No Honour on the Red Terror Trail

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TIM property, he fails to go on to analyse the development of private property and the contradictory process in which it changes.

To equate the petty strife of Bronze Age tribes with the catastrophic struggles of the imperialist epoch is patently ridiculous.

Since Leakey sees the development of the human mind, human culture, as a smooth one, a process of enlightenment, he is left with the humanistic "solution" . of "co-operation" and "understanding" between nations, for the crisis of humanity that the imperialist epoch represents.

The brotherhood of man of which he talks will only be achieved by the world proletariat under the leadership of a new revolutionary party. There lies the hopes for the future of the human race.

Such a party will need a vigourous understanding of human society in order to formulate a scientific gramme. This book will assist in that.

Despite its price, every class-conscious worker should read it. "The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum" was made in 1975-before the latest wave of anti-terrorist" repression and press hysteria which followed the kidnapping of Hans Martin Schleyer last year.

It reflects instead the period during which the original Baader-Meinhof group were being rounded up and imprisoned.

The film is based on the book of the same name by Heinrich Boll who has himself been a victim of press attacks for daring to suggest that the German state's treatment of people awaiting trial for "terrorist" activities was somewhat excessive Deaths in prison That treatment not. only involved torture and the denial of prisoners' democratic rights but has led to the mysterious deaths in prison of Urike Meinhof, and more recently Baader, Ensslin and Raspe.

Despite the efforts of forensic scientists to "prove" that they committed suicide, the events surrounding their deaths, even those made public, point towards murder.

This film does not deal with the treatment of political prisoners, or with the clampdown on democratic rights which the Social-Democrats, liberal Free-Democrats, and Christian Democrats alike have called for and enforced (after all these anarchists "threaten our democracy").

Hysteria

Instead, it is a study of the role of the press in creating the atmosphere of hysteria which is a necessary prelude to that attack.

Katharina Blum is an innocent. She meets Ludwig Gotten (an "anarchist" according to police and press) at a party and takes him home to her flat.

He is under police surveillance and in the morning the flat is raided by a mob of police, complete with marksmen armed with only mildly political (he deserted from the army and robbed the regimental safe) but Totges and the police seize on every slight indication that Blum might be a "red".

A distant • relative of Blum's voluntarily emigrated to "the other part" of Germany; she kept a quotation from Marx as a bookmarker-obviously this woman has the most politically dangerous opinions.

Thinly veiled

The main purpose of the film is as a thinly-veiled attack on the newspapers of ex Nazi Axel Springer.

Die Zeitung is the Bild Zeitung in thin disguise.

Bild Zeitung is the most popular daily in West Germany, notorious for its witch-hunts of militants, communists, homosexuals and other "dangers to safety"

It is also the paper responsible for the prosecution of Boll himself.

We are left with the general impression that there are "good" bourgeois news papers and "bad" ones.

Crude line

A policewoman tries to comfort Blum by showing her cuttings from other paperswhich only mention "Katharina B" and show no photographs.

Of course not all papers pursue the crude line of attack of Springer's, publications, but the German capitalist press has been united in its advocacy of harsh measures against anarchists, terrorists and others who "endanger cemocracy".

Police methods and brutality are only touched upon, although at the beginning of the film it seems that they might be the main target.

However the collusion between police and press is made clear with the swapping of information between the police chief and public prosecutor and the reporter Totges.

Mutually beneficial

They have a cosy, mutually beneficial relationship. The police give the reporter details about the case in return for the handy titbits which Totges digs up (or makes up) about Blum's background.

Despite the limitations, the Lost Honour of Katharina Blum is highly successful in recreating the hysteria of which Katharina Blum is the victim and the fear and persecution she suffers.

Perhaps the most significant comment on German bourgeois democracy is provided by one of Blum's associates. He points out that he is the only person who knows Katharina well and yet has not been slandered in the press, and adds:

"Perhaps that's because I'm an ex-Nazi".

By Ann Evans