ABSTRACT
The film was inspired by the real-life experience of a young woman, Margit Czenki, who robbed a bank in order to prevent a daycare centre from being closed, and this is the model for the film's main character, Christa Klages. It is important to realize that the political climate in which von Trotta made her film was one of profound conservatism. Student protests on West German
university campuses against conservative university structures and inadequate conditions in the late 1950s soon developed into protests against the capitalist values of West German society and government, the rearmament of their country, the Vietnam War, and dictatorial regimes. While a political organization – the German Socialist Students Union (SDS) - emerged from this, political extremists ventured into terrorist activity, founding the Red Army Faction (RAF). Terrorism increased its presence throughout the 1960s and 1970s, culminating in October 1977 with the assassination of the president of the Employers' Association, Hans Martin Schleyer; the hijack of a Lufthansa aircraft to Mogadishu; and the apparent suicides of three key members of the Baader-Meinhof group – as the RAF came to be known during that period – in Stammhein prison while under maximum security.6 The federal government moved to counter the rise of terrorist activity with the introduction of the Berufsverbot in 1971, a decree aimed at preventing radicals from assuming positions within the civil service.7 Nor was the film industry exempt from censorship: virtually dependent on the federal government for financial support, the German film industry was governed by a law that forbade offending against the Constitution (amongst other things). Unless they were privately funded, films that dealt overtly with politically and socially sensitive issues simply could not be produced.8 Christa Klages, however, is not aimed at providing a titillating account of urban terrorism. The film does not end with the robbery as denouement; rather, it uses it as the event that sets off everything else. Yet, it cannot be
Combined with this thread of terrorism is a concern for feminist issues that permeates the whole film, as evidenced by the motivations for the robbery as well as by von Trotta's treatment of the individual development of three women. The student protests, with their stand against oppression and authoritarianism, provided a space within which the new women's movement could emerge in Germany during the 1960s. The director Helke Sander is generaily credited with bringing the women's movement into the media, and hence, to public attention, at an SDS conference in 1968 when she spoke up against the lack of representation of women's issues within the student movement itself. With regard to film, Sander also co-organized, with Claudia von Alemann, the inaugural International Women's Film Seminar in West Berlin in 1973, the first of its kind in the Federal Republic.9 In 1974, Sander also founded the journal Frauen und Film, which is today "the oldest feminist journal on film anywhere."10 Although avenues for the discussion of film within a feminist context were emerging, the practice of feminist filmmaking encountered many barriers in the early years of the 1970s: it was commonly assumed that women who could be called feminists simply could not be objective about matters related to the women's movement. If women filmmakers addressed issues raised by the women's movement, then they were likely to be labelled feminists regardless of whether or not they had any association with the movement. Women filmmakers who were involved or even thought to be associated with the women's movement were prevented from making films on the basis of their allegiances, whether real or assumed.11 It was not until the second half of the 1970s that women filmmakers would be permitted to focus their cameras on issues related to the women's movement. Despite the gains that had been achieved by the movement,12 it was still a time when "the majority of the public, who at any rate felt no special sympathies for the new women's movement, was under the impression that feminism was necessarily proclamatory, rigorous and, for that matter, not especially entertaining."13 It was within this context that von Trotta's film was screened.
