The German Sisters

18/01/2026

Film    Download PDF  

Collatoral Damages

The German Sisters initially might seem an issue film, a work determined to explore the political through the narrative exigencies of the personal. In such an exploration, the story uses the political to add novelty to the drama, and uses the drama to give emotion to the politics. This can take the form of heroic narratives or domestic demands, the biopic exploration of a person changing their nation (Gandhi, Braveheart, Lincoln), or a situational event that will allow familial tensions to be revealed and often resolved (The Day After Tomorrow, Interstellar, The Lost Bus). The problem is twofold: how to allow its story to be told conventionally, and how to make the viewer aware of a political topic? What doesn’t happen in such instances is that the subject deforms the form – the film remains smoothly narrational and suitably topical.
Margarethe von Trotta’s The German Sisters doesn’t quite do this. From a certain perspective, the film can seem too obvious – too many scenes of political explication and personal expression are put into dialogue rather than visually dramatised. Near the beginning of this film about two sisters, one of whom is politically radicalised, the other politically engaged, the politically engaged Juliane (Juta Lampe) is speaking to Marianne’s ex, Werner, who is the father of Marianne’s child. As they discuss Marianne and the son, Jan, Juliane insists the boy can only stay for a few days. Werner insists he needs ‘to get out of this rut and start working again’, and stop obsessing over Marianne. (Barbara Sukowa) Just after Werner says that he and Juliane aren’t so different from Marianne, and that they all share the same ideas, before adding, ‘‘only we’re too cowardly, or too sensible.’’ There is no subtext to what the characters say, but one might justify this by insisting these are intellectual characters who have no difficulty expressing what is on their mind. Yet this could seem an easy way to justify obvious dramaturgy. A better answer perhaps would be insist that Von Trotta wants to create less subtext than uncertainty: these are characters who know what they think, but don’t quite know how to live. They are in a capitalist bourgeois society with beliefs that run contrary to their own, and where the sort of existence they wish to lead isn’t easy to square with overthrowing the state. The film we realise isn’t about subtext but paradox: the difficulty in leading a life contrary to bourgeois demands, if these demands are there in characters who have children, homes, relationships and jobs. What matters, the film seems to propose, is how to move towards disentangling the contradictions.
After Werner leaves, saying he will be back, the film cuts to a shot of a car in the woods, the white car we have seen earlier, as this ex takes his son to Julianne. We might assume he has taken his life, and this is alluded to shortly afterwards, and revealed a few scenes later, when Marianne and Juliane meet up and discuss his death. We may believe his demise isn’t so much incidental as collateral, part of the damage done in trying to live alternatively. We offer the word in italics, all the better to comprehend the difference between a life that deals with paradoxes and one that retreats from contradictions. An alternative life has become an alternative lifestyle. Ancient Purity magazine offers some of the options: minimalism, living off-grid, a nomadic existence, communal living, polyamory and veganism. All well and good, but these are usually lifestyles  that are often reduced to a buzzword: digital detoxing and plant-based diets, digital nomadism and breadcrumbing. This isn’t the language of radical change, but that of personal options. What works for me?
Marianne can appear far more selfish than those seeking alternative living when she says, after hearing Werner has killed himself, that ‘I’ve no time to mourn the death of a neurotic intellectual’, and by showing irritation that he hadn’t found a place for Jan before his suicide. But that would be to simplify her existence, reducing it to an alternative lifestyle instead of an alternative life, one that is based on personal selfishness as opposed to social selflessness. While we should be wary of idealising these figures of social discontent, we oughtn’t either to ignore the idea of sacrificing oneself for a greater social good. Von Trotta’s film was released in 1981, as if taking stock of the period it was coming out of, and the era it was moving into: from the radical hope offered from the late sixties and through the seventies, to the neo-liberal conformism that was ushered in, not especially in Germany, but chiefly in Britain and the US, with Thatcherism and Reaganism, through deregulation and the steady erosion of the state. If the radicals of the 1970s wanted the oppressive capitalist state to dissolve into a benign socialist one, instead, what happened was that capitalism increasingly hardened into ever greater concentration of wealth in the hands of the rich. Nations became weak next to corporations, with the individual gaining or losing enormously. Diego Fusaro noted that ‘’the proletariat itself becomes a ‘precariat,’ condemned to flexibility and nomadism, to mobility and the breaking of all solid ties, according to the new systemic needs of turbo-capitalism.’’ (The Postil)
It isn’t that Marianne is a bad person because she is relatively indifferent to Werner’s death and her child’s parentless status; it is that such notions have little value when pursuing far greater ones than the grubbiness of the family unit. What would be the point of trying to make good on the domestic, if it has to fit into a broader patriarchal structure? When Thomas Elsaesser sees that men have no significant role in The German Sisters (nor in Von Trotta’s earlier Sister, or the Balance of Happiness), he adds that the director leaves little doubt that ‘’the self-destructive identification patterns derive from a displaced or repressed mother-daughter relationship which, however, forcibly implies the absent father.’’ (New German Cinema)
However, the film’s purpose perhaps rests on returning to the importance of the obligations and intimacies of families, without the bourgeois expectation, nor the political negation. If we propose that the film might appear didactic rather than subtextual, as characters often confront each other directly, this is partly because Von Trotta wants a dramatic form that can explore the paradox through the dialectical, through an opposition that can achieve synthesis. She uses the bluntness of apparently contrary positions to understand a mode of living that needn’t reject the revolutionary, can accommodate the feminist, and acknowledge the complex reality of feeling. When Marianne insists Juliane has to look after Jan, Juliane says, ‘‘So you’re forcing me into the life you no longer want to lead,’’ as Juliane offers a feminist argument that insists her independence is what matters. If Marianne was silly enough to have a child before she quite knew how she wanted to live, it isn’t fair that Julianne should be forced into that life after Marianne rejects it. She really would be left holding the baby, and we are reminded of a scene a little earlier, with Julianne at a protest insisting on a woman’s right to be responsible for her own body, as she talks about why she should be able to terminate the pregnancy at any stage.
The film respects this need and also Juliane’s insistence that she doesn’t want children. Yet by the end of the film, it will be Juliane looking after Jan, and after a terrible incident where the boy had built himself a dugout, where he would spend much of his time. Others came and set fire to it, discovering who his mother was, and the boy suffered terrible burns. This isn’t quite how the film presents it, and central to Von Trotta’s aesthetic is a mixture of the obvious (those dialogue scenes) and the elliptical (Werner’s suicide). As with Werner’s death, Jan’s burning isn’t dramatised; it is retrospectively revealed. Juliane visits the boy in the hospital, sees the burns, and then goes to the location where it happened, as someone explains things in detail. It is only later, when the boy dreams he is burning, that we see the fire that caused so much damage.
Jan will recover: his skin is young, and the burns were cosmetically appalling but not so deep, and we have seen that Juliane has neglected the boy partly because she was fretting over Marianne’s death, musing over whether Marianne was killed or killed herself while in prison. Again, the scene has been eschewed, as the film focuses not on Marianne’s demise but on Juliane’s reaction as she hears about it. She and her partner, Wolfgang (Rudiger Vogler), are on holiday in Italy, and Marianne’s face appears on the television. Neither Wolfgang nor Julianne can understand the language, and there are fretful moments where incomprehension meets dread, as Juliane tries to get someone to tell her what happened. As with Werner’s death, and Jan’s terrible burning, Von Trotta wants the oblique over the vivid, allowing the graphic to take conversational form but resisting it in what would seem to concern the film’s major events.
This needn’t be cinematic bloody-mindedness, an inverse of a Hollywood model that insists on showing and not telling, but instead an awareness that a film is often an exploration of a problem. The suicide, the death in prison, the burning, aren’t dramatic highpoints; they are the consequences of what were called ‘the years of lead’, a period especially during the seventies in Italy where political turmoil was at its most pronounced. But Germany, of course, had its version of it, and perhaps in even greater form. The German title of Von Trotta’s film is Die bleierne Zeit, which translates as "The Leaden Time". The film is loosely based on sisters, Christiane and Gurdrun Esslin, the latter one of the most important members of the Baader-Meinhoff group/Red Army Faction. While there were numerous European radical left groups in the 70s, including the IRA and ETA, as well as Italy’s The Red Brigades, perhaps no other group quite held the public’s imagination as the RAF. After Andreas Baader and Gudrun Esslin’s deaths in Stammheim Prison, a thousand mourners were monitored by a thousand police. ‘‘Cameras were everywhere, including a video camera, which the police used to photograph all the guests as they left the cemetery. ‘No, not a masquerade party but a funeral in West Germany where it is necessary to come disguised — if you dare to come at all.’’ (katesharpleylibrary)
The problems associated with, for example, The Red Brigades and The Baader Meinhof Group, as opposed to ETA and the IRA, was the former were chiefly ideological organizations, while the latter were nationalist ones. ETA wanted an independent Basque country and the IRA wanted a united Ireland. People could, at least in theory, come together as communities to support a clear goal. The Italian and German organizations were more nebulous in their demands and perhaps were subsequently more divisive, as parents and children disagreed, and brothers and sisters found themselves on different sides. In many of the films that focused on these two movements at the time (Three Brothers, Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man, Germany in Autumn, The Third Generation; The German Sisters), the familial was intricately connected with the political and, in Von Trotta’s case, this was closely associated with an ongoing interest in women’s rights and women’s obligations. Her first film (The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, co-directed with her husband Volker Schlondorff) is about an innocent woman harassed into mediated guilt by the German yellow press. A woman apolitical and chaste becomes, in the press’s presentation, a radical slut after falling for a young army deserter who is misconstrued as a terrorist. In The Second Awakening of Christa Klages, a woman becomes involved in a bank robbery to try to pay off debts at a daycare centre. In Sisters, or the Balance of Happiness, the political is less pronounced but works as a precursor to The German Sisters in its examination of two sisters and their symbiotic bond, and how one deals with the loss of the other.
We could say Von Trotta’s early work is fascinated by questions of female identity in the face of the society in which women live, and that the terrorist offers the further reaches of that self-determination. Yet it seems it is the fragility that matters more than the self-emancipation, and the conflictual complexity of a life over its determined trajectory. This is reflected in The German Sisters by the collapsed nature of its narrative, as it often pulls us back into the material, domestic life of Juliane, and still further back into the childhoods of the two sisters. We realise that it wasn’t Marianne who was the assertive figure, but older sister Juliane. While if Marianne had been, this would have given the film a strong cause and effect, by making it Juliane, it offers a psychological ellipsis equal to the dramatic ones that eschew what could seem the film’s main events: the suicide, the death in prison, the boy set on fire.
The film searches for the broadest circle of collateralism: showing how events in the past help produce, enigmatically, the events in the present, and how political events in the present can have ricocheting consequences on those who aren’t directly involved. The German Sisters is little interested in perpetrators or victims, or terrorist actions and those who died, unlike, for example, Uli Edel’s much later The Baader Meinhof Complex, which functions as an action thriller. The German Sisters is instead dispersive rather than concentrated, and wishes to accept the inexplicable within the need for the causative. This is resolved in the gap it finds between cause and effect. We might wonder what event motivated Marianne’s radicalisation, as the flashbacks most of the time show her as the loving daughter of a Lutheran minister father and a conformist mother. But we also see her both as a young teenager and as an adult, watching archival footage of atrocity. In the first, the teacher shows them footage from the camps; in the latter, the images are more contemporaneous, if equally atrocious, as she says she couldn’t tolerate doing nothing. We don’t know for sure whether this latter scene is before she has become radically involved or not, as the scene is shown within the context of Juliane writing a magazine article about Marianne, and we see her typing it up before cutting to Juliane, Marianne and Wolfgang all watching the footage in a makeshift cinema.
In childhood, Marianne would seem a conformist and Juliane a rebel, but that wouldn’t quite make sense of why Marianne becomes the radical, and Juliane does not. It might be more that Marianne is the idealist and Juliane the pragmatist. Juliane seeks pleasure and purpose from life and is interested in politics that is grounded in it. Marianne seeks a cause higher than herself. A scene shows them as girls, and Marianne says, ‘I want to be used. To be of use to something.’ Juliane replies, ‘wanting to be used is voluntary slavery.’ Marianne looks for a higher cause than herself and eventually finds it in a radical movement that will try to end injustice, even if in the process it will cause pain to others. Von Trotta seems to ask whether this is a price worth paying, and this shouldn’t rest on a yes or no answer, to be for or against radical action. It instead asks it by showing what the consequences of it are. When Von Trotta says, ‘‘I never did political films with the purpose of doing political films. It was not, ‘I have to think about this or that political thing.’ It was that I have to find a person who I follow, and then, sure, it comes up—because if this person lives in a certain time surrounded by political facts, then it comes into the film. But my first aim is never to make a political film. It’s to make a film about people who live in a certain time, and I am portraying the time. (Film Comment)
The people who are living in this time are understandably determined to change it, but the film shows, even more, that they are being transformed by it. Werner and Marianne die; Jan is burned, and Julianne takes responsibility for the boy even though she has no wish to be a mother. A conservative reaction might be that von Trotta shows the futility of Marianne’s efforts, and Juliane realises that she has a motherly instinct all along. That would surely be a reactionary misreading, but because von Trotta resists a militant account,it might be available to those who want to see it. True, nothing seems to be gained from Marianne’s actions, a point made when Julianne speaks to an editor about an article she wants to publish on her sister’s death in prison. It is now the beginning of the eighties, and the editor says, ‘the movement belongs to the late 60s and 70s.’ The news has moved on; Baader, Meinhof and Esslin would be deemed yesterday’s story. They haven’t impacted the world; they have been forgotten by it. And it is true that, for all Julianne’s resistance throughout the film to having a child, and to looking after Jan, by the conclusion, that is exactly what she is doing.
But more importantly, the film is contextualised by Julianne’s research into her sister’s work, and whatever the editor’s claim about the story’s irrelevance, the Red Army Faction is hardly a forgotten chapter in history. It is more like a recurring vision, one that film, literature and journalism keep returning to in various manifestations. After all, though the editor insists the story is no longer relevant, Von Trotta is filming the scene in a work she is making, one that suggests the subject is still pertinent. The Baader-Meinhof Complex was made almost twenty-five years after The German Sisters, and whatever we may think of Edel and producer Bernd Eichinger’s account (a movie made ‘‘with the subtlety of a sawed-off shotgun account’’, according to Time’s William Boston), the film was successful: it was viewed by 2.4 million Germans, Boston notes. If the German editor in Von Trotta’s film thinks that by the early 1980s nobody wanted to hear about The Red Army Faction, it was still a subject deemed worthy of a Guardian long read in 2025. Speaking of the film in 2019, von Trotta said what she wanted to do was present ‘‘two opposing views of so-called revolution: the extreme view that leads to terrorism because it has no patience for what we used to call the ‘long march through the institutions’, and the other perspective, which sees violence as a crime.’’ (BFI)
This was partly because after attending Baader and Ensslin’s funeral, Von Trotta got to know Ensslin’s sister Christiane, and her perspective would have seemed closer to Von Trotta’s than Gudrun’s. As Von Trotta says of her and other filmmakers and artists, ‘‘not that we supported the terrorists’’ (BFI), but she did want to understand her moment and that was perhaps understood best by seeing two sides of radical leftism, and most especially to show not so much that violence is wrong (though Von Trotta might insist it is), but that such an extreme response to the world’s injustices create further injustices of their own. This is why we have spoken of paradoxes and the difficulty of changing the world when that world has so much more power than you have, and will likely change you more than you will change it. This needn’t be an argument for political passivity (many radical movements have changed the world). It is merely to accept the collateral damage often involved in trying to do so.

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

The German Sisters

Collatoral Damages

The German Sisters initially might seem an issue film, a work determined to explore the political through the narrative exigencies of the personal. In such an exploration, the story uses the political to add novelty to the drama, and uses the drama to give emotion to the politics. This can take the form of heroic narratives or domestic demands, the biopic exploration of a person changing their nation (Gandhi, Braveheart, Lincoln), or a situational event that will allow familial tensions to be revealed and often resolved (The Day After Tomorrow, Interstellar, The Lost Bus). The problem is twofold: how to allow its story to be told conventionally, and how to make the viewer aware of a political topic? What doesn’t happen in such instances is that the subject deforms the form – the film remains smoothly narrational and suitably topical.
Margarethe von Trotta’s The German Sisters doesn’t quite do this. From a certain perspective, the film can seem too obvious – too many scenes of political explication and personal expression are put into dialogue rather than visually dramatised. Near the beginning of this film about two sisters, one of whom is politically radicalised, the other politically engaged, the politically engaged Juliane (Juta Lampe) is speaking to Marianne’s ex, Werner, who is the father of Marianne’s child. As they discuss Marianne and the son, Jan, Juliane insists the boy can only stay for a few days. Werner insists he needs ‘to get out of this rut and start working again’, and stop obsessing over Marianne. (Barbara Sukowa) Just after Werner says that he and Juliane aren’t so different from Marianne, and that they all share the same ideas, before adding, ‘‘only we’re too cowardly, or too sensible.’’ There is no subtext to what the characters say, but one might justify this by insisting these are intellectual characters who have no difficulty expressing what is on their mind. Yet this could seem an easy way to justify obvious dramaturgy. A better answer perhaps would be insist that Von Trotta wants to create less subtext than uncertainty: these are characters who know what they think, but don’t quite know how to live. They are in a capitalist bourgeois society with beliefs that run contrary to their own, and where the sort of existence they wish to lead isn’t easy to square with overthrowing the state. The film we realise isn’t about subtext but paradox: the difficulty in leading a life contrary to bourgeois demands, if these demands are there in characters who have children, homes, relationships and jobs. What matters, the film seems to propose, is how to move towards disentangling the contradictions.
After Werner leaves, saying he will be back, the film cuts to a shot of a car in the woods, the white car we have seen earlier, as this ex takes his son to Julianne. We might assume he has taken his life, and this is alluded to shortly afterwards, and revealed a few scenes later, when Marianne and Juliane meet up and discuss his death. We may believe his demise isn’t so much incidental as collateral, part of the damage done in trying to live alternatively. We offer the word in italics, all the better to comprehend the difference between a life that deals with paradoxes and one that retreats from contradictions. An alternative life has become an alternative lifestyle. Ancient Purity magazine offers some of the options: minimalism, living off-grid, a nomadic existence, communal living, polyamory and veganism. All well and good, but these are usually lifestyles  that are often reduced to a buzzword: digital detoxing and plant-based diets, digital nomadism and breadcrumbing. This isn’t the language of radical change, but that of personal options. What works for me?
Marianne can appear far more selfish than those seeking alternative living when she says, after hearing Werner has killed himself, that ‘I’ve no time to mourn the death of a neurotic intellectual’, and by showing irritation that he hadn’t found a place for Jan before his suicide. But that would be to simplify her existence, reducing it to an alternative lifestyle instead of an alternative life, one that is based on personal selfishness as opposed to social selflessness. While we should be wary of idealising these figures of social discontent, we oughtn’t either to ignore the idea of sacrificing oneself for a greater social good. Von Trotta’s film was released in 1981, as if taking stock of the period it was coming out of, and the era it was moving into: from the radical hope offered from the late sixties and through the seventies, to the neo-liberal conformism that was ushered in, not especially in Germany, but chiefly in Britain and the US, with Thatcherism and Reaganism, through deregulation and the steady erosion of the state. If the radicals of the 1970s wanted the oppressive capitalist state to dissolve into a benign socialist one, instead, what happened was that capitalism increasingly hardened into ever greater concentration of wealth in the hands of the rich. Nations became weak next to corporations, with the individual gaining or losing enormously. Diego Fusaro noted that ‘’the proletariat itself becomes a ‘precariat,’ condemned to flexibility and nomadism, to mobility and the breaking of all solid ties, according to the new systemic needs of turbo-capitalism.’’ (The Postil)
It isn’t that Marianne is a bad person because she is relatively indifferent to Werner’s death and her child’s parentless status; it is that such notions have little value when pursuing far greater ones than the grubbiness of the family unit. What would be the point of trying to make good on the domestic, if it has to fit into a broader patriarchal structure? When Thomas Elsaesser sees that men have no significant role in The German Sisters (nor in Von Trotta’s earlier Sister, or the Balance of Happiness), he adds that the director leaves little doubt that ‘’the self-destructive identification patterns derive from a displaced or repressed mother-daughter relationship which, however, forcibly implies the absent father.’’ (New German Cinema)
However, the film’s purpose perhaps rests on returning to the importance of the obligations and intimacies of families, without the bourgeois expectation, nor the political negation. If we propose that the film might appear didactic rather than subtextual, as characters often confront each other directly, this is partly because Von Trotta wants a dramatic form that can explore the paradox through the dialectical, through an opposition that can achieve synthesis. She uses the bluntness of apparently contrary positions to understand a mode of living that needn’t reject the revolutionary, can accommodate the feminist, and acknowledge the complex reality of feeling. When Marianne insists Juliane has to look after Jan, Juliane says, ‘‘So you’re forcing me into the life you no longer want to lead,’’ as Juliane offers a feminist argument that insists her independence is what matters. If Marianne was silly enough to have a child before she quite knew how she wanted to live, it isn’t fair that Julianne should be forced into that life after Marianne rejects it. She really would be left holding the baby, and we are reminded of a scene a little earlier, with Julianne at a protest insisting on a woman’s right to be responsible for her own body, as she talks about why she should be able to terminate the pregnancy at any stage.
The film respects this need and also Juliane’s insistence that she doesn’t want children. Yet by the end of the film, it will be Juliane looking after Jan, and after a terrible incident where the boy had built himself a dugout, where he would spend much of his time. Others came and set fire to it, discovering who his mother was, and the boy suffered terrible burns. This isn’t quite how the film presents it, and central to Von Trotta’s aesthetic is a mixture of the obvious (those dialogue scenes) and the elliptical (Werner’s suicide). As with Werner’s death, Jan’s burning isn’t dramatised; it is retrospectively revealed. Juliane visits the boy in the hospital, sees the burns, and then goes to the location where it happened, as someone explains things in detail. It is only later, when the boy dreams he is burning, that we see the fire that caused so much damage.
Jan will recover: his skin is young, and the burns were cosmetically appalling but not so deep, and we have seen that Juliane has neglected the boy partly because she was fretting over Marianne’s death, musing over whether Marianne was killed or killed herself while in prison. Again, the scene has been eschewed, as the film focuses not on Marianne’s demise but on Juliane’s reaction as she hears about it. She and her partner, Wolfgang (Rudiger Vogler), are on holiday in Italy, and Marianne’s face appears on the television. Neither Wolfgang nor Julianne can understand the language, and there are fretful moments where incomprehension meets dread, as Juliane tries to get someone to tell her what happened. As with Werner’s death, and Jan’s terrible burning, Von Trotta wants the oblique over the vivid, allowing the graphic to take conversational form but resisting it in what would seem to concern the film’s major events.
This needn’t be cinematic bloody-mindedness, an inverse of a Hollywood model that insists on showing and not telling, but instead an awareness that a film is often an exploration of a problem. The suicide, the death in prison, the burning, aren’t dramatic highpoints; they are the consequences of what were called ‘the years of lead’, a period especially during the seventies in Italy where political turmoil was at its most pronounced. But Germany, of course, had its version of it, and perhaps in even greater form. The German title of Von Trotta’s film is Die bleierne Zeit, which translates as "The Leaden Time". The film is loosely based on sisters, Christiane and Gurdrun Esslin, the latter one of the most important members of the Baader-Meinhoff group/Red Army Faction. While there were numerous European radical left groups in the 70s, including the IRA and ETA, as well as Italy’s The Red Brigades, perhaps no other group quite held the public’s imagination as the RAF. After Andreas Baader and Gudrun Esslin’s deaths in Stammheim Prison, a thousand mourners were monitored by a thousand police. ‘‘Cameras were everywhere, including a video camera, which the police used to photograph all the guests as they left the cemetery. ‘No, not a masquerade party but a funeral in West Germany where it is necessary to come disguised — if you dare to come at all.’’ (katesharpleylibrary)
The problems associated with, for example, The Red Brigades and The Baader Meinhof Group, as opposed to ETA and the IRA, was the former were chiefly ideological organizations, while the latter were nationalist ones. ETA wanted an independent Basque country and the IRA wanted a united Ireland. People could, at least in theory, come together as communities to support a clear goal. The Italian and German organizations were more nebulous in their demands and perhaps were subsequently more divisive, as parents and children disagreed, and brothers and sisters found themselves on different sides. In many of the films that focused on these two movements at the time (Three Brothers, Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man, Germany in Autumn, The Third Generation; The German Sisters), the familial was intricately connected with the political and, in Von Trotta’s case, this was closely associated with an ongoing interest in women’s rights and women’s obligations. Her first film (The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, co-directed with her husband Volker Schlondorff) is about an innocent woman harassed into mediated guilt by the German yellow press. A woman apolitical and chaste becomes, in the press’s presentation, a radical slut after falling for a young army deserter who is misconstrued as a terrorist. In The Second Awakening of Christa Klages, a woman becomes involved in a bank robbery to try to pay off debts at a daycare centre. In Sisters, or the Balance of Happiness, the political is less pronounced but works as a precursor to The German Sisters in its examination of two sisters and their symbiotic bond, and how one deals with the loss of the other.
We could say Von Trotta’s early work is fascinated by questions of female identity in the face of the society in which women live, and that the terrorist offers the further reaches of that self-determination. Yet it seems it is the fragility that matters more than the self-emancipation, and the conflictual complexity of a life over its determined trajectory. This is reflected in The German Sisters by the collapsed nature of its narrative, as it often pulls us back into the material, domestic life of Juliane, and still further back into the childhoods of the two sisters. We realise that it wasn’t Marianne who was the assertive figure, but older sister Juliane. While if Marianne had been, this would have given the film a strong cause and effect, by making it Juliane, it offers a psychological ellipsis equal to the dramatic ones that eschew what could seem the film’s main events: the suicide, the death in prison, the boy set on fire.
The film searches for the broadest circle of collateralism: showing how events in the past help produce, enigmatically, the events in the present, and how political events in the present can have ricocheting consequences on those who aren’t directly involved. The German Sisters is little interested in perpetrators or victims, or terrorist actions and those who died, unlike, for example, Uli Edel’s much later The Baader Meinhof Complex, which functions as an action thriller. The German Sisters is instead dispersive rather than concentrated, and wishes to accept the inexplicable within the need for the causative. This is resolved in the gap it finds between cause and effect. We might wonder what event motivated Marianne’s radicalisation, as the flashbacks most of the time show her as the loving daughter of a Lutheran minister father and a conformist mother. But we also see her both as a young teenager and as an adult, watching archival footage of atrocity. In the first, the teacher shows them footage from the camps; in the latter, the images are more contemporaneous, if equally atrocious, as she says she couldn’t tolerate doing nothing. We don’t know for sure whether this latter scene is before she has become radically involved or not, as the scene is shown within the context of Juliane writing a magazine article about Marianne, and we see her typing it up before cutting to Juliane, Marianne and Wolfgang all watching the footage in a makeshift cinema.
In childhood, Marianne would seem a conformist and Juliane a rebel, but that wouldn’t quite make sense of why Marianne becomes the radical, and Juliane does not. It might be more that Marianne is the idealist and Juliane the pragmatist. Juliane seeks pleasure and purpose from life and is interested in politics that is grounded in it. Marianne seeks a cause higher than herself. A scene shows them as girls, and Marianne says, ‘I want to be used. To be of use to something.’ Juliane replies, ‘wanting to be used is voluntary slavery.’ Marianne looks for a higher cause than herself and eventually finds it in a radical movement that will try to end injustice, even if in the process it will cause pain to others. Von Trotta seems to ask whether this is a price worth paying, and this shouldn’t rest on a yes or no answer, to be for or against radical action. It instead asks it by showing what the consequences of it are. When Von Trotta says, ‘‘I never did political films with the purpose of doing political films. It was not, ‘I have to think about this or that political thing.’ It was that I have to find a person who I follow, and then, sure, it comes up—because if this person lives in a certain time surrounded by political facts, then it comes into the film. But my first aim is never to make a political film. It’s to make a film about people who live in a certain time, and I am portraying the time. (Film Comment)
The people who are living in this time are understandably determined to change it, but the film shows, even more, that they are being transformed by it. Werner and Marianne die; Jan is burned, and Julianne takes responsibility for the boy even though she has no wish to be a mother. A conservative reaction might be that von Trotta shows the futility of Marianne’s efforts, and Juliane realises that she has a motherly instinct all along. That would surely be a reactionary misreading, but because von Trotta resists a militant account,it might be available to those who want to see it. True, nothing seems to be gained from Marianne’s actions, a point made when Julianne speaks to an editor about an article she wants to publish on her sister’s death in prison. It is now the beginning of the eighties, and the editor says, ‘the movement belongs to the late 60s and 70s.’ The news has moved on; Baader, Meinhof and Esslin would be deemed yesterday’s story. They haven’t impacted the world; they have been forgotten by it. And it is true that, for all Julianne’s resistance throughout the film to having a child, and to looking after Jan, by the conclusion, that is exactly what she is doing.
But more importantly, the film is contextualised by Julianne’s research into her sister’s work, and whatever the editor’s claim about the story’s irrelevance, the Red Army Faction is hardly a forgotten chapter in history. It is more like a recurring vision, one that film, literature and journalism keep returning to in various manifestations. After all, though the editor insists the story is no longer relevant, Von Trotta is filming the scene in a work she is making, one that suggests the subject is still pertinent. The Baader-Meinhof Complex was made almost twenty-five years after The German Sisters, and whatever we may think of Edel and producer Bernd Eichinger’s account (a movie made ‘‘with the subtlety of a sawed-off shotgun account’’, according to Time’s William Boston), the film was successful: it was viewed by 2.4 million Germans, Boston notes. If the German editor in Von Trotta’s film thinks that by the early 1980s nobody wanted to hear about The Red Army Faction, it was still a subject deemed worthy of a Guardian long read in 2025. Speaking of the film in 2019, von Trotta said what she wanted to do was present ‘‘two opposing views of so-called revolution: the extreme view that leads to terrorism because it has no patience for what we used to call the ‘long march through the institutions’, and the other perspective, which sees violence as a crime.’’ (BFI)
This was partly because after attending Baader and Ensslin’s funeral, Von Trotta got to know Ensslin’s sister Christiane, and her perspective would have seemed closer to Von Trotta’s than Gudrun’s. As Von Trotta says of her and other filmmakers and artists, ‘‘not that we supported the terrorists’’ (BFI), but she did want to understand her moment and that was perhaps understood best by seeing two sides of radical leftism, and most especially to show not so much that violence is wrong (though Von Trotta might insist it is), but that such an extreme response to the world’s injustices create further injustices of their own. This is why we have spoken of paradoxes and the difficulty of changing the world when that world has so much more power than you have, and will likely change you more than you will change it. This needn’t be an argument for political passivity (many radical movements have changed the world). It is merely to accept the collateral damage often involved in trying to do so.

© Tony McKibbin