Rainer Werner Fassbinder | Lili Marleen / 1981

swimming backwards

by Douglas Messerli

 

Manfred Purzer, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Joshua Sinclair, and Werner Ushkurat (screenplay, based on Lale Andersen’s autobiographical fiction The Heavens Have Many Colors), Rainer Werner Fassbinder (director) Lili Marleen / 1981

 

For several years now, I have felt that I have seen and commented on all of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s brilliant available films. But by a quirk of momentary research, I suddenly discovered that I had no essay for one of his most interesting of his films, Lili Marleen. Apparently I had seen it; it showed up on my Letterboxd list as rated, and I don’t ever rate a film without first seeing it. But when I watched it again the other day, I didn’t remember a single frame. It was like I was seeing the film for the first time, which perhaps I was.

      And what a true revelation. Although this is not one of Fassbinder’s most compelling movies, it is one of the few which actually deals with the rise of the Nazi regime, and, in that sense, is perhaps closest in subject and tone to his great masterwork, Berlin Alexanderplatz of a year earlier—although most critics link it, inexplicably I’d argue, with the female-centered movies Lola (1981) and Veronika Voss (1982) or attempt to tie it up with his 1979 film The Marriage of Maria Braun. But this work is of a different species.

      First of all, the film features a wealthy Jewish family—something rare in Fassbinder films, and frankly one of his failures, I suggest—living in Switzerland, Robert Mendelsson (Giancarlo Mgiannini) and his father David (Mel Ferrer). They head up an underground network which, one by one, sneaks Jews out of Germany into Switzerland and other countries. The network is complex and heavily coded, even requiring its most loyal members to knock on doors in certain matters and to communicate in discreet ways. Robert breaks several of these codes and moreover, as a piano player accompanying a rather untalented German cabaret singer, Willie (Hanna Schygulla) is now actually perceived as a danger to their movement, particularly when Robert declares his love for her and his desire that they marry.

     Both father and mother, disturbed by her Aryan background and terrified of any German connections she might have, fear, when Robert and she return to Germany for a performance and, on Robert’s part, a covert action, that she might possibly discover and reveal their actions.

      David Mendelsson arranges, in part because of her unpaid debts back in Switzerland, that she is now allowed re-entry into the country, meaning she is now stranded in her homeland without her lover. Robert, furious with his father’s actions attempts to raise enough money to pay off her debts, and returns often to Germany, both to further cause of the underground’s movements and to discreetly meet up with his lover.

     We begin, accordingly, with a toggling of viewpoints between the secretive and powerful Jewish family and the rather untalented German cabaret singer. As reviewer Lisa Thatchter quite intelligently describes both the power and the failure of Fassbinder’s vision in this film and others:

 

“Fassbinder liked to make films from a female point of view because he preferred what he considered a female way of thinking which was, he believed, dialectic. This means that not only is there a thesis and antithesis but also a synthesis of perspectives. Therefore we have Nazis and underground fighters in a chiastic relation:  that is the villain is victim and the victim is villain. Fassbinder wants us to see that black and white / good and bad / perpetrator and victim are not clear-cut dialects, but rather a synthesised chaotic mass of interpretations, motivations, misinterpretations and multiple desires.

     However, in a world view based on logic, good and bad can have nothing to do with each other. They exist as each other’s polar opposite. Because Fassbinder wants us to see that synthesis— while possible—isn’t occurring, the relationship is the sacrifice as each represents a pole apart from the other.”

      The two lovers are from completely different worlds, Robert brought up in a strictly moralistic world, while Willie has no political understanding whatsoever, and has no comprehension of how she might even endanger an underground enterprise with her naivete. She loves Robert desperately, but he and his family have seemingly abandoned her, and when a Nazi official, Henkel (Karl-Heinz von Hassel) seems dedicated to advancing her career, she has no reason not to take advantage of the situation. He insists she record the popular song, revised by Robert from World War I, “Lili Marleen.” Despite her sometimes miserable recording sessions, she finishes the taping, and, when almost by accident the song is broadcast to the German troops fighting in central Europe, Bulgaria and elsewhere, she becomes not only a popular singer but someone who is almost fetishized as a link back to before the current war and to the young men’s childhood. Willie becomes “Lillie Marleen,” the poor girl waiting for her lover endlessly, still waiting for the man who never showed up. And she becomes a wealthy woman for playing the role over and over again in song. The wonderful composer Peer Raben presents us with so many different versions of this song that, by the end, we are as tortured by it as Robert is later when he is arrested by the Gestapo, who play the song endlessly to him that he might suffer for the sin of his love.

       The real focus of this movie suddenly shifts from the plot to the song itself, which is truly the central foci of this film, as several commentators have noted. Although the great actress Schygulla gives it her best throughout, she, in fact loses control of the film and becomes almost an ancillary of her own fame, as a kind of ur-Marlene Dietrich, a figure that is both loved and hated by the Germans and equally popular with the Allied troops.

      Again, Thatcher is quite perceptive about this issue:

 

“Hanna Schygulla’s Willie, who is transformed to incorporate the song, “Lili Marleen,” which she performs over and over again, upholds the mythology of the Marlene Dietrich the Germans loved to hate and loved to love again. She becomes the great star of the German Empire, the metaphoric gestalt of victory. She represents the transcendent force in the new medias, the melodramatic, popular force of cinema, of a song that transcends frontiers and languages.”

     Goebbels hates the song for its nostalgia and lack of an uplifting message, but Hitler loves it, and invites her for a special performance, revealing once more, as Fassbinder has often shown us, of the kitsch and longing that are the heart of his regime. His was not at all a movement forward, but backwards into a time of the past for which all Germans longed for, something that might even have been present, at least for the soldiers, in the Weimar Regime.

      At one point Willie sings a live concert before the soldiers, but when she finishes, instead of responding to their cheers and insistence that she return and sing again, she runs off to meet secretly with Robert. Chaos eventually overwhelms them as we watch them engage in a kind of orgiastic playing out of several Germanic tropes that seem closer to the SA (Brownshirts) behavior of Ernst Röhm’s gay men than to Hitler’s soldiers, ending even with a boa wrapped round the shoulders of the propaganda minister. This scene alone requires the film to be seen not only as a heterosexual love story, but a queer tale of the relationship between these men of the past and their own love of a wild free sexual world perhaps even without the women they fetishize and adore.

      Matthew Cheney, on his Mumpsimus blog expresses it quite succinctly:

 

“One of the things I love about Lili Marleen is that its mode is utter and obvious kitsch, undeniable kitsch. It highlights the kitschiness not only of the Nazi aesthetic (which plenty of people have done, not least, though unintentionally, the Nazis themselves), but to some extent also of many movies about the Nazis. (I kept thinking of the awful TV mini-series Holocaust while watching it this time, and Elsaesser makes that connection as well.) We love to use the Nazis and the Holocaust for sentimental purposes, and representations of the Nazis and Holocaust often unintentionally veer off into poshlost. To intentionally do so is dangerous, even as critique, because it is too easy to fall into parody and render fascism as something absurd and ridiculous, but not insidious. The genius of Lili Marleen is that the insidiousness remains. It's what nags at us afterward, what lingers beneath the occasional laughter at the excess. There is a discomfort to this film, and it's not just the discomfort of undeniable parody — it is the discomfort of realizing how easily we can be drawn in to the structures being parodied: the suspense, the action, the breathless and improbable love story, the twists and turns, the pageantry, the displays of wealth and power. Our desires are easily teased, our expectations set like booby traps, and again and again those desires and expectations are frustrated and mercilessly mocked.”

     That important orgy-like situation reveals that perhaps, even in the Nazi world, boys still loved other boys, and the ultimate feminization of the Nazi struggle for masculinization, something that strongly echoes in Pete Hegseth’s notion of today’s Trump US military, as he argues for testosterone treatments for selected soldiers.

      Having finally recognized what Robert and his family have been up to, Willie demands that she too becomes a covert agent, and she redeems herself somewhat with the family, by demanding her Nazi friends take her to an early concentration camp, filming the experience, the tape of which she covertly returns to the underground, and which they use, somewhat despicably (particularly when abandoning their possibility to release that information to the world), to release Robert from his imprisonment as opposed to revealing the camps to international sources. But that film can be reproduced, a human being cannot.

 

Critic Bodil Marie Thomsen, in her essay “The Spy and the Cabaret Singer” nicely summarizes what I have just expressed:

 

“One of the central utterances is in the scene where the spy Robert is exchanged for a documentary film showing a German concentration camp. The German officer pays almost no interest to the film, and answers, when he is asked (by Robert’s father), why it was not possible to exchange more Jews for the film: “You can copy a film, not people”. This is the answer that makes it justifiable for Robert’s father to denounce Willie, who actually smuggled the film out of Germany. The film could have been copied anywhere – in Germany before the smuggling and in Switzerland before the exchange. This is perhaps the most solid and cruel statement of the film: When reality is documented in a film, it can – like any fiction film – be copied and altered according to the purpose the public wants it to serve. It can result in joy, longing desire or torture as the song ‘Lili Marleen.’ It can give a vague reference to reality, but the product itself will always be artificial. It is this insight, that the public all over the world wants to dismiss. We want to believe in history although most of it is ideology. We want to believe in big leaders or big ideologies that act as saviors or as evil incarnate.”

 

     Meanwhile, back in Switzerland, Robert’s family arranges and insists upon his marriage to a nice Jewish girl, as he moves on, by the end of the war, to become a famous orchestra conductor. Freed from her German isolation, Willie (now known as “Lili Marleen”) returns, still in love with him, to hear his concert and perhaps reconnect.

     As in a Douglas Sirk movie (Sirk being a big influence on Fassbinder’s films), she meets up by accident with his wife, who greets her, seemingly eager to have finally made her acquaintance. She, realizing finally that she no longer has any role in Robert’s life, turns and leaves, releasing him to his own future. If nothing else, she has had, despite the eventual banning of her song, a truly wondrous life.

     I believe that Fassbinder simply found it impossible to fully express the holocaust, that his films, always sympathetic of human failures, simply could not embrace the full evil. And, as much as I adore his works, this is his failure. He sees the evil, he trots it out for us to see, but ultimately, he forgives it or redeems it in his razor-sharp portrait of those of who failed and were different from all the others. His fascination with perversity cannot embrace the true evil of some of its actions and effects. The face of fascism, after all, is not banality as Hannah Arendt would have us believe, but a culturally self-created universe of desire by those within in. As Matthew Cheney interestingly comments about Lili Marleen: "[It] was like watching an anti-Nazi movie made in the style of Nazi movies." In a sense, however, that is Fassbinder’s gift; he is able to deconstruct his films even as he moves through them, making us realize the allure of what fascism provides certain individuals in Germany and elsewhere in the world is all about. It can be men involving other men in sexual relationships for their own benefit, a social unit preying on each other, a film director abusing his own actors and crew in order to create a memorable work of art, or even the drive to represent the world in art itself.

 

Los Angeles, August 11, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2026).