"No American woman filmmaker can rank on a par with Margarethe von Trotta's impressive body of filmmaking. . . [She is] the world's leading feminist filmmaker." -- Ally Acker

Margarethe von Trotta is the most important female director of the New German Cinema.

Although von Trotta grew up in Düsseldorf, she gained her first experiences with film in Paris, where she acted in some short films as a teenager. She returned to Germany in the early 60s and started a degree in Fine Arts. She studied German and Romance languages in Paris and Munich and attended the drama school in Munich.

In an interview, von Trotta once said: “I came from Germany before the New Wave, so we had all these silly movies. Cinema for me was entertainment, but it was not art. When I came to Paris, I saw several films of Ingmar Bergman, and all of the sudden I understood what cinema could be. I saw the films of Alfred Hitchcock and the French Nouvelle Vague. I stood there and said, ‘that is what I’d like to do with my life.’ But that was 1962, and you couldn’t think that a woman could be a director. In a way, as an unconscious act, I started acting and when the New German films started, I tried to get in through acting.”

Her professional acting career started in 1965 with an engagement at the Stuttgart Theatre. Working closely with Werner Fassbinder and Volker Schlöndorff, she eventually became one the most famous actresses of New German Film. She met Volker Schlöndorff in 1969 and they were married in 1971. Around the same time, she began writing screenplays. Greatly influenced by the work of Ingmar Bergman, with whom she would eventually be compared, von Trotta’s first work as a director was with her husband (Der plötzliche Reichtum der armen Leute von Kronbach).

In 1975, they co-directed The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum. The earmarks of von Trotta’s signature style as a director are already detectable in this early film. Katharina Blum features explore the human elements of a politically charged plot. Yet, the elements of von Trotta’s films – female bonding, violence, the effects and repercussions of liberalism – show up even more in her first solo film. This first film that she wrote and directed on her own was The Second Awakening of Christa Klages (1977), which was followed in 1979 by the von Trotta classic Sisters.

The string of similar films that followed earned von Trotta the title of “the world’s leading feminist filmmaker,” which was attributed to her by Ally Acker, a fellow feminist author and filmmaker from New York. In 1981, von Trotta gained international success with Die bleierne Zeit (The German Sisters or Marianne and Juliane). In 1985, she made a film about Rosa Luxemburg with Barbara Sukowa in the title role. In 1989, von Trotta took part in the co-production Felix (with other renowned German women filmmakers Helke Sander, Helma Sanders-Brahms, and Christel Buschmann). She separated from Schlöndorff in 1991 and lives in Paris.

Her film about the division of East and West Germany, Das Versprechen (1994) received international critical acclaim and was her greatest commercial success. Since then, von Trotta has directed films for television, including the feature Rosenstraße (2003). In 2000, the mini-series Jahrestage was screened on German TV.

See Also

Beckman, Karen. “Terrorism, Feminism, Sisters, and Twins: Building Relations in the Wake of the World Trade Center Attacks.” Grey Room 7 (Spring 2002): 24-39. Available online

Beisler, Lorenz (et. al.) “Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Margarethe von Trotta, Michelangelo Antonioni.” Dokumentation Zurich: Filmstellen  VSETH/VSU (Winter 1991/92).

Levitin, Jacqueline, Judith Plessis, & Valerie Raoul. Women Filmmakers: Refocusing. New York: Routledge (2003).

Linville, Susan E. “Retrieving History: Margarethe von Trotta's Marianne and Juliane.” PMLA 106.3 (May, 1991): 446-458.

Phillips, Klaus ed. New German Filmmakers: Oberhausen Through the 1970s. New York: Frederick Ungar (1984).

Margarethe von Trottas neuer Film: Ich bin die Andere