“Adapted from the Heinrich Böll novel which was in turn based on a real incident, Katharina Blum has frequently been compared with Costa-Gavras' Z for its pace and implications as a political thriller. After sleeping with an army deserter and suspected terrorist, a domestic servant finds herself persecuted and victimized by a police investigation and subsequent press coverage which turns her past into lurid sensationalism. The target of abusive mail, obscene phone calls and voyeuristic social disgust, something in her eventually snaps.... Coming after the post-Watergate glorification of the role of the press as ‘truth-tellers,' Katharina Blum unabashedly makes its target the dubious practices of the right-wing German tabloid press.
“‘Like A Free Woman (see July 27), which von Trotta starred in, The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum is a film about modern woman--about the ways in which a woman becomes most vulnerable when she tries to “go it alone.” In striking out, the struggling divorcee of A Free Woman, like the intensely private, even prudish Katharina Blum, forfeits the protections of the law and the solicitude of men, vouchsafed her for as long as she abided by the rules of the game. These rules are based on fundamental hypocrisies: for instance, that a Wife behave in one way (committed to family and home, her queendom) and a Single Woman in a diametrically-opposed manner--free, flirtatious, and game, both designed to sustain and flatter the male ego. For a woman to cultivate an area of the self that owes nothing to men, as these heroines do in vastly different ways, is an offense against patria and patriarchy and, as both films show conclusively, doomed to ridicule or failure' (Molly Haskell, Village Voice).” --Richard Kwietniowski