explosive relationships
by Douglas Messerli
Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Pea
Fröhlich, Peter Märthesheimer, and Kurt Raab (dialogue and screenplay), Rainer
Werner Fassbinder (director) Die Ehe der
Maria Braun (The Marriage of Maria
Braun) / 1978, released in the USA in 1979
The first of Fassbinder's so-called BRD Trilogy (the Bundesrepublik
Deutschland series that includes Maria
Braun, Lola, and Veronika Voss) The Marriage of Maria Braun is clearly
one of Fassbinder's most brilliant films, but also, one of his most puzzling.
The story itself, concerning the rise after the end of World War II of a
young German woman (splendidly portrayed by Hanna Schygulla), who has survived
during the war by trading her body for necessary commodities, is quite
transparent—a story told perhaps hundreds of times in post-war literature. But
Fassbinder's characters seem more complex, or one might say
"confused," than typical stereotypes upon which these figures have
been built. The most puzzling aspect of The
Marriage of Maria Braun is the marriage itself, which begins,
significantly, with an explosion of gunfire, presumably by Allied forces. As we
discover the woman of the title, we grow increasingly confused by what she has
seen in her husband, Hermann Braun (Klaus Löwitsch), and why, after only one
night of true marriage, she still so strongly loves and supports him throughout
the film. After that one blissful night, Braun is forced into the German
military and is believed dead, until one day, as Maria is about to bed her
major customer (and father of the baby in her womb), a black soldier named
Bill, Hermann shows up, having been released from prison.
Maria, leaving her crowded family home, sets out by herself to make a
success, with the hope of building a home and financial future for her husband
when he is again released. The attentive viewer already perceives that she is
doomed to succeed, for Maria, a brilliantly capable woman, has learned the art
of seducing men in order to control them—most often, surprisingly, for their
own betterment. Trapped on a train in second-class, Maria pushes her way into
first class where only one individual sits, a French industrialist, Karl Oswald
(Ivan Desny).. Before they have reached their destination he has already fallen
in love with her and made her his "personal assistant."
Despite the outcries of Oswald's unimaginative "bookkeeper,"
Senkenberg, Maria brokers a deal with an
American companies for new machines, and Oswald's somewhat moribund company is
suddenly in the position to become part of the economic miracle of Konrad
Adenauer's post- World War II's government (through the film we hear snippets
of his speeches). One of the great joys of this movie is watching Maria as she
gradually grows into the job, transforming herself both emotionally and
physically into the capable and wealthy businesswoman she was determined to
become. She has even predicted the changes of her own body and personality.
Before Oswald can ask her into his bed, she determines, as she later tells him,
to have an affair with him.
Karl Oswald: You were different
last night.
Maria Braun: Last night I slept
with you. Today I'm working for you.
Karl Oswald: Afraid someone
will think we're having an affair?
Maria Braun: I don't care what people think. I do care what you think.
And you're not having an affair with me. I'm having an affair with you.
In short, although sex is necessary to her very survival, that is not
only how Maria succeeds in her course of action. For despite her open sexuality
and obvious intelligence, she is still utterly in love with her husband of the
past, visiting him in prison regularly each week, and working with a lawyer for
his release.
What we gradually began to perceive is that Maria's success—and by
extension post-War Germany's success—is intrinsically tied sentimentally to the
past. While outwardly they completely abandon the old world, accepting with
gleeful greed and desire its new materialism, the German people are deeply tied
to older relationships such as those of Frau
and Ehemann, husband and wife, managers and labor, etc.
It is not so much "love" that ties them to the past, but the rites
themselves, the positioning of the themselves in the society. For Maria,
however, that role is tolerable only as long as she is in control, is the one
on whom the house and finances are dependent. She has purchased a kind of
mini-mansion for the day when her husband will return and she will be able to
live out the "romance."
It is that split in her personality, the
ability to move forward while linking herself to the myths of the German past,
that makes Maria so attractive. We have only to consider her sister Betti's
inability to encompass those necessary changes to understand why her husband,
Willi, returned also from the front, can no longer stand the sight of her.
Unlike Maria, she cannot intellectually alter her life; she is only the Frau,
now growing fat. Even their mother (Gisela Uhlen) is more sexually and
intellectually adventuresome, her greed for life being revealed even in the
early scenes of the movie, as she says:
Mother: It's wrong to give all
you love to only one person, Grandpa. If you
don't have
potatoes, you eat turnips. When the turnips are gone,
you eat gruel. But
every girl loves her one and only. He goes to
war; five months
later he's dead; and you mourn the rest of your
life. Does that make sense to you, Grandpa? It drowns you.
What Maria does not know is that Oswald,
frustrated by her refusal to marry him—which would certainly mean a release of
that control and a rejection of certain deeply held beliefs from the past—has
discovered her marriage, and made an agreement with Hermann that, if released
from jail, he will travel to Canada, leaving Maria to Oswald for the brief time
he has left before his death.
In some ways, The Marriage of Maria Braun gives us the template for a character
like Petra van Kant. Had Maria lived, she might certainly have been a kind of
independent neurotic, like Petra, who has given up on men. But Hermann's return
with his revelation that he is now financially able to support her, usurps her
power at the very moment that she is told, through Oswald's lawyers, that she
will his inherit money; however, he has given its control over to Hermann. She
has been merely a pawn in trade between the two men.
Los
Angeles, September 10, 2010
Reprinted from International Cinema Review (September 2010).
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