Retrieving History: Margarethe von Trotta's Marianne and Juliane

Abstract

part of that project. WTH REMARKABLE consistency, Margarethe von VW Y Trtrotta's films criticize the historical and political sensibilities of liberal humanists and the radical Left. Pastor Klein, the publicly antifascist exemplar in Marianne and Juliane; Wolfgang, Juliane's leftist companion; Hans, the antinuclear activist in Sheer Madness; and Leo Jogiches, Luxemburg's lover and political ally in Rosa Luxemburg-these are only the more obvious instances of liberals and leftists whom von Trotta indicts for refusing to see that the historical and the political are indivisible from the personal.' Von Trotta views feminism, with its insistence that the personal is the political, as more than just another item on the liberal agenda; it is itself the lens through which history is examined-deconstructed and re-visioned. Her feminism is nonessentialist (i.e., historical). The personal psychologizing that is anathema to the leftist critical model derived from sixties historical practices is her indispensable tool for exposing what those practices repress, for shaping narrative, for investigating and destabilizing spectatorship, and for making ambiguity and contradiction visible. In no other film is her attempt to re-vision history more persuasive than in Marianne and Juliane (Die bleierne Zeit). Ironically, promoters of the New German Cinema have marginalized von Trotta's work in a way that parallels liberalism's marginalization of the personal and psychological. Although in the United States von Trotta is the best known of several extraordinary German women filmmakers, studies of the New German Cinema typically treat her as ancillary to her husband, Volker Schlondorff, with whom she collaborated until she realized that this arrangement-much like the conventional domestic one-placed her in a subordinate position (see, e.g., Rentschler; Corrigan; Franklin; and Sandford).2 Thomas Elsaesser, the author of the most detailed history of the New German Cinema to date, discusses von Trotta at greater length but still attempts to classify her under the rubric of bourgeois humanist historyspecifically that of the German Lutheran Church-even though the church figures importantly in only two of her films, while a vigorous