Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss

Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1982)

The Marriage of Maria Braun, the first part of Fassbinder’s ‘Bundesrepublik Deustchland’ trilogy, ends on the day of West Germany’s victory in the soccer World Cup of 1954.  The trilogy’s second film[1], Veronika Voss, picks up, chronologically and with a sporting echo, where Maria Braun left off.  The year is 1955; the principal male character, Robert Krohn (Hilmar Thate), is a football journalist.  The leading lady, the eponymous Veronika (Rosel Zech), is a once-popular German film actress whose career is now on the skids.  Her biography is based loosely on that of the real-life Sybille Schmitz (1909-45).  Elements of the scenario, especially the title character’s delusions of undiminished celebrity, and the chiaroscuro black-and-white photography (by Xaver Schwarzenberger) bring to mind Sunset Boulevard too.

The key location in Veronika Voss is the Munich house in which a doctor, Marianne Katz (Annemarie Düringer), treats patients, including Veronika, who are suffering from nervous ailments.  This place is the behind-closed-doors of early post-war West Germany and the symbolic nerve centre of what Fassbinder sees as the national psyche of the 1950s.  (He wrote the screenplay with Pea Fröhlich and Peter Märthesheimer, both of whom also worked on Maria Braun and Lola.)  Veronika’s heyday, as a star of UFA pictures, was in the late 1930s and early 1940s; she is rumoured to have slept with Josef Goebbels.  Dr Katz’s patients also include an elderly Jewish couple (Johanna Hofer and Rudolf Platte), concentration camp survivors who eventually die in a suicide pact.  Morphine, the ultimate painkiller, and other opiates are administered freely.  A sense of America calling the tune in post-war Germany is suggested through the Country & Western and other pop music playing on a radio in the clinic, and reinforcing its anaesthetising climate, as well as by a GI dealer (Günther Kaufmann) on the premises, who gives the (somewhat languid) impression of owning the place.

Even though she’s aware he’s having an affair with femme fatale Veronika, Robert’s girlfriend Henriette (Cornelia Froboess) tries to help him uncover what’s going on at the clinic.  For her pains, Henriette dies at the hands of Dr Katz, whom Veronika helps to cover up her crime.  Soon afterwards, Veronika takes a fatal overdose of medication supplied by the clinic authorities.  They remain in control and Robert’s attempts to expose the status quo are vanquished.  He returns to his day job, asking a cab driver to take him ‘back to the Munich 1860’ football ground.  Fassbinder characteristically complements political metaphor with cinematic references.  The latter also bespeak American cultural influence.  Veronika and Robert, on their first meeting, walk together through woodland and a rainstorm which exaggerate typical forties Hollywood representations of the same.  The stylised visuals made the film often hard going for this photophobic viewer – thanks to the dazzling whiteness of parts of the clinic, the flicker of whirring film projectors in the movie studio sequences and of rotating ceiling fans in the offices of Robert’s newspaper.  Punitively insistent drum rolls on the soundtrack reinforce the oppressive, claustrophobic ambience.

Veronika Voss, more than The Marriage of Maria Braun, is a film I’d rather read about than sit through.  This later piece makes you appreciate all the more the animating presence of Hanna Schygulla in the earlier one.  Veronika initially finds Robert extraordinary because he’s never heard of her; unlike Norma Desmond, she seems as much deluded as a lover as she is as a movie has-been.  Rosel Zech’s high-pitched neuroticism is startling in the early stages but she’s gradually swamped by Fassbinder’s symbolic scheme.   Hilmar Thate’s strong naturalistic playing of Robert allows the story to keep some kind of foothold in human reality.  The longer German title of the film translates as ‘The Longing of Veronika Voss’.

29 May 2017

[1] Veronika Voss is considered the second film even though it was the last of the BRD trilogy to be released.  Lola, which came out a year earlier, is set two years later, in 1957.