From an essay in The American Historical Review by Geoffrey Cocks (Vol. 96, No. 4. [Oct. 1991]):

This is the first and most famous film in Fassbinder's trilogy on the Federal Republic. (The other two are Lola, 1981, and Veronika Voss, 1982.) Maria Braun is the story of a young woman married in 1944 whose climb up the postwar West German corporate ladder serves as an allegory of what Fassbinder sees as the reconsideration of social and political authoritarianism in West Germany between 1945 and 1954. The prolific Fassbinder, who died in 1982, was a prominent member of the German New Wave in cinema, directors who by and large were born during the war and radicalized by the youth movements of the 1960's and 1970's. In West Germany, of course, this rebelliousness was aggravated by the discontent over their elders' indulgence in the material successes of the "economic miracle," the resultant social and political conservatism of the Federal Republic, and behind it all, the psychological denial of the crimes of Nazi Germany.

Fassbinder remained a radical utopian whose films nonetheless concentrate on the frustration of hope and change. Maria Braun is a prime example of this, since Fassbinder regards the period beginning in 1945 as one in which "everything seemed possible," including the founding of a state "that could have been the most humane and freest ever." Instead, democracy was imposed by the Western occupation forces, and the cold war demanded German industry and a German army. Maria Braun ends with the death of the protagonist in 1954, the year (mirroring 1945) the West German army was born. Fassbinder underscores this tragedy of blasted hopes, as he sees it, by filling the soundtrack at the end of the film with the last seven minutes of the radio broadcast on July 4, 1954, of West Germany's victory in the world soccer championships: Maria and her husband die in their flaming villa while the announcer exults: "Time's up! Time's up! Germany is world champion [Weltmeister]!"

While Fassbinder's hope for a new beginning in 1945 explicitly accepts the potentially exculpatory notion of a "Year Zero" in German history, Maria Braun posits political continuity between the Nazi years and the subsequent history of the Federal Republic. The film opens with a portrait of Hitler blasted away in the bombardment that accompanies Maria and Hermann's wedding and concludes with a series of negatives of the pictures of postwar chancellors Konrad Adenauer, Ludwig Erhard, Kurt Kiesinder, and Helmut Schmidt. (Fassbinder omits Willy Brandt, whom he sees as an exception to blindness to the German past.) And the story ends with the gas explosion that destroyed Maria's house, a symbol (applied less skillfully by other filmmakers to America in Zabriskie Point, 1969, and The Two Jakes, 1990) of the failure of reform and the triumph of bourgeois greed. The film's primary level of narrative, that of the "private history" of the everyday life of the common people, implies a tradition of apoliticism. In Maria Braun, "public history" regularly intrudes into the lives of the characters, usually in the form of radio speeches and announcements, but the characters remain oblivious to such intrusions. This narrative style, along with the large number of minor characters, allows the film to reproduce effectively the "microhistory" of the period, rendering it a valuable depiction of the early material deprivation and the later material plenty that submerged critical political, social, and historical consciousness.

Fassbinder has argued that women are offered a greater chance for constructive social reform than are men, whose lives are more determined by public opportunity. Thus he casts women as the protagonists of the films in his Federal Republic trilogy. By focusing on what Fassbinder calls the "micropolitics of desire," however, the film abandons inquiry into the responsibility of people like Maria and Hermann, her soldier-husband who remains a captive of the Russians for a time after the war, for action (or inaction) under National Socialism. Fassbinder's depiction of the struggle for survival, especially for women, during and after the war lacks the critical quality of recent historical research, such as that of Annemarie Tröger, which shows that women's accounts of their suffering between 1939 and 1949 have served as a means to avoid confronting their indirect complicity in the greater suffering inflicted by the Nazis on their victims.

This neglect of perspective undercuts Fassbinder's attempt to draw lines of continuity between Nazi Germany and the postwar period. At the same time, Fassbinder's radical insistence on political continuity between the Third Reich and the Federal Republic works against a critical appreciation of the nuances of collaboration and abdication under a dictatorship significantly different in policy and process from West German democracy. We do not learn anything about Maria's (much less Hermann's) life before 1945 that would illuminate the ways in which her survival and prosperity after the war might have been conditioned by her socialization before and after 1933. (Compare Detlev Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany [1987].) Maria remains more of a symbol of relative innocence corrupted (and opportunity missed) than a fully drawn character. It serves Fassbinder's ideological convictions more than it does history that Maria vomits during an Adenauer radio speech advocating rearmament, that in the end she realizes that she has been manipulated by the men in her life, and that her death appears as a possible suicide. In spite of his limitations, however, The Marriage of Maria Braun offers significant insight not only into the social history of postwar western Germany but also into the radical critiques of the social and political system of the Federal Republic common during the 1960's and 1970's, critiques powerfully concerned not just with socioeconomic theory and practice but with the substance and consciousness of recent German history as a whole.


From "Camping in the Art Closet: The Politics of Camp and Nation in German Film" by Johannes von Moltke in New German Critique (No. 63, Special Issue on Fassbinder [Autumn 1994]):

The renewal of Schygulla's and Fassbinder's collaborative relation in Maria Braun marks not only their rise to international fame (particularly in America), but also the distinct "nationalization" of Schygulla's (super)star image. Significantly, the film's subject matter gets scripted directly onto the star's body, leading critics to speak of Schygulla's national roles as "eine deutsche Frau." (Indeed, Schygulla herself recounts how, in a grotesque kind of Freudian screen memory, this identification has even led to comments such as "You were wonderful in your role as Eva Braun.) It is hardly surprising, therefore, that Hanna Schygulla's performances as Willie in Lilli Marleen and as Maria Braun have often been read for the way in which she represents German history itself. Not only, it is argued, is she a quintessential woman of the 1940's or 1950's, respectively (which would amount to saying simply that she plays her role well in the sense of realistically); but she is seen to literally embody Germany, becoming a "Germania" of the New German Cinema.

A Germania among others, to be sure. Among the Lenes and Marias of that cinema, Hanna Schygulla, too, functions as such an allegory; and yet, I want to insist that there is an additional aspect to her filmic presence, an excess which cannot be fully integrated into the national meaning represented by her role as allegorical image, but which lies instead in the more intractable histrionics of her performance. For clearly it is not simply the character of the "average German woman of the 1950's" (Maria Braun) which operates on the actress's identification with the nation itself. Nor is this just an effect of the elaborate metaphorics of the film's respective stylistics and narrative systems (the way in which Maria Braun's rise to affluence parallels and mirrors the German economic miracle [Wirtschaftswunder], for example). Instead, what links the star's body so intimately to the national body and at the same time cuts across that identification is as much an effect of her particular performance as it is of her role or her narrative status as a signifier...In the case of Schygulla, his embodiment is marked, like the parodies of the drag performer, by excess: she is not simply a woman of the fifties, but one who is constantly playing at playing a woman of the fifties (in The Marriage of Maria Braun, this is elaborated most clearly perhaps in her vampish cat-and-mouse play with Ivan Desny). Just as Hanna Schygulla exemplifies the way gender is a matter of doing rather than being, so are the nationalizing and historicizing dimensions of her performance characterized by an emphasis on construction, theatricality, and artifice which represent the nation and its history as a drag performance, put on by a particular body. Schygulla's enigmatic performances as a vamp in fifties clothing refuse the certainty that "we already know how it ends"; indeed, even after the explosive end has come at the close of Maria Braun, we are still not quite sure that we know.

From "Historicizing the Subject: A Body of Work?" by Thomas Elsaesser in New German Critique (No. 63, Special Issue on Fassbinder [Autumn 1994]):

The Marriage of Maria Braun deconstructs/rewrites several different genres, and even several specific films: the newsreel; the post-war Trümmerfilme [rubble films], such as Zwischen Gestern und Morgen, from which it takes certain visual compositions; the Adenauer-era corruption films like Das Mädchen Rosemarie; the Hollywood melodrama of the upwardly mobile business woman, e.g., Mildred Pierce; film noir (Maria Braun is a kind of inverted The Postman Always Rings Twice, in which the femme fatale does not kill the returning husband but the lover instead); a kind of homage, as well, to Douglas Sirk's A Time to Love and a Time to Die.

From "Fassbinder/Peer Raben" by Roger Hillman in Screening the Past (Issue 12, 2001):

Raben's musical choices perfectly complement Fassbinder's narratives, with his parodic twists to light entertainment (in places, an outright indulgence in conscious schmaltz), or else mock-dramatic music. In the opening sequence of The Marriage of Maria Braun, nothing less than an inversion of the primacy of the visual and the soundtrack is achieved. Sounds of course can be just as deceptive as images. But one way out of the suspect capacity of audio-visual media to "represent the forces at work in the historical process" is the soundtrack, at least its evocation of cultural memory. The most probing student query I can ever recall fielding was whether the Beethoven excerpt at the beginning of The Marriage of Maria Braun was perhaps a recording by Wilhelm Furtwängler (the conductor whose career was deemed to typify issues of art and morality under the Nazis).

The prominence of sound throughout this film (e.g. the staccato effects of jackhammers and typewriters, reminiscent of the anti-aircraft fire from the opening sequence), in particular the viewer/listener's bombardment in the first and last sequences, creates an acoustic framing effect similar to that of his many visual devices. About halfway through this film there is a scene in which Maria and Oswald (characteristically framed visually) are conversing in the background with a piano prominent in the foreground, while a Mozart piano concerto on the soundtrack functions seemingly as high art mood music. But Fassbinder confounds the standard conventions of such music—our expectation that it's audible to us but not to the onscreen characters—by having Oswald sit down at the piano and play a couple of phrases (with notably tinnier piano tone). These synchronize perfectly with the non-diegetic Mozart (and without any hint of its source being a record player in the same rooms), the gesture of a highly creative auteur.

From a review by Michael Acquarello in Strictly Film School (www.filmref.com):

Rainer Werner Fassbinder creates a darkly comic and scathing portrait of Germany's revitalization program in The Marriage of Maria Braun. A cultural shift has occurred in the aftermath of the war, and government mandates cannot repair the damage to the human soul. There is a pervasive sense of desperation in the German people: a man stealing planks from a rotting fence, women from good homes selling themselves, an overworked doctor feeding a chemical addiction. Even Maria's corporate success is a consequence of a figurative act of prostitution. Episodically, despite her increasing wealth, Maria prefers to return to a demolished, abandoned building surrounded by faint sounds of reconstruction, emphasizing the country's incomplete recovery from the war. Hermann's indefinite prison term seems to vary with the prevailing political tide, reflecting the government's own uncertainty over its agenda. In essence, The Marriage of Maria Braun is not about an enduring love, but rather the idea that true love has no place in an exploitative and emotionally detached world of materialism and economic struggle.