Die Ehe der Maria Braun

Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1979)

On the day that Theresa May ‘fired the Brexit starting gun’, BFI began their two-month Rainer Werner Fassbinder retrospective, with a screening of The Marriage of Maria Braun, followed by a Q&A with the film’s star, Hanna Schygulla, and Juliane Lorenz, Fassbinder’s assistant editor on the picture and currently President of the Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation.  The audience entered NFT1 to see an announcement on the screen of the treats in store.  The announcement referred to the film as ‘The Marriage of Maria Brown’.   If the perpetrator had been anyone else, you’d have suspected this was an unconscious expression of Europhobia:  we’re not having Germans tell us how to spell a fine old English name like Brown!  Since it was BFI, you could rest assured it was simple carelessness.  Fortunately, someone had spotted the embarrassing Anglicisation and the ‘Brown’ was corrected to ‘Braun’ by the time the text reappeared at the end of the film, when the BFI’s German guests took the stage.

Although I didn’t stay for the whole Q&A, I wanted to see and applaud Hanna Schygulla, whose dazzling, charismatic performance in the title role sustains The Marriage of Maria Braun, and to hear a little of what she had to say.  The discussion with her and Juliane Lorenz was chaired by Erica Carter, professor of German at King’s College London, who asked Schygulla how conscious she’d been, while making the film, that it was a parable of Germany’s development during the decade following its defeat in World War II.  Schygulla downplayed any such awareness, recalling that she asked Fassbinder if it was really necessary for Maria to die at the end of the story.   My problem with Maria Braun was that I couldn’t see it as anything other than a political allegory.  This is a picture with a heroine self-aware enough to describe herself at one point as ‘the Mata Hari of the economic miracle’.

The film begins in 1943, when Schygulla’s Maria marries Hermann Braun (Klaus Löwitsch) during an Allied bombing raid.  The newlyweds spend ‘half a day and a whole night’ together before Hermann goes back to the front.   At the end of the war, Maria is told that her husband is dead.  She takes a job as a hostess in a bar frequented by soldiers from the occupying US forces.  She begins an affair with Bill (George Byrd), an African-American officer, who’s much older than Maria and much crazier about her than she is about him.   She becomes pregnant by Bill.  Hermann returns from the dead – in fact, from a Soviet prison camp – to discover his wife and Bill undressing each other.  Intervening in the struggle between the two men that follows, Maria hits Bill on the head with a full bottle, killing him instantly, though unintentionally.  At a trial before a US military tribunal, Maria acknowledges her love for both Hermann and Bill, an admission that moves her husband to claim responsibility for Bill’s death.

As Hermann begins a jail sentence, Maria, after an abortion, becomes personal assistant to – and the mistress of – a rich industrialist, Karl Oswald (Ivan Desny).  She reveals this to Hermann, insisting that it’s he whom she really loves and that their relationship can begin again once he’s out of prison.  Maria quickly rises to a powerful position within Oswald’s business empire and makes enough money to buy her own house.  In the meantime, Oswald visits Hermann in jail and promises to make him and Maria joint heirs to his fortune if Hermann agrees to desert Maria.  On his release, he emigrates to Canada, from where he sends his wife a red rose each month to remind her of his love.  After Oswald’s death, Hermann returns to West Germany and Maria.   With commentary on the 1954 World Cup final playing on the radio, the couple prepare to go to bed together.   Their lovemaking is interrupted by the arrival at Maria’s house of Oswald’s executor (Hark Bohm) and a notary public (Kristine De Loup), who have come to read the tycoon’s will.  Maria now discovers, to her distress, the pact that Hermann and Oswald made with each other.   She uses the stove to light a cigarette and is killed in a gas explosion:  it’s not explained exactly how this occurs or whether Maria’s death may have been suicide.   She dies as the final whistle blows in Berne:  West Germany have won the World Cup.

That unexpected triumph – the Germans beat the ‘Mighty Magyars’ team from Hungary 3-2 – must have been a huge boost to national morale and Fassbinder uses this return from the international sporting wilderness to represent the sealing of Germany’s rehabilitation as a major political and economic power.  Maria Braun was Fassbinder’s biggest commercial success, in Germany and internationally.  It’s consistently entertaining and the opening and closing sections – the mix of horror and slapstick in the bomb-hit marriage ceremony, the dynamic irony of the World Cup commentary (which, assuming it’s the genuine article, has historical interest too) – are bravura pieces of film-making.  There are probably plenty of others in between for cinéastes able to pick up all the echoes in Maria Braun of the Hollywood melodramas that were close to Fassbinder’s heart.  The screenplay, by Peter Märthesheimer and Pea Fröhlich, is nothing if not coherent.  The dichotomy between Maria’s underlying, more or less unconsummated love for her German husband and her exploitative liaisons with representatives of America and big business is clearly designed to illustrate the economic over-development and spiritual under-development of West Germany during the early post-war years.  But Fassbinder’s stylised approach makes the meanings of the story, and of the mostly alienating people in it, too salient.  As a result, he seems to be making the same points repeatedly.

It’s interesting to compare The Marriage of Maria Braun with the Depression-era Hollywood film Baby Face, directed by Alfred E Green, which describes the meteoric, unscrupulous self-advancement of its heroine Lilly Powers, played by Barbara Stanwyck.  Baby Face may be a much less sophisticated movie than Fassbinder’s yet I think it’s a better one in the sense that you’re immediately engaged by Lilly’s story but can see it too as offering larger insights into what drives a young woman of a particular time, place and social background towards money and independence.  In Maria Braun, the bigger political picture overshadows the individual story.  Fassbinder tends to favour actors whose appearance is striking-verging-on-grotesque and whose characterisations are hard-edged and one-dimensional:  Gisela Uhlen’s playing of Maria’s feckless mother epitomises this.  Although George Byrd is good enough as Bill, the German actors with cameos as American characters – Günther Kaufmann as another soldier, Bruce Low as a conference delegate – are terrible.  Apart from Hanna Schygulla, by far the best performance comes from Klaus Löwitsch as Hermann.  His quiet intensity and ambiguity make him relatively hard to read.  They also give Hermann Braun a quality of remoteness and mystery that’s a refreshing contrast to the prevailing style of this arresting but unlikeable film.

29 March 2017