann reading a magazine article about the crime, where there is a humorous juxtaposition between a rather goofy, posed shot of Hoffmann in a tuxedo, playing a violin, and a blaring headline accusing the biogeneticist of terrorist activity. At one point in the film, a reporter shows up in the hospital, asking to interview this supposed terrorist--who, at this point, cannot even remember the words to describe foods he wants besides applesauce. His presence in the press is somewhat disconcerting for Hoffmann when he starts to recover, but other people do not seem to mind the presence of the so-called terrorist so much: other patients ask for his autograph on occasion, and a running gag in the film involves an elderly patient gleefully pointing out Hoffmann to his nurse as “the man from the papers” every time he runs across him.
The police behave in a similar fashion to the press, showing up even though Hoffmann has no ability to meaningfully talk and needs rest, despite warning from the doctors to leave him alone. The chief investigator continually shows up at the hospital, trying to feed the still incoherent Hoffmann information and pressure him into making statements. One of the more horrifying sequences involves Hoffmann, still confined to a wheelchair, getting so desperate and frustrated that to get rid of the police officer, he struggles until he has removed his hospital gown and pretend to masturbate, in an attempt to offend the officer and convince him that he is unfit for questioning. Instead, the lead officer merely brings in Schurig to the room to “confirm” that Hoffmann is the man who stabbed him, increasing Hoffmann’s embarassment and alienation. Interestingly, though, while the lead officer on the case is clearly and repeatedly presented as a cold-hearted human being, Schurig starts to seem sympathetic from this very first hospital visit: he is very young and obviously extremely uncomfortable and ashamed of the situation at hand, unlike his boss, who seems to almost revel in humiliating Hoffmann.
The treatment of the left is not particularly more positive than the subtle ridicule of the press and the seemingly monstrous behavior of the lead investigator, which was an intriguing facet of the film. The radical group is mainly represented by Ann and her friend, Volker (Heinz Hönig). It quickly becomes apparent in the film that Ann and Volker are in a relationship, and that Volker caused the rift between Hoffmann and Ann that indirectly resulted in the entire mess. Volker is the leader of the student group that was being raided the evening Hoffmann was shot, and decides that Hoffmann is a perfect vessel for pushing the radical agenda, and he, like the lead police investigator, starts feeding Hoffmann information to “jog his memory,” which in honesty meant create a memory, since all memory of the night was erased from Hoffmann’s mind. His manipulative behavior seems little better than the behaviors of other, more traditionally ominous characters, especially considering that while he’s trying to convince Hoffmann to help him, he’s also stealing his wife. Or, as Hoffmann himself puts it in one of the very first things he says to Volker upon regaining ability to talk, “I play violin, or with knives. Volker plays with Ann.”
It is worth noting that, despite all of Volker’s sudden intentions, Hoffmann was never considered part of the radical movement. He had no dealings with this group prior to his shooting, except to come and occasionally see Ann. Few people in the center can recall him at all. Even though Hoffmann had no dealings with this group though, Hoffmann is the one who ended up gravely injured and declared the most dangerous terrorist of the group in the aftermath of the raid, by virtue of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It seems that the student center here serves as a microcosm of the greater leftist movement for Hauff, a concrete version of what Oskar Negt referred to as the “hazard zone” of surveillance: “whoever enters this area for any length of time does not need to provide any special reason for being considered suspect. He or she is already under suspicion.” Or, in the words of one Prussian police chief, “first the criminal must be found, then the crime will find itself.” Hoffmann, by virtue of a single bullet shot by an inexperienced officer, is now the criminal to be defended or prosecuted.
Despite all the seeming distractions and accusations, Hoffmann does recover fairly successfully, but he cannot quite recall the events of the night he was shot. He starts to believe the press reports and police claims, and starts to become certain that he did stab Schurig. After he asserts this to his doctor, the doctor asks him to draw a knife, but Hoffmann is unable to--he does not actually remember what a knife is, despite very positively telling people that he did, indeed, use a knife to stab another man. The doctor goes on to explain that there was absolutely no knife found in the room--the only knife to be found in this situation is the figurative knife that has been permanently inserted in the back of Hoffmann’s head, disabling him for an unknowable amount of time. From this point forward, the viewer gets to watch Hoffmann become increasingly angry, and the anger coupled with confusion starts to emulate the same level of despair and powerlessness seen from Katharina Blum. Where Katharina slips and has to admit to an intensely personal story of night-driving in Katharina Blum, Hoffmann finds himself making an incredibly nonsensical speech in front of a throng of reporters on his release from the hospital, which he ends by suddenly spitting out, “To all the police watching, you’ll be hearing from me.” Where Katharina destroys her own apartment systematically out of frustration, Hoffmann threatens Ann and Volker with a knife and then runs from his own home. And Hoffmann, like Katharina, seeks out a meeting with the person who caused him all of this pain to begin with.
The meeting between Schurig and Hoffmann, unlike the meeting between Katharina and Tötges, is not at all clear cut, however, nor is the outcome certain. After a confrontation with the lead police officer, where he is told “[the police] are not interested in you anymore, we do not want to talk to you,” Hoffmann just wants his question answered--why did the police officer lie?--but once in the man’s apartment, it becomes much more of a game. Schurig is terrified and tries to prove he was actually harmed in the scuffle, showing off a miniscule scar on his stomach that does not impress Hoffmann very much. He asks Schurig again why he lied, and Schurig gives in: no one ever asked him. He did not lie, he did not hide anything. He merely never answered questions that he was never asked. This brief omission is very powerful, because of the very subtle but strong point it makes in regards to the West German police force and exactly why civil liberties and political tolerance were such an important sticking point in the leftist debate: the type of reasoning Schurig is giving here for his innocence is reminiscent of the excuses given by the Durchschnittsbürger after World War II, that no one asked them or they just did not see. Many intellectuals of the 1970s made the point repeatedly about how ominous it was, in a country with a history of bringing the logic of political oppression to its ultimate, extreme conclusion, that this mass hysteria and focus on “sympathizers” and “guilt by association” was developing so strongly.
After this admission of lying by omission, Schurig then emerges from the kitchen with a knife, but while he was searching for the knife, Hoffmann happened upon Schurig’s gun, which is now aimed straight at the young police officer. After an increasingly desperate game of Schurig pleading for mercy and Hoffmann growing more and more cold, the film ends with Hoffmann calmly and rationally pressing the gun into the back of the policeman’s head as he lies prone on the floor, saying “Ich bin du”: I am you.
The ending of the film is chilling and uncertain, which serves Hauff well. The audience, who has spent the entire film rooting for Hoffmann to triumph over adversity and prove himself innocent, is now confronted with a supposed villain who amounted to nothing more than a nervous young man who made a mistake and was also manipulated. Schurig, a married man with a nice middle-class lifestyle, tries to defend himself but only halfheartedly; he contrasts very sharply with Schlöndorff and von Trotta’s Tötges, who, with his promiscuity and bad, flashy clothes, has all the stereotypical “sleazy bad guy” markings of melodramatic cinema, and who actually tries to propose to Katharina that he made her life better by giving her fame, as opposed to destroying it. Schurig is an apologetic, scared figure, and it is impossible for an audience member to root for Hoffmann to kill him. The scene of Hoffmann with the gun only lasts a minute or two in the film but seems to last for hours because of the high level of discomfort it causes.
Ultimately, it is this pervasive ambiguity that makes Messer im Kopf the stronger statement in terms of the query put forth by Heinrich Böll: How does violence develop, and where can it lead? In Die Verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum, the violence that develops is entirely mental, and it leads to an action that one would be hard-pressed not to sympathize with: an abused, slandered, and disenfranchised young woman murdering the lecherous journalist who destroyed her life. Schlöndorff and von Trotta, by making so many of their characters stereotypes of good and bad, make it very easy for the viewer to not just expect vigilante justice against the “bad guy,” but root for it. There is no overwhelming feeling that the cycle should stop; despite the directors’ objections, it does not seem like they are particularly against violence. In contrast, Hauff shows exactly how violence develops and where it leads, in a very similar process to the one experienced by Katharina Blum, except that when the audience gets to the expected vigilante denouement, no one wants Hoffmann to pull the trigger. The viewer has seen a radical behaving just as cynically and manipulatively as a head investigator, a police officer who has also been manipulated by the press. The world seems less black and white in Messer im Kopf, and Hoffmann’s desperation to regain his sense of power seems sadistic in this universe.
In short, Hauff seems concerned, more than anything else, with reflecting on the type of idea posited by the 1977 film Deutschland im Herbst (which, incidentally, featured a segment directed by Volker Schlöndorff and lists Heinrich Böll on the writing credits): when cruelly arrives at a certain point, it is no longer important who initiated it, it should only stop. By shooting his assailant, Hoffmann would actually become more sadistic in the viewer’s eyes than the assailant was, as it has now become obvious that this young man did what he did due to fear and inexperience and did not mean to shoot Hoffmann in the head, and was not involved with the subsequent beating Hoffmann received at the student center. He would have his revenge only in an impotent, bitter fashion--the system that created the situation would still be in place, the pathology of antiterrorist hysteria still extant. In the end, the two men do not become like Katharina and Tötges, symbolizing heroes and villains, or good causes and bad causes, but they remain as two individuals trapped inside of a society in a state of fear. The image of two otherwise completely respectable men trapped in such a horrific game of Russian roulette speaks strongly about the state of society and just how powerless even seemingly powerful men, like policemen and wealthy scientists, can become when the state and the media become too pervasive in the lives of the individual.