Lynch 2.0.: Today's Katharina Blums

One of the most powerful characters created by Nobel laureate Heinrich Böll is Katharina Blum, a young woman whose life is turned upside down overnight. When the text was serialized in four parts in 1974 in Der Spiegel, it stirred up quite a storm. It was the first time a news magazine had published a fictional work. The story was striking, contemporary, and, in a way, real.

The protagonist, Katharina Blum, spends an evening with Ludwig Götten, a young man she meets during the Cologne Carnival. The next morning, the police knock on her door—Ludwig is wanted for murder and theft. Katharina helps Ludwig to escape.

This brief romance completely overturns Katharina's life. The police, prosecutors, and media surround her, trampling on her dignity. Interrogation methods that violate human rights, baseless suspicions, and “fake news” spread through the collaboration of law enforcement and tabloid media... Over four days, Katharina undergoes an irreversible transformation, and those close to her are gradually caught in this spiral.

This short but impactful novel highlights the exploitation of press freedom for money and power, the ease of creating scapegoats, the public’s appetite for watching victims suffer, the legal vacuum created by unlawful measures in the fight against armed violence, and the tragedy of a woman fighting to preserve her honour.

What we face today is not the central media of the 1970s, with its one-sided flow of information and sense of threat driven by Red Army Fraction’s lethal attacks. Yet human dignity can still be trampled—this time by social media algorithms left to the mercy of tech bros walking hand in hand with authoritarian regimes.

Fifty years after its publication in 1974, the Katharina Blums of today are perhaps more numerous than ever.

We are coming together at Beyoğlu Aynalı Geçit on Saturday, March 15, 2025, to commemorate the 51st anniversary of the novel and the 50th anniversary of the film’s release. We will interpret the novel’s contemporary reflections and discuss the threats posed by the culture of lynching to civil society, politics, and human rights, as well as potential defence mechanisms.

We will watch the film together and discuss the work, its central theme, and how and why it has remained relevant even after half a century.
 

Please fill out the form to attend. 

15 March, 2025, Aynalı Geçit Cultural Center 
Meşrutiyet Cad. Avrupa Pasajı Kat:2 Galatasaray, 34435 Beyoğlu/İstanbul

Program 

16.00                          Reception

16.15                          Opening: Yonca Verdioğlu, Heinrich Böll Stiftung İstanbul Democracy Program Coordinator  

16.30 – 18.30             Screening

18.30 – 19.30             Talk: Today's Katharina Blums
Moderation: Dr. Dawid Bartelt, Heinrich Böll Stiftung Istanbul Office Director 
Rene Böll, Painter & Graphic Artist, Manager of Annemarie ve Heinrich Böll's Literary and Artictic Heritage 
Prof. Tirşe Erbaysal Filibeli, Bahçeşehir University
 

19.30 - 20:15              Coctail