The Marriage Of Maria Braun

Commentary and criticism on Fassbinder's film "The marriage of Maria Braun"

A new reading of Fassbinder's most popular film that highlights the roles of race and gender. The Marriage of Maria Braun is the most popular film by the enfant terrible director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the leading exponent of the "New German Cinema" of the early sixties to early eighties. It exemplifies his use and abuse of the genre of melodrama. Set in the immediate postwar period and centered around a strong female protagonist, Maria Braun (1978) was the first film in a trilogy that attempts to work through West Germany's fraught past and the legacy of Nazi Germany through the eyes of characters marginalized by their gender, race, sexuality, or (dis)ability. Maria attempts to navigate the poverty and sexism of the immediate postwar years by making her relationships with men as beneficial as possible. In the end, she discovers she has been a pawn in a power game between her husband, long thought killed on the Eastern Front, and her long-time lover Bill, an African-American GI. Yet Maria is also complicit in racism and white patriarchy, a fact that scholarship on the film has barely registered. In her new reading, Priscilla Layne draws on archival research, Critical Race Theory, Black Feminist Thought, and Critical Whiteness Studies to expand on the role of race and gender in the film.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder is one of the most prominent and important authors of post-war European cinema. Thomas Elsaesser is the first to write a thoroughly analytical study of his work. He stresses the importance of a closer understanding of Fassbinder's career through a re-reading of his films as textual entities. Approaching the work from different thematic and analytical perspectives, Elsaesser offers both an overview and a number of detailed readings of crucial films, while also providing a European context for Fassbinder's own coming to terms with fascism.

A history of German film dealing with individual films as works of art has long been needed. Existing histories tend to treat cinema as an economic rather than an aesthetic phenomenon; earlier surveys that do engage with individual films do not include films of recent decades. This book treats representative films from the beginnings of German film to the present. Providing historical context through an introduction and interchapters preceding the treatments of each era's films, the volume is suitable for semester- or year-long survey courses and for anyone with an interest in German cinema. The films: The Student of Prague - The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari - The Last Laugh - Metropolis - The Blue Angel - M - Triumph of the Will - The Great Love - The Murderers Are among Us - Sun Seekers - Trace of Stones - The Legend of Paul and Paula - Solo Sunny - The Bridge - Young T rless - Aguirre, The Wrath of God - Germany in Autumn - The Marriage of Maria Braun - The Tin Drum - Marianne and Juliane - Wings of Desire - Maybe, Maybe Not - Rossini - Run Lola Run - Good Bye Lenin - Head On - The Lives of Others Stephen Brockmann is Professor of German at Carnegie Mellon University and past President of the German Studies Assocation.

With the outbreak of the Korean War, the poor, rural West German state of Rhineland-Palatinate became home to some of the largest American military installations outside the United States. In GIs and Frauleins, Maria Hohn offers a rich social history of this German-American encounter and provides new insights into how West Germans negotiated their transition from National Socialism to a consumer democracy during the 1950s. Focusing on the conservative reaction to the American military presence, Hohn shows that Germany's Christian Democrats, though eager to be allied politically and militarily with the United States, were appalled by the apparent Americanization of daily life and the decline in morality that accompanied the troops to the provinces. Conservatives condemned the jazz clubs and striptease parlors that Holocaust survivors from Eastern Europe opened to cater to the troops, and they expressed scorn toward the German women who eagerly pursued white and black American GIs. While most Germans rejected the conservative effort to punish as prostitutes all women who associated with American GIs, they vilified the sexual relationships between African American men and German women. Hohn demonstrates that German anxieties over widespread Americanization were always debates about proper gender norms and racial boundaries, and that while the American military brought democracy with them to Germany, it also brought Jim Crow.

Essay from the year 2012 in the subject German Studies - Miscellaneous, grade: 78, University of Birmingham, course: BA Modern Languages, language: English, abstract: The collision of sound and image in Fassbinder’s "Die Ehe der Maria Braun" provides an on-screen representation of the relationship between public and private life in the film. The contrast created by this collision is a distancing technique which encourages the audience to consider the implications of ignoring the political (public) world at the time of the Wirtschaftswunder and in their own time. This essay aims to demonstrate the way in which Fassbinder achieves this through his manipulation of sound and image, specifically examining the open and closing credits, the radio broadcasts of Konrad Adenauer’s speeches, Oswald’s piano playing and the final radio broadcast concerning the 1954 World Cup.