The film starts out on a ferry carrying a man who's being filmed by another. Katharina meets a man at a Carnival party. The two hit it off and go back to her place. The next morning, the police break down her door. Apparently the man was some kind of criminal. This man gave the police the slip somehow and the police are now accusing of abetting him. It becomes a media frenzy and the media comes down especially hard on her. It's a real circus and Katharina's life is turned upside down as well as that of her dying mother. There's one reporter who was particularly oppressive and, in the final scene, is shot by Katharina.A lot of the specifics aren't particularly clear, but that seems on purpose. It's not clear what sort of criminal Ludwig Götten (Jürgen Prochnow) is except for a widely sought one. It's also not clear if Katharina was lying the entire time and actually helped Ludwig or not. In the end she's very quick to get back with him and call him on the telephone. This seems very contrary to someone ignorant of the man's criminal past. I really like how the police and media are portrayed. I hear a lot of talk about how police are necessary, but they are those who walk around with a gun putting out harsh questions and being general jerks. This film does a good job showing of what they do - how many times the innocent are convicted etc. It's also great that the media is shown how they are. The obvious bias shown by media in their decision to cover certain events over another, and the intrusive and aggressive nature of the tabloids is shown well. Undoubtedly, this isn't a true story, but it is based on the novel by Heinrich Böll who had experience with such things himself. It's easy to forget sometimes that film is a part of life and it's important to show the modern world as it is while still telling a story - which this does. This is a high recommend to any fan of German cinema.

Grace Kelly once said: "There is freedom of the press, but not much freedom from it." "The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum" shows that to be all too true. Katharina Blum (Angela Winkler) is a young woman in West Germany who has a brief fling with a man who turns out to be a left-wing terrorist. The press, ever eager to find stories to sell, sensationalizes the whole thing to make Katharina look like a terrorist, destroying her reputation in the process.The movie also poses the question of quantity vs. quality. You may or may not have heard of Germany's economic miracle. Kaputt after WWII, Germany quickly rebuilt and went on to become Europe's largest economy. But what does it really mean? Katharina's apartment building looks pretty fancy on the outside, but her apartment looks kind of dilapidated; maybe the "economic miracle" has been a facade all along. Either way, this is a movie that everyone should see.

The story takes place in West Germany in the 1970s, a time of great public fear caused by the Red Army Faction's terror campaign of bombing and murder. Katharina Blum is seen going home one night with a suspected terrorist after a party, and she is subsequently arrested and interrogated. The police give her some fairly aggressive treatment and the tabloid newspapers smear her name. As you would expect in a left-wing political film, Ms Blum plays the innocent martyr in all of this, an apparently wrongfully accused woman whose rights are abused by both police investigators and the media. The cops and reporters are made to be caricatures of meanness and evil. The film-makers try every manipulative trick in the book to make us sympathize with her, and think ill of her accusers. When she refuses to cooperate in their investigation, she is portrayed as legitimately defending her dignity. The problem with all of this of course is that to many politically moderate viewers, the woman thoroughly deserved everything that she got! [Some SPOILERS ahead] It is revealed at the end of the film that she did in fact aid and abet the terrorist, and in fact knew where he was hiding. She could easily have avoided all the negative newspaper coverage and police brusqueness by cooperating. Indeed she had a clear moral obligation to do so. That she felt a romantic attraction to the fugitive, is an incredibly selfish reason for her not to help the police. Only in the upside-down moral universe of the lunatic left does the anti-police and anti-media blame game in this film make any sense at all. Katharina Blum has only herself to blame for her loss of honor.

Apart from its general and still (i.e. now more than ever) valid attacks on the scrupelous tactics of tabloid journalism, this movie is also very valuable as a time piece about German society in the 1970's, when the country was shaken by fear of terrorist assassinations and everything considered anti-Democratic (meaning left-wing). In this way, the film not only takes into question the missing morality of tabloid journalists, but also the loss of human rights in a society bothered with questions of homeland security (parallels to the current situation in the U.S. are obvious). Katharina Blum is not only destroyed by the merciless press abusing her for sensationalist journalism, but also by a police and judicial system that doesn't value an individual's right of privacy anymore, and even less the principle of innocent until proven otherwise.A film of exceptional quality (even though the acting isn't convincing at some times), "Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum" is strongly recommended to every thinking movie fan with an interest in the abuse of power in our not-so-democratic society.