Gegenwärtig sein

She says herself that many of her films were made to take pressure off the heart. Her life is a winding one. Bombed out in Berlin, she soon moved with her mother to Düsseldorf, later lived in Munich, Rome, Paris, then back in Munich. She only found out about her half-sister after her mother's death. Her father was usually absent. She found happiness in art: first in books. She read everything away as a child.
In conversation with author and film publicist Thilo Wydra, Margarethe von Trotta talks about the anxieties of her youth, her first steps as an actress in Munich - by Fassbinder, who didn't want to share her with any other director -, the films she made together with her then-husband Volker Schlöndorff, but above all her own, the biographies of Hannah Arendt, Hildegard von Bingen and Rosa Luxemburg, and her international breakthrough with Die bleierne Zeit - a time she herself experienced intensely: the German Autumn. And, of course, the talk turns to the two filmmakers who continue to impress her most to this day: Ingmar Bergman and Alfred Hitchcock, two directors who could hardly be more different. But she also talks about the great loves of her life - and much more besides.