‘White Whores’: Islam’s Unwavering View on Western Women By Raymond Ibrahim - 15 August 2018

‘White Whores’: Islam’s Unwavering View on Western Women

By Raymond Ibrahim August 15, 2018

 

 

In this Sept. 4, 2017 file photo, a paper heart reading "Dear Maria, we will never forget you" is hanging near the site of the crime at the Dreisam river in Freiburg, Germany. A district court later convicted a young migrant of raping and killing 19-year-old medical student Maria Ladenburger in a case that fueled a nationwide debate about the country's migration policy. (Patrick Seeger/dpa via AP,file)

 A young woman targeted by what the obscurantist media label an "Asian" Rape Gang told her story after years of being trapped as a young teen after being groomed by Muslim men in the UK.  The British woman going by the pseudonym “Kate Elysia” recently revealed the extent of her sexual victimization by Muslim men. While this included the numerous details seen in many similar cases -- including drugs, and gang-rapes by as many as 70 men in one night -- her story had an interesting twist to it.

According to the report: “At one point during her abuse, she was trafficked to the North African country of Morocco where she was prostituted and repeatedly raped.” There she was kept in an apartment in Marrakesh, where another girl no more than 15 was also kept for sexual purposes. “I can’t remember how many times I’m raped that first night, or by who,” Kate recounted.

That she was seen as a piece of meat is evident in other ways: “The Pakistani men I came into contact with made me believe I was nothing more than a slut, a white whore. They treated me like a leper, apart from when they wanted sex. I was less than human to them, I was rubbish.”

What explains the ongoing victimization of European women by Muslim men -- which exists well beyond the UK, and has become epidemic in Germany, Sweden, and elsewhere?

While these sordid accounts are routinely dismissed as the activities of “criminals,” they are in fact reflective of nearly fourteen centuries of Muslim views on and treatment of European women. Nothing in Kate’s account -- not even the otherwise extreme aspect of taking her to Morocco to be a sex slave -- has not happened countless times over the centuries.

For starters, Muslim men have long had an obsessive attraction for fair women of the European variety. This, as all things Islamic, traces back to their prophet, Muhammad. In order to entice his men to war against the Byzantines -- who, as the Arabs’ nearest European neighbors came to represent “white” people -- Muhammad told them they would be able to sexually enslave the “yellow” women (an apparent reference to their hair color).

For over a millennium after Muhammad, jihadi leaders -- Arabs, Berbers, Turks, Tatars -- also coaxed their men to jihad on Europe by citing (and later sexually enslaving) its fair women, as copiously documented in Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West. For one example, prior to invading Spain, jihadi hero Tarek bin Ziyad enticed his men by saying: “You must have heard numerous accounts of this island, you must know how the Grecian maidens, as beautiful as houris [sexual superwomen are awaiting your arrival, reclining on soft couches in the sumptuous palaces of crowned lords and princes.”

That the sexual enslavement of fair women was an aspect that always fueled the jihad is evident in other ways. Thus, for M.A. Khan, a former Muslim author, it is “impossible to disconnect Islam from the Viking slave-trade, because the supply was absolutely meant for meeting [the] Islamic world’s unceasing demand for the prized white slaves” and for “white sex-slaves.”

And just as Muslim rapists saw Kate as “nothing more than a slut, a white whore,” so did Muslim luminaries always describe the nearest white women of Byzantium. For Abu Uthman al-Jahiz (b. 776), a prolific court scholar, the females of Constantinople were the “most shameless women in the whole world ... [T]hey find sex more enjoyable” and “are prone to adultery.” Abd al-Jabbar (b. 935), another prominent scholar, claimed that “adultery is commonplace in the cities and markets of Byzantium,” so much so that even “the nuns from the convents went out to the fortresses to offer themselves to monks.”

As Nadia Maria el-Cheikh, author of Byzantium Viewed by the Arabs, explains:

Our [Arab/Muslim] sources show not Byzantine women but writers’ images of these women, who served as symbols of the eternal female -- constantly a potential threat, particularly due to blatant  exaggerations of their sexual promiscuity. In our texts, Byzantine women are strongly associated with sexual immorality. … While the one quality that our [Muslim] sources never deny is the beauty of Byzantine women, the image that they create in describing these women is anything but beautiful.

Their depictions are, occasionally, excessive, virtually caricatures, overwhelmingly negative … The behavior of most women in Byzantium was a far cry from the depictions that appear in Arabic sources.

But even taking Kate to Morocco and turning her into a sex slave is a mirror reflection of history. 

 Thanks to Ottoman support for the slave-raiding pirates of North Africa, the so-called “Barbary States,” by 1541 “Algiers teemed with Christian captives [from Europe], and it became a common saying that a Christian slave was scarce a fair barter for an onion.”

According to the conservative estimate of American professor Robert Davis: “[B]etween 1530 and 1780 [alone] there were almost certainly a million and quite possibly as many as a million and a quarter white, European Christians enslaved by the Muslims of the Barbary Coast,” of which Morocco was one. Women slaves -- and not a few men and boys -- were almost always sexually abused. With countless European women selling for the price of an onion, little wonder by the late 1700s, European observers noted how “the inhabitants of Algiers have a rather white complexion.”

It was the same elsewhere. The slave markets of the Ottoman sultanate were for centuries so inundated with European flesh that children sold for pennies, “a very beautiful slave woman was exchanged for a pair of boots, and four Serbian slaves were traded for a horse.” In Crimea -- where some three million Slavs were enslaved by the Ottomans’ Muslim allies, the Tatars -- an eyewitness described how Christian men were castrated and savagely tortured (including by gouging their eyes out), whereas “[t]he youngest women are kept for wanton pleasures.”

Such a long and unwavering history of sexually enslaving European women on the claim that, like Kate Elysia, they are all “nothing more than a slut, a white whore,” should place the ongoing sexual abuse of Western women in context -- and suggest that there’s little chance of change along the horizon.

(Editor’s note: All quotes and historical facts appearing in the above article are documented in the author’s new book, Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West.)

We Built the Titanic, and We Can Do It Again! - Belfast Workers Seize Bankrupt Shipyard - by Lauren Kaori Gurley - 14 Aug 2019

Workers Seize the Shipyard That Built the Titanic, Plan to Make Renewable Energy There

The closure of the last shipyard in Belfast would end centuries of ship building in the city. A group of workers are demanding the U.K. nationalize the yards.

by Lauren Kaori Gurley

Aug 14 2019, 7:18am

 

Late last month, 130 ship builders, steel workers, welders, and riveters seized control of the storied Belfast shipyard that built the Titanic in 1909. More than two weeks later, they're still there, and say they won't be leaving until the docks are nationalized and are used to produce renewable energy infrastructure.

The docks had moved to shut down after their troubled Norwegian parent company, Dolphin Drilling, failed to find a buyer, but militant workers have refused to relinquish the site, including its two towering yellow cranes, known as Sampson and Goliath—landmarks that dominate the Belfast skyline.

The closure of the shipyard, once an emblem of Britain’s industrial power with over 30,000 workers, would mark the end of centuries of shipbuilding in the city. But workers from Harland & Wolff are demanding that British Prime Minister Boris Johnson nationalize the shipyards and create new jobs in renewable energy there.

“I was there yesterday. These workers are going to sit there until they get a result,” a spokesperson for Unite, which represents Harland & Woolf workers, told Motherboard. “There’s massive potential in wind turbines and tidal energy. They’re saying they could create thousands of jobs, and that we need a just transition to renewable energy.”

Some activists involved in the occupation have cited Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Green New Deal as their inspiration. In recent years, the workers at Harland & Wolff have built parts for wind turbines. They argue that renewable energy jobs would serve not only as a sustainable solution, but also a practical one because of their skill set.

Image: Unite the Union

The steelworkers—now in their 17th day of protest—have blocked insolvency practitioners, known in the United Kingdom as “administrators,” from entering the site, with around 20 to 30 workers occupying around the clock. “No one moves onto that site or off that site unless the workers who are running that site agree to it,” a union official told the media. “No administrator will drive into that workplace unless the gate is opened by workers.”

This week, the Scottish government announced that it “ready and willing” to nationalize a shipyard near Glasgow where 350 jobs are at risk. This could bode well for the Harland & Wolff workers in Belfast. Dolphin Drilling did not respond to a request for comment.

Gerry Carroll, an outspoken member of Northern Ireland’s parliament from Ireland’s socialist party, People Before Profits, has teamed up with local unions to call for green energy jobs at Harland & Wolff. Carroll says the Belfast docks have a long history of labor strikes and worker purges, dating back to the 1910s and into the 1990s, during the Northern Ireland Conflict. “Catholics have been forced out of jobs... There’s a poisonous history of anti-communism,” Carroll told Motherboard. “We fully support the workers and their occupation and fight."

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Whitney Biennial 2019: A “snapshot” of contemporary art - what is revealed - 26 August 2019

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 17 May–22 September 2019

Whitney Museum of American Art 

The Whitney Museum of American Art’s prestigious Biennial in New York City, according to its organizers, provides a “snapshot of contemporary art-making in the United States.” The “snapshot,” in this case, also takes in the controversies that emerge around the art.

Judging from the work selected by Whitney curators Jane Panetta and Rujeko Hockley for the 2019 Biennial, it would seem that artists have not responded profoundly, either directly or indirectly, to the social and political crisis that has increasingly gripped the US, particularly since the 2016 Trump election.

Instead, the artists remain largely trapped in a narrow environment and outlook. “Race, gender, equity and the vulnerability of the body” are the central themes of the installations, video, mixed media and performance pieces, as well as more traditional media of painting, photography and sculpture, produced by 75 artists and collectives in this year’s biennial.

Panetta says that in their hundreds of studio visits, the curators found that artists have “adjusted to what I think felt like a really traumatic moment at the time of the [Trump] inauguration ... It’s sort of accepting the reality and looking ahead.” (Emphasis added) Or more accurately perhaps, they’ve gotten back to themes that have dominated the arts for the past decade or more.

John Edmonds, The Villain, 2018. Inkjet print, 30 x 24 in. (76.2 x 61 cm). [Credit: the artist and Company, NY]

Just a few of the many examples: Martine Syms’ (b. 1988) installation Intro to Threat Modeling “explores pervasive archetypes and depictions of Black experience in America, often intervening directly in the ubiquitous platforms we use for communication and identity production.” Syms refers to herself as a “conceptual entrepreneur.” In his photographs, John Edmonds (b. 1989), by “making Black queer collectivity and self-awareness central to his work, explores the aesthetic possibilities of intimacy and desire.” And Elle Pérez’ (b. 1989) large-format photographs of post-facial feminization surgery and of the word “DYKE” spelled out in blood seeping from carved skin, we are told, constitute “a study of the human process of creating a new reality for oneself ... not replicating the world, but instead transfiguring it.” And so on and so forth. Much of this language has a clichéd and formulaic character by now.

The 2019 Biennial has been hailed as the most diverse and inclusive to date. The majority of the artists are “people of color,” half of them women, a significant number identify as LGBTQ. Several Native American artists are included, four artists hail from Puerto Rico, another from Canada, several are US-born living in Europe. But with few exceptions, the “diversity” of the artists does not serve to expand our insight into a wider range of social experience. In a peculiar fashion, in a process duplicated in other artistic fields, the supposed inclusiveness, because it reflects the thinking and feeling of such a small percentage of the middle-class population, can actually work to reduce the overall perspective and scope of the art on display.

This is not entirely the fault of the artists, almost 30 percent of whom are young (20 out of the 75 artists/collectives are younger than 33, with the youngest two born in 1991.) And in a sense, they are attempting to respond to aspects of the current social crisis. Racist police violence, climate change, the exploitation of migrant workers, gentrification are all taken as subjects in work which is in some cases skillful or inventive.

But the technical complexity of the pieces is often in inverse proportion to the very limited or stunted insight they have to offer. In part, this has been fostered by the “conceptualism” that has dominated much artistic practice for the past 50 years.

For example, Maia Ruth Lee’s Bondage Baggage is a stack of four tightly bound (with rope) tarpaulin bundles. These bundles-as-sculpture literally reproduce the bundles carried by Nepalese workers as “luggage” when they return from working in the Middle East. According to the wall caption, the sculpture “model(s) a condition of the self, as well as concepts of self-preservation, diaspora, the family, and the economic oppression of developing countries.”

Even if one did derive any of this from the pile of bundles, which seems unlikely, how has one’s understanding of the economic oppression of developing countries been enhanced to any degree by Lee’s sculpture? The artist is simply being too elliptical and self-conscious for her own—or our—good.

A more decisive problem, however, is the identity politics outlook promoted at all levels of this careerist milieu from art schools, juried art shows and residencies, to critical art journals and mainstream press such as the New York Times. The Whitney curators themselves reflect this atmosphere, and they are encouraging the artists in a certain direction.

The curators, in a statement, describe that while “we often encountered heightened emotions” (presumably in response to Donald Trump and the political situation) in their studio visits, the artists “were directed toward thoughtful and productive experimentation, the re-envisioning of self and society, and political and aesthetic strategies for survival.” The focus on “self” first, and society second, implies that the kind of social change envisioned wouldn’t likely affect the basic structure of society and the lives of millions of people. It simply means pressuring “society” to become more amenable or hospitable to the demands of “self,” or these particular “selves,” creating more psychological/cultural space for these previously under-represented groups. Likewise the focus on “equity” instead of social equality largely means more privileges for certain groups to bring them up to the level of the most privileged social layers.

Notably absent from the political topics addressed was the fascistic Trump administration itself, the reactionary opposition of the Democratic Party and intensification of social conflict that has erupted since the 2016 election. Only in Marcus Fischer’s Untitled (Words of Concern), do we hear “loss of democratic rights, attacks on immigrants, fascism” in a loop tape recorded at a select residency on Captiva Island, Florida, where Fischer and other artists spoke the day before the inauguration. But that’s all they are, words without elaboration. Again, the absence of meaningful substance is offset by a complex installation that runs the tape from a vintage recording device up to the ceiling and back again.

Curran Hatleberg, Untitled (Camaro), 2017. Inkjet print, 19 x 23 1/2 in. (48.3 x 59.7 cm). [Credit: the artist and Higher Pictures, New York]

As always in the Whitney Biennial, there are a few exceptions to the rule. Curran Hatleberg’s photographs of quotidian American scenes with a surreal edge are in the tradition of closely observed photographs by Zoe Strauss (Whitney Biennial, 2006), for example. The sculpture Maria-Maria, 2019 by Daniel Lind-Ramos, who is one of the few older artists (b. 1953) included, combines the blue FEMA tarps left after the destruction of Puerto Rico by Hurricane Maria with natural and other found materials to create a totemic Virgin Mary.

And a more intimate side of life is revealed in Jennifer Packer’s colorful, loosely painted portraits bearing out the artist’s stated intention that “It’s not figures, not bodies, but humans I am painting.” She pays special attention, she explains, to the vulnerability of black female bodies in contemporary society.

Installation view of the Witney Biennial, 2019 (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, May 17-September 22, 2019). Daniel Lind-Ramos, Maria-Maria, 2019. [Photo credit: Ron Amstutz]

Although social life is not richly addressed in the art at the exhibition, social and political developments inevitably make themselves felt. The fact they don’t find expression in the pieces themselves is a serious weakness and, to a certain extent, speaks to the artists’ view that such developments have no organic place in their (literally) self-centered work.

At the 2017 Biennial, a scurrilous attack was launched on Dana Schutz’s painting Open Casket (2016), based on the famous photograph of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old black youth lynched in Mississippi in 1955. The basis of the campaign was the reactionary argument that “it was not acceptable for a white person (Schutz) to transmute Black suffering into profit and fun.” There were calls to remove, even destroy, the painting. A campaign against this censorship drew strong support, but not till Schutz vouched for her sincerity and most importantly promised never to profit from the sale of the painting was it allowed to stay.

Jennifer Packer, An Exercise in Tenderness, 2017. Oil on canvas, 9 1/2 x 7 in. (24 x 18 cm). 

The artists are not entirely blind to the world around them. The principal controversy this year involved demonstrations and the threat of a boycott by eight participating artists against Warren B. Kanders, the vice chair of the Whitney’s board. Kanders’ company Safariland manufactured the teargas used along the US-Mexico border, as well as against protesters in Ferguson, Missouri, the Gaza Strip, Turkey and elsewhere.

The Whitney vice chair’s connection to teargas was established well before the opening of this year’s Biennial. It was reported in 2015 at the time of the protests over the police murders of Michael Brown in Ferguson and Freddie Gray in Baltimore. It was picked up then by the media and became the subject of a video piece, Triple Chasers (2019) by the artist collective Forensic Architecture, which was among the pieces included in (and then, in protest, withdrawn from) the Biennial itself.
Hannah Black, one of the initiators of the campaign against Schutz in 2017, co-authored (along with Ciarán Finlayson and Tobi Haslett) a statement, “The Tear Gas Biennial,” which appeared in Artforum on July 17. Black is on generally principled ground this time. The statement argues that the “Biennial is a prominent platform, and the teargassing of asylum-seekers, including children at the US-Mexico border a few months before its May opening, has thrust Kanders and Safariland into the public eye. And some of the artists involved have sincere political commitments and surely feel concerned that their work is being instrumentalized to cleanse Kanders’s reputation.” It likewise challenged artists, “a majority of whose work has some political valence,” to withdraw their work—even if the Biennial was already halfway through its four-month run.

Ironically, Black and the boycott supporters note that “We’ve heard, too, that the effort to politicize the Biennial amounts first, to racism, because it places an unfair burden on artists of color, who ought to be celebrated in this majority-minority Biennial, and second, an expression of class privilege, because ‘artists must eat.’”

In any event, soon after the statement in Artforum, eight artists issued a joint letter to the Whitney requesting their work be removed. Within a week Kanders announced he would step down.
However welcome Kanders’ resignation may be, it will do little under present conditions to change the dependence of the arts upon the “dirty money” of the super-rich. Nor by itself will it deepen and expand the artists’ outlook.

As evidenced in the artwork at the Biennial itself, a genuine reorientation toward critical questions of history and social life is required for the creation of more deeply challenging and insightful work.

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Widespread Mental Illness in the US Is the Reason for All These Mass Shootings - by Dr. Paul Kindlon - 6 Aug 2019

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Democratic politicians and progressives are currently busy blaming Republicans and in particular Donald Trump for the horrific murders over the past weekend in El Paso. Having seen the carnage and the blood, they now smell blood. Over the next few months poorly educated pundits, pseudo journalists and opportunistic politicians will be using this tragedy to blame Trump as a dog whistling racist and white nationalist.

What will be missing from this rabid attack on the president will be the root cause of mass shootings: psychological malaise.

American society is not on the verge of disintegrating; it is already in a dystopian state. Many Americans are deeply unhappy because the American dream is dead and buried under a mountain of greed, debt and corruption. Young people especially are acutely aware of a future that promises lack of upward social mobility and financial struggle. Having been taught that in the promised land of America anyone who applies him or herself can achieve acquisitive success, many see themselves as “losers”. This is a genuinely dirty word in the United States.

The disappointment and frustration being felt is prompting millions to take pills to counteract depression, anxiety, and anger issues. Not being able to face the harsh reality of life, Americans are fleeing through opioids, anti-depressants and alcohol. It is not an accident that Americans are obsessed with fantasy in film, literature or gaming. Everyone wants to escape the pain. Mass murderers hate themselves and want to kill themselves. As has been demonstrated by many psychologists, this intense self-hatred often is re-directed outwards.

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In less than 220 days there have been 250 mass shooting in America. This pattern will only continue because no one wants to address this fundamental truth: there is widespread mental instability in the United States.
The insanity does not stop with the mass shootings…

• The Russia gate hoax is another example of rationality being replaced by a hyper-emotionality that only deeply disturbed individuals display. 
  
• The bizarre attempt to ignore basic biology by claiming that gender (dictated by X and Y chromosomes) is a social construct defies logic and common sense. It’s madness!
  

The current attempt to blame acts of brutal violence on ordinary Americans who – quite rightly – oppose ILLEGAL immigration and who prefer “idiot Trump” instead of the arrogant and out of touch Democrats is only going to push America into two diametrically opposed camps.

 

 

 

This conflict can only escalate over time because the Democrats and progressives are quite unhinged, seeing themselves as righteous Zealots or Saviors. When you add pride to an already toxic mixture there is bound to be an explosion at some point.

But don’t look at the Russians when that happens; look homeward angel.
America is now the largest insane asylum in the world.

German film prize goes to Margarethe von Trotta, director of Rosa Luxemburg (1986) and Rosenstrasse (2003) 19 August 2019

Film director Margarethe von Trotta was awarded an honorary lifetime prize at this year’s German Film Awards ceremony in May. The filmmaker is best known for The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (1975, with Volker Schlöndorff), Marianne & Julianne (1981), Rosa Luxemburg (1986), The Promise (1994), Rosenstrasse (2003) and Hannah Arendt (2012).
Much of the media coverage surrounding the award ceremony conveyed the impression that von Trotta’s main contribution to cinema has been to present strong female characters on screen. The director, however, has never regarded herself as a “woman’s filmmaker.” Von Trotta’s works have never been exclusively devoted to women’s issues, but always dealt with the problems and conflicts of women in the context of broader social issues. The film director has said she regards the denunciations associated with #MeToo as “a kind of reverse witch-hunt: women used to be hunted down, now some men are the target.”

Margarethe von Trotta, 2013 (Photo credit-Roger Weil)

Margarethe von Trotta is one of the most important postwar German filmmakers. Born in Berlin in 1942, she belongs to a generation—born in the shadow of fascism and the Holocaust—that made a conscious decision to oppose the social and political conditions that prevailed in the 1960s. She was part of a generation that also demonstrated against the continuing presence of former Nazis in German politics and opposed the US war in Vietnam. Like many others of her generation, she placed much of her hope in the Social Democratic Party (SDP).

Von Trotta spent her childhood and youth in Düsseldorf before becoming an actress. In Klaus Lemke’s television film Brandstifter (1969) she plays a young woman, Anka, who sets a department store on fire as part of a political protest. The role was modelled on the Frankfurt department store fires of 1968 carried out by individuals who were later to become the Red Army Faction (RAF, better known in the US as the Baader–Meinhof Group) terrorists, such as Gudrun Ensslin and Andreas Baader. Von Trotta collaborated with other directors of the New German Cinema movement, such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Volker Schlöndorff, whom she married in 1971.

She began directing in the mid-1970s, influenced by French New Wave films, among others. A number of Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman’s films were also important to her, especially The Seventh Seal (1957), a work that, like some of Bergman’s other films, reflected doubt and pessimism regarding post-World War II conditions of life. Another important inspiration for her work was Bergman’s Sawdust and Tinsel (1953). The film about the aging director of a travelling circus and his young mistress raises the question: can one be more than a mere victim of circumstances? Last year, von Trotta released her own cinematic homage to Bergman.

Margarethe von Trotta in Fassbinder's The American Soldier (1970)

Like many of her generation, Trotta despised the hypocrisy, self-pity and repression of the past expounded by former Nazis or their apologists. Instead, she wanted to create a new, democratic society through enlightened, and often radical criticism.

She is drawn to vibrant, resilient personalities with a sense of social justice who seek to understand and change their environment, in both the private and social sphere. A number of her films closely explore intimate relationships. A recurring theme is the conflict between sisters, as in her films Sisters, or The Balance of Happiness (1979), Marianne & Juliane (1981) and the television movie Die Schwester [“The Sister”] (2010).

Mario Adorf and Angela Winkler in The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (1975)

The first film for which von Trotta is credited as co-director is The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, based on a story by the German author Heinrich Böll, who also worked on the script. The theme of the film is the hysterically charged atmosphere of the 1970s when Baader-Meinhof members were hunted down by the state and many intellectuals—including Böll—were denounced as “terrorist” sympathisers.

One night, Katharina Blum (Angela Winkler), a young woman, takes home a young man, Ludwig (Jürgen Prochnow), who is being watched by the authorities. When police attempt to arrest Ludwig the next morning, he has already given them the slip. Thereupon Katharina is immediately accused of being his accomplice. Entirely innocent, she is helplessly exposed to a massive media campaign of hatred and lies. In utter despair, she shoots the tabloid journalist leading the campaign. At the subsequent funeral, her desperate act is cynically condemned by the journalist’s editor as an attack on freedom of the press. The film, which warned against a conspiracy of police, judiciary, big business and the press, was a great success at home and abroad. (Certain similar themes appear in Fassbinder’s Mother Küsters’ Trip to Heaven, also 1975).

The Schlöndorff-von Trotta effort demonstrated the fragility of Germany’s postwar democracy and the persistence of authoritarian ideas and practice. This was true not only of the 1960s, when student leader Rudi Dutschke was shot amidst a frenetic anti-communist media campaign, but also of the so-called “social democratic” decade, which witnessed a series of attacks on democratic rights in the name of fighting terrorism.

Von Trotta’s first film as sole director was The Second Awakening of Christa Klages (1978). Christa (Tina Engel) is an impulsive young woman with both a big heart and mouth, who seeks social retribution and raids a bank to save her children’s daycare center from financial disaster. In the course of her flight from police, she realises that “expropriation” on a small scale cannot result in fundamental change. Being branded a criminal who risks the lives of the innocent cannot advance progressive aims. “Be patient,” she writes finally on the wall of her room.

Marianne & Juliane

One of von Trotta’s most significant films is Marianne & Juliane, which won the Golden Lion at the Venice film festival in 1981. The film features two very different sisters, Marianne and Juliane, and is based on the story of the Baader-Meinhof terrorist Gudrun Ensslin and her sister Christiane.

Born—like the filmmaker—during the Second World War, Marianne (Barbara Sukowa) and Juliane (Jutta Lampe) grow up in a pastor’s family and experience the bigoted and conservative atmosphere of the 1950s. Their father shows a film to his young parishioners. It is the first documentary on the Holocaust to be screened in West Germany, Night and Fog (1956, directed by Alain Resnais).

The film strikes the sisters to the core and becomes a key experience for both of them. The Nazi crimes must never happen again. At a later point, they are both alarmed by similarly horrifying images of the US invasion of Vietnam, which is supported by the German government. Internationally, fascist movements are gaining ground, a development the sisters resolve to oppose with all their might.

Jutta Lampe and Barbara Sukowa in Marianne & Juliane (1981)

Juliane consciously chooses the arduous path of politics of small steps and rejects Marianne’s anarchist-based radicalism. Juliane is the stronger personality in the movie. She is more down-to-earth than her sister who has more in common with a Christian martyr. Juliane realises that the struggle for a just society requires the patience to win over the majority of the population.
Marianne, who was such a gentle child, takes up arms. Juliane becomes a journalist, joins the women’s movement and fights against the existing ban on abortion. When Marianne is arrested, her sister visits her in prison. At first Marianne refuses to talk to her, but Juliane persists and recollections of their childhood bring them closer together. During the prison visits, Marianne accuses her sister of wasting her time on trivial matters. Juliane replies that Marianne romanticises revolutionary action in an arrogant manner. Nevertheless, she remains loyal to her sister and acknowledges the energy with which Marianne endeavours to resolve the problems that drove both of them into politics, even if their political methods differ entirely.

After Marianne dies in prison Juliane demonstrates with the tenacity and energy of her sister that her death could not have been a suicide, thereby going far beyond the narrow horizons of the middle class women’s movement. The death of the three RAF prisoners (Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe) in Stuttgart’s Stammheim Prison in October 1977 was hotly debated at the time and remains unclear until today. There are certainly indications that the leaders of the Baader-Meinhof group were in fact murdered while in Stammheim prison. It is also possible that the RAF trio did commit suicide in a desperate protest against what they alleged was a fascist state.
Journalist Christiane Ensslin, sister of Gudrun Ensslin, met von Trotta personally in 1977, at the funeral of Gudrun and other members of the RAF.

Alarmed about the development of society, but full of political prejudices against so-called “bourgeoisified” workers, many intellectuals not only sympathised with the armed struggle of national liberation movements, such as the Palestine Liberation Organization in the Middle East, but also expressed some sympathy for the actions carried out by the Red Army Faction. Von Trotta temporarily hid a suitcase belonging to someone associated with the RAF and became involved in a campaign for improved prison conditions for RAF members.

In an interview with the Tagesspiegel she said about this period of time: “I may have been too intent on following an ideology, instead of thinking things through to the end. Today I think I got carried away, although I do not reject everything that we believed in back then.”

In common with Fassbinder, who shot the television series Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day about young workers in the early 1970s (and in three of whose films she acted early on in her career), von Trotta demonstrates a sensibility towards the plight of ordinary people. As the offspring of immigrants (her mother was a former German Baltic noblewoman who fled Moscow), von Trotta learnt about the hardships of life as a child. She remained stateless until the mid-1960s and only received full German citizenship following her marriage to Schlöndorff.

Trotta’s film Rosa Luxemburg emerged at a time when a broad anti-war movement was actively opposing Germany’s intensified efforts at military rearmament in the 1980s. Based on actual texts, the film deals with the last 20 years in the life of the outstanding socialist and revolutionary, Rosa Luxemburg. Luxemburg was murdered together with Karl Liebknecht by mercenary soldiers in 1919 during the counterrevolution sanctioned by the Social Democratic Party-led government of the time.
The movie features key political and personal episodes from the life of the revolutionist, demonstrating her enormous courage and political determination.

In 1905 revolution breaks out in Russia. A wave of spontaneous mass strikes spreads across the country. The German SPD leadership, dominated by its conservative trade union wing, reacts defensively. Returning to Berlin from Russia in 1906, Luxemburg (outstandingly played by Sukowa) salutes the revolution. Leading figures in the SPD argue that the situation in Germany is not ripe for the type of mass actions associated with the 1905 Russian revolution. Even aging party leader August Bebel (Jan Biczycki) declares, “You cannot compare the Russian situation with Germany.”

Luxemburg recognises that the Russian Revolution is an expression of a new historical era ending the relatively peaceful period that had lasted for 40 years. The issue is not one of manipulating mass actions from above, as one of her critics claims, but rather of “consciously participating in the historical epoch.” Restricting political work to trade unionism and parliamentary manoeuvres is isolating the party from its real, international workers’ base, Luxemburg argues. The new development of world capitalism requires that the SPD embrace the mass movement in Russia as its own.

Shortly afterwards, at the Mannheim Party Congress in 1906, Luxemburg criticises Bebel’s restraint regarding the stance of the SPD in the event of a German military assault on Russia. His contribution at the congress suggests that nothing can be done. She welcomes the stand taken by the French Socialist Party at that time, which has declared in the event of an outbreak of war, “Rather a popular uprising than war!”

Luxemburg’s passionate speech at a workers’ assembly in Frankfurt am Main in 1913 would be highly topical even today: “The delusion of a gradual trend towards peace has dissipated. Those who point to 40 years of peace in Europe, forget the wars that took place outside of Europe and in which Europe played a role. Those responsible for the war danger hovering over the cultural world are the classes who supported the rearmament mania at sea and on land under the pretext of securing the peace. But also sharing responsibility are the liberal parties that have given up any opposition to militarism. (...) The rulers believe they have the right to decide on such a vital question over the heads of the entire people. (...) When we are asked to raise the weapons of murder against our French and other brothers, we declare: No, we refuse!” [1]

THE PERSONAL IS POLITICAL: Four films by Margarethe von Trotta - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILaiLf5H7_w