Katharina - or the art of finding work
Four women search for work in difficult times. The writer Anna Seghers had to flee into exile in Paris in 1933. Searching there for new material, she remembered a newspaper article about Maria Einsmann, who had worked unrecognised as a man in Mainz for many years. This is how the story of Katharina Rendel was born, who puts on her husband's clothes after his death in order to find work.
The film "Katharina oder: Die Kunst Arbeit zu finden" was prompted by a long-lost screenplay in which Anna Seghers had treated this material in 1934/35 and which had been found at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The film combines dramatised scenes from this screenplay with documentary notes on Anna Seghers's difficult situation in Parisian exile, and searches for Maria Einsmann, whose exposure in 1932 caused a worldwide sensation. When she separated from her husband she had taken with her a suit she had paid for, and discovered his papers inside it. Together with her friend she went to Mainz and there assumed his identity. But the film also draws parallels to the situation of women today. Gudrun Selent, a single mother from the former GDR, becomes unemployed in 1990, the year of reunification, and cannot find a new job.
Katharina, Maria, Anna and Gudrun - four women's stories, invented and true, acted and observed, then and now, and the question: how far must women go to find work in difficult times?
Katharina supports her family by washing laundry. Anna Seghers sets her story in Mainz in the crisis year of 1932. Katharina's husband has been unemployed for many years when a wartime comrade arranges a job for him in another city. But he is seriously ill and dies on the way to the interview. Katharina puts on his clothes, presents herself at the mine and is hired as a watchman. In this way she can earn a living for her two children. Only many years later, after a tragic accident, is she unmasked.
Barbara Trottnow filmed excerpts from the screenplay "Hier gibt's keine Katharina" at original locations in Mainz, the birthplace of Anna Seghers. A washerwomen's bridge ("Wäschbrigg"), on which the women once washed laundry, was rebuilt on the Rhine especially for the shoot. So-called women's work, too, can be hard physical labour.
Anna Seghers was born in Mainz in 1900; after studying in Heidelberg she went to Berlin, where she married Laszlo Radvanyi. In 1933 she had to flee the Nazis to Paris. There she lived in the suburb of Bellevue; her daughter Ruth was then five, her son Pierre seven years old. She often managed the balancing act between family and work only by going to a café to write. She was constantly plagued by great financial worries, as numerous letters to publishers testify. And she was alone after her husband was interned in France. Much of the mother Anna's worries can be found in the figure of Katharina. Her famous novel "The Seventh Cross" was also written during her time in Paris.
Anna Seghers's children, Ruth and Pierre Radvanyi, remember their mother in the film and describe how she lived and worked during exile. Pierre lives in Paris today; Ruth followed her mother to the GDR. For the shoot the son visits the house in which the family lived in Paris. And the daughter remembers this time in her mother's Berlin apartment, which is now a memorial.
"Based on a true story reported by Anna Seghers" is written in the preface to the screenplay. Maria Einsmann came to Mainz in 1919 together with her friend Helene, after she had separated from her husband. As she could find no work as a woman, in her desperation she resolved on the spur of the moment to try as a man. Her very first application was successful, and after that no one noticed the gender switch for twelve years. The two women passed themselves off as a married couple, and when Helene had two children, Maria took on paternity at the registry office. Her exposure made headlines in 1931; the photo of the Einsmann family was displayed for weeks in a Mainz photo shop.
Gudrun Selent grew up in the GDR, where she worked for a long time as a milling-machine operator, supposedly a man's job. But after reunification women were the first to be laid off. Her chance of finding work was as slim as Maria's in 1919 or Katharina's in 1932. As a single mother her prospects were especially poor. The women in the new federal states resisted in their own way; after reunification the birth rate fell.