My Favorite Films, Plague Edition (Volume 33): Margarethe von Trotta

Die Bleirne Zeit (aka The German Sisters, Marianne and Juliane, 1981)

Directed by Margarethe von Trotta

Starring Jutte Lampe

German director Margarethe von Trotta (b. 1942) has made her name since the 1970s as a “feminist director”. The problem with labels like that is that they tend to stick and stereotype, especially for non-white, non-male directors. Would Spike Lee be engaged now to direct Titanic or Goodfellas?. Will Greta Gerwig, who was nominated for Best Director in 2017 (the last female so nominated) get to make something other than her two “women’s films” like Lady Bird (2017) or Little Women (2019)? Perhaps young directors always start with topics close to them culturally, but the best ones are allowed to branch out. We shall see.

Von Trotta had to also break out of an additional mold, as the wife of renowned German director Volker Schlöndorff (The Tin Drum), who, by the way, got the chance to make a decent version of a “women’s film”, The Handmaid’s Tale (1990). Most of von Trotta’s work consists of well-made, earnest, admiring, but slightly plodding portrayals of famous German women: Rosa Luxemburg (1986), Vision (about Hildgard von Bingen, 2009), and Hannah Arendt (2012). In common to these women is how they defied male-dominated professional boundaries and staked out their own path. That’s OK, but a bit limiting. Die Bleirne Zeit (Leaden Times) is different. It’s a complex film that looks at feminism from a unique lens, and was apparently much-admired by Ingmar Bergman, and won a top award at the 1981 Venice Film Festival.

The film is a semi-biographical treatment of two real-life sisters caught up in the revolutionary 1960’s-70’s. Marianne, played by Barbara Sukowa, leaves her husband and child to become a bomb-throwing anarchist as a member of the Baader-Meinhoff group (aka the Red Army Faction), a collection of young German communists who attempted to overthrow the German government using force in the 1970s. Her sister Julianne is the really interesting character. She loves, and admires the zeal of her sister, and fights herself (non-violently) for women’s issues such as the right to abortion. She thinks that her sister’s violence will distract from her more disciplined, orderly attempts to improve the lives of women. She is also appalled that her sister has abandoned her child to pursue her revolutionary aims; yet Julianne refuses to take care of this abandoned child, not wanting to disrupt her own career and ambitions. The child lands in foster care. Julianne has a sympathetic husband (an excellent Rüdiger Volker, who I reviewed in Wim Wender’s early movies a bit ago). The husband is a 1970’s prototype of a modern Millennial man, supporting his wife with minimal male posturing. But when Julianne becomes obsessed with the apparent prison-suicide of her sister, filling the house with forensic files, even he has his limits and leaves her.

What is so striking about this film is its demonstration of how women are caught in a trap between ambition and nurturing. This is not just due to external expectations—the film beautifully shows how Julianne herself wants order, and certain traditional women’s roles, yet bristles against these when it seems like they are forced down her throat. The two women in this film are an interesting hybrid of aspects of Red Guard leader Ulrike Meinhoff herself (seen below). I watched a fascinating documentary about the Baader-Meinhoff group which shows the young Meinhoff as an extraordinary intellect, able to argue circles around the condescending German men who try to critique her on academic talk-shows. Yet she too started as a mother of two children, leaving them (and her husband) when her revolutionary actions began in the 1960’s. She, like Marianne in the movie, was found hanged in her prison cell, and there was a prolonged controversy about whether this was truly a suicide. The brilliance of this film is its uncompromising depiction of the impossible decisions many women are forced to make between ambition, stability, and nurturing activities.

The other provocative thing about this film was how it showed that the revolutionary times of the 1960’s were not at all the same in different countries. In the US, the winner of WW II, kids rebelled against the smug suburban prosperity and complacency of their “winning” parents of the “Greatest Generation”. While the Vietnam War was one focus, the US rebellion was just as much about love, sex, hedonism, and avoidance of responsibility (by the way, including being drafted to kill in Vietnam). It also really accomplished something, bringing the country along to get the US out of the Vietnam War, and ending the most intense phase of US military adventurism. The French, being French, hit the streets of Paris protesting capitalism, US imperialism, consumerism, and rigid French educational hierarchy. Breaking the barriers, like The Marseillaise, so to speak. Germany was a bit different, and its easy to understand why. The parents that were being rebelled-against here were mostly ex-Nazis, a generation who built a “new Germany” from the rubble of WW II, but who eagerly sought to avoid discussion of their behavior 20 years earlier as Hitler-worshipers. The protests in Germany were not so widespread, but became far more violent in the actions of the Baader-Meinhoff group, among others. Bombings and shootings became common. The older generation framed it as a return to the violence of Hitler, but these highly educated kids reframed it as their response to the Nazi violence of their parents. All of this was very caught up in German themes of guilt, retribution, and violence. A little bit like an old joke about tourists trapped inside a hot, airless streetcar. The French tourist screams “Vive la liberté”, breaks the window, and jumps out of the street car. The American tourist opens the window, using the latch. The German tourist sits uncomfortably in silence, then goes home and beats his wife. Unfair, I know, but a metaphor for the 1960’s, as is this wonderful film.