Katharina Blums tapte ære

Welcome to “vorspiel”, the warm-up programme for Tyske Filmdager 2026. Get into the festival spirit with two modern classics of German cinema. Before this year’s festival opens with Volker Schlöndorff’s latest film, we’re showing one of his early, formative works of New German Cinema.

Housemaid Katharina Blum meets a young man at a party and spends the night with him. The next morning, the police are at her door, searching her apartment and questioning her. According to the investigators, the guest who has disappeared is a dangerous terrorist. The affair turns into a catastrophe, and when a tabloid newspaper gets involved and twists the “case” this way and that, Katharina’s world is turned upside down. At first, she meets the police’s actions with disbelief, but her sense of helplessness and resentment gradually grows, until in desperation she responds with violence and hits back.

The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (original title: Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum) is a 1974 film adaptation of Heinrich Böll’s story of the same name (published in Norwegian that same year as Katharina Blums tapte ære), and the first directorial collaboration between the then-married couple Margarethe von Trotta and Volker Schlöndorff.