Two strong women

Perhaps the praise given to women when they make films about women is something that has literally to be swallowed like a bitter pill. Over a period of decades, film director Margarethe von Trotta and actress Barbara Sukowa have created a fundamentally unique series of film portraits of strong female personalities. Three are particularly outstanding: Rosa Luxemburg (1986), about the icon of the early 20th century workers’ and peace movement; Vision (2009) about the influential medieval nun and universal scholar Hildegard von Bingen, and now Hannah Arendt (2012) about the German-American Jewish philosopher whose book The Banality of Evil put forward one of the 20th century’s elemental figures of thought.

Whereas it cannot be pointed out often enough that these are films by women about women, as this is still the exception rather than the rule, this kind of “women’s etiquette” still harbours the threat of making what is great and unique about these films seem minor by assigning them to a niche – as if the films could be of interest at most for women. Yet the art of director Margarethe von Trotta consists of making “women’s films” that demonstrate the nonsense of such categories. This can also be put another way: even someone interested not in feminism but only in German cinema and German history simply cannot avoid von Trotta and Sukowa.

In its own particular way, the guiding principle of the women’s movement, “The private is political”, is woven as a narrative motif through all von Trotta’s films, from her first feature film in 1977, The Second Awakening of Christa Klages, in which a woman robs a bank so as to save a children’s nursery school, to Hannah Arendt. Yet what this film director understands by the private being political is so much more than, for 
example, just showing a famous philosopher in her kitchen. Hannah Arendt, in which Barbara Sukowa plays the title role, deals with a relatively brief phase in the philosopher’s life – the period in the early 1960s when Arendt travelled to Jerusalem to report on the trail of Adolf Eichmann, who was co-responsible for the organization of the Holocaust and the murder of millions of people. Her report instigated fierce debates. In it she labelled Eichmann an unspectacular “Hanswurst” or buffoon, who in her eyes personified not evil but banality. Von Trotta’s film does actually present Arendt’s more private side: after leaving Europe and going into exile in the United States in the 1940s, she is shown as a caring wife, an adept cook and host, a friend making jokes about intimate topics, and a mentor giving advice on relationships. The remarkable thing is, however, that these private scenes do not reveal another “more female” side of an otherwise sharp-minded philosopher. Instead, those typically female features form part of a continuum. That a world-­famous philosopher should be shown 
cuddling her husband may be seen by many as a contradiction. According to von Trotta’s film, this did not involve a crisis of identity for Arendt. She did both, cook and think, with one and the same directness, that could border on ruthlessness.

For Rosa Luxemburg at the beginning of the 20th century things may have been quite different. The film Rosa Luxemburg presents its title character as a strong woman with many contradictions, an in no way undaunted heroine who rebelled against both social and private constraints and in doing so was not always able to attune her personal wishes to her social goals. That film won von Trotta a Gold Band, and Barbara Sukowa Best Actress both in Cannes and at the German Film Awards. The director and the actress had met some time previously. The cinema career of both women was associated with the name of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Von Trotta had acted in several Fassbinder films in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but then she quickly moved on to directing, initially at the side of her film director husband Volker Schlöndorff. Barbara Sukowa arrived on the scene of what was no longer New German Film a decade later, when Fassbinder cast her in Berlin Alexanderplatz in 1980.

The first time Sukowa was directed by Margarethe von Trotta was in 1981, when she starred in Marianne and Juliane, the film that brought von Trotta her international breakthrough. In that film, too, Sukowa basically personified an iconographic figure in German history: Marianne, who is driven underground and into armed struggle by her heightened sense of justice, alludes to the 
real German terrorist Gudrun Ensslin. The film gained numerous prizes both for the director and the leading actress. But their careers certainly did not proceed in parallel. Margarethe von Trotta’s life was marked at an early stage by a kind of vagrancy: she was born during the war, in 1942 in Berlin, the daughter of the artist Alfred Roloff and his wife, who was from the Baltic region and of aristocratic origins. After the war she and her mother ended up in Dusseldorf, at first almost stateless. As a young woman, von Trotta gained expe­rience in all sorts of fields, attending a commercial college, living for some time in Paris, doing an art course in Dusseldorf, changing to Romance and German Studies in Munich, only to break off again and attend acting school. This erratic feature of her biography only stabilized when she found her way to the New German Film – and also found her constant theme: portraits and biographies of women. Only very few female film directors have centred their work on women as repeatedly as von Trotta has, but without ending up telling what is traditionally understood as stories of “women’s fates”. What characterizes von Trotta’s film is that they always focus on the interaction between social constraints and personal needs. They are not “films about the movement”, they are always about individ­uals, about singular, stubborn, often sharp women.

Barbara Sukowa has proven to be the ideal person for such difficult female roles. Born in Bremen in 1950, her ageless appearance already has something which benefits the films – an independence betraying a strong character. Sukowa, who first made a name for herself in theatre and had her inter­national breakthrough in the title role of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Lola (1981), can actually do two things: embody an emblematic figure of male fantasy like Lola, who thrives fully on her sexual aura, and a nun like Hildegard von Bingen, whose appeal is her spirituality, and now, in addition to that, a philosopher like Hannah Arendt, who is completely determined by her thinking. Through their film portraits, Margarethe von Trotta and Barbara Sukowa engage in their very particular way in historiography, given that these are all women who through their stubbornness, intelligence and mature womanliness also embody an import­ant aspect of German identity. ▪