The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Rainer Werner Fassbinder · a film in German, with some English · 1979 · about 120 minutes · written by Peter Märthesheimer and Pea Fröhlich, from an idea by Fassbinder · in the original, Die Ehe der Maria Braun
Mode
Melodrama of a woman’s rise held at a Brechtian distance; national allegory, comedy of exchange and tragedy in one
Mythos
Penelope inverted: the wife who waits for the husband at war, handles her suitors and is sent the return by contract; the woman as the nation married to an absent past
Phase
Eleven years in order and with no flashback, from a wedding under bombardment in 1943 to an explosion on the day of the Bern final in 1954, with a coda after the story ends
Presentation
Feature film in colour, about 120 minutes, in German with some English; Michael Ballhaus’s photography, Peer Raben’s score, the period’s radio and building noise under the interiors; Hanna Schygulla in nearly every scene
Register
Cool, ironic melodrama, from a wedding signed in the rubble as half farce to a killing played almost calmly and a house going up under a football commentary
Scale
One woman, two marriages and a firm; a ruined city, a prison and a new house; the nation heard on the radio
Governing Proposition
A woman married for one night in the bombing waits for her husband through the ruin and the recovery, and grows rich in the waiting, while the men settle her life between themselves by a document she never sees. The wager of the film is that private and public time were one clock: that the Federal Republic was built by deferring its feeling into accumulation, and that the deferral used up what it was said to be for.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins with a marriage and a bombardment in the same frame. In 1943 Maria and Hermann Braun are being married when the wall behind the wedding table is blown open. The portrait of Hitler falls, the registrar runs, and the couple sign on the ground in the rubble, the bride dragging the registrar back to stamp the paper. Freeze frames hold the moment under the credits. It is played half as farce, and it states the film’s first fact before there is a story: this marriage exists as a document, signed under a portrait and stamped while the city falls.
There is one night. Then Hermann goes back to the war, and the marriage that has just been made is deferred. Everything that follows is the waiting, and the film tells it in order, with no flashback, across eleven years, to an explosion on the day of the World Cup final in Bern, 4 July 1954. The two explosions, the one that interrupts the wedding and the one that ends the marriage, bracket the whole, and between them a ruined country becomes a rich one.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder directed Die Ehe der Maria Braun in 1978 from a screenplay by Peter Märthesheimer and Pea Fröhlich, on an idea of his own. Michael Ballhaus photographed it in colour, Peer Raben wrote the music, and it was edited by Juliane Lorenz and by “Franz Walsch”, Fassbinder’s own pseudonym. Hanna Schygulla plays Maria, Klaus Löwitsch Hermann, Ivan Desny Karl Oswald and Gisela Uhlen the mother, with Gottfried John as Willi, Elisabeth Trissenaar as Betti and George Byrd as Bill. It was first shown at the Berlin festival in February 1979 and opened in West German cinemas in March, in German with some English, and runs about 120 minutes.
Movement II
After the war Maria stands at the station in the ruined city with a placard bearing her husband’s name. The waiting, which was private, is made public: a woman among the returning trains, holding up a name to strangers. On the radio a service reads out the names of the missing. The film’s second structure begins here and does not stop. Under the private scenes runs the public sound of the period, broadcasts and announcements, and under many of the interiors the noise of building, hammering and drilling. The viewer watches a woman and hears a nation, and has to join them.
The ruin is an economy. There is a black market, and a dress bought on it; there is coffee, and there are cigarettes. Maria’s mother keeps a household with the grandfather and is courted by Wetzel, and takes him for comfort. Maria’s friend Betti is married to Willi. And Maria takes work in a bar for American soldiers, where she meets Bill, a Black American. With him she makes the film’s first exchange of body for survival: he is paid in her company, and in lessons in German.
Word comes that Hermann is dead, and Maria goes on with Bill. The ruin of these early scenes is period recreated in 1978, rubble, nylons and the black market, and Ballhaus already frames Maria inside structures that are not hers: doorways, windows, rooms seen from other rooms. She acts, and she is placed.
Movement III
Hermann is not dead. He stands in the doorway and sees his wife with Bill, and the bottle is brought down on Bill. The film plays the terror almost calmly, without the swell a melodrama would give it. A Black American is killed so that the German marriage can survive, and the film leaves what that death means beyond the plot as a question, unresolved.
At the trial Hermann takes the blame, and he goes to prison. The killing that should have ended the marriage defers it again, now by law. The husband has returned and is at once removed, and Maria is left with a marriage that consists, once more, of a paper and a promise of later. The deferral has become a sentence.
From here the film is one long waiting with its own clock. Maria visits Hermann in prison, down the corridor and across the table, and Ballhaus films the visits as he films everything else: two people in a structure neither of them owns. The marriage is a set of visiting hours. Everything Maria does in the world outside is done for later, for the marriage that will begin when he comes out.
Movement IV
On a train Maria takes a seat in the first-class compartment, where the industrialist Karl Oswald watches her. A drunk soldier is dealt with. Oswald makes an offer, and she rises in his textile firm: negotiating with American buyers and with the unions, cool, comic and imperious, and becoming his lover. Schygulla plays her as a surface that is the meaning. Desny’s Oswald is courteous and sick, and the film never asks the viewer to see past either of them.
The firm is the recovery. Exports, unions, contracts and a fortune growing year by year: Maria’s rise is a ledger of the economic miracle, and her waiting is entrepreneurial. She works for later, and the country works for later around her, the radio carrying its public history over her private scenes. The office scenes repeat their point, her hardness and her charm, more than once, and they are staged more flatly than what surrounds them.
What Maria does not know, or does not show she knows, is that the two men have met. Oswald and Hermann make a secret contract between themselves, and Hermann sells the years to Oswald. The woman whose agency drives the plot is traded by a document she never sees. The Penelope of the old story waited for her husband and handled her suitors; this one is managed by her husband and her suitor together, and the return she is working for has been sold.
Movement V
There is a house now, and Ballhaus’s camera moves through it with a restless grace. Oswald dies. Hermann comes back, the second return, and the will is read in the new house. It discloses the deal the two men made. The marriage that Maria waited for has a house, a fortune and a husband in it, and nothing in it can be lived. The later she worked for has arrived, and what it was for has been spent in the waiting.
On the radio the World Cup final is being played in Bern. At the stove a cigarette is lit, and the gas is left open. The camera dwells on it; the stove and the cigarettes have been set up long before. The commentator’s voice rises toward the winning goal, and the house goes up. The film does not say whether the explosion is accident or choice. The private ending and the public victory are one event, joined by the form, on the day the country was said to be born again.
A coda follows the story: photographic negatives of West German chancellors, one after another, an essay appended to the drama and answering to its own law. Die Ehe der Maria Braun was Fassbinder’s greatest commercial success and the first of the films later called the BRD Trilogy, with Lola (1981) and Veronika Voss (1982); it is the Fassbinder film most often shown. What it made is a melodrama in which a woman’s waiting and a nation’s recovery keep one clock, and the deferral consumes what it was for.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test holds on the main line. The wedding in the bombing gives the marriage its paper and its single night; the placard at the station makes the waiting public; the bar and Bill give Maria her first exchange of body for survival; the killing of Bill puts Hermann in prison, so the marriage is deferred by law; the contract between the two men makes the deferral a transaction; the will discloses it; the gas ends it. Each step requires the next. What gives is in the margins. The mother’s courtship by Wetzel and the marriage of Betti and Willi are mirrors the film could lose at some cost; the office scenes repeat one point; the drunk on the train is a set piece rather than a joint.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and holds: the Federal Republic was built by deferring its feeling into accumulation, and the deferral consumed what it was said to be for. Maria works for later, for the marriage that will begin when Hermann returns; the economic recovery is that later, and when it arrives there is a house, a fortune and nothing that can be lived in it. A second truth stands beside it: the marriage was a contract from the first frame, made under a portrait of Hitler, and the men settle her life by a document she never sees. Her agency is real and is still traded. Held below the bar because the allegory is announced as well as disclosed, by the radio and the coda, and the interior that would test it is kept closed.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The register is cool, ironic melodrama, and elevation is not its habit. It rises at the ends and once in the middle. At the opening the wall is blown open behind the wedding table, the portrait falls, the registrar runs and the couple sign on the ground in the rubble, with freeze frames under the credits. In the middle, Hermann stands in the doorway and the bottle is brought down on Bill, a terror played almost calmly. At the close a cigarette is lit at the stove, the gas is left open, and the commentator’s voice rises to the winning goal as the house goes up. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: the long middle, of office, prison visits and the house, is level and dry, and the film distrusts transport on principle.
Score: 7.7 / 10
The myth is built, and it is the Odyssey’s other half: Penelope waiting for the husband at war, keeping faith, refusing and handling suitors, and the return. Every term is turned. The waiting is entrepreneurial, the suitors are used and buried, the husband returns twice and is sent away by contract, and the reunion ends in fire. The second structure is national: Maria is the Federal Republic, married to an absent past, prospering through an American and then an industrialist, and the allegory carries the plot’s chronology to the day of the Bern final. The particular stays particular: a bottle, a placard, coffee, a dress from the black market. Held below the bar because the national allegory is schematic and the Penelope structure is deepened no further than irony.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The inheritance is Douglas Sirk’s Hollywood melodrama, which Fassbinder had already taken up in Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974); the woman’s picture of the 1940s and 1950s, of whose line Mildred Pierce is nearest; and the German rubble films and Heimatfilme of the years the film depicts. The turn binds the melodrama to national history and to Brechtian distance at once: the woman’s rise as a ledger of the recovery, the radio as a public text over the private one, and an ending that will not say whether the explosion is accident or choice. The stake was real: a larger budget than his earlier films, a production troubled by money disputes with its producer, a bid for a wide public. Held at 8.0 because the Sirkian method was already his: the swerve from his own path is in scale.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows, which is that private and public time were one clock. The chronology is strict, and the radio carries public history over private scenes, so that the viewer hears the nation and watches the woman and has to join them. The final explosion falls on the commentator’s cry of victory: the joining is made by the form, not stated. Ballhaus frames Maria through doorways, behind glass, in the prison corridor, in rooms seen from other rooms, so that she is always placed in a structure she does not own. Two explosions bracket the film. Held from the top because the scenes between the brackets are classical studio melodrama, well made and inherited, and the coda of negatives is added rather than grown.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Evidence across forty-seven years. The film became a central text in the argument of the New German Cinema with the national past, and feminist readings divide on whether Maria is a figure of agency or of its commodification. The questions stay open: accident or suicide at the stove; whether Maria knew of the contract before the will; whether she loved Hermann or the idea of the marriage; whether the allegory is a critique of the recovery or of the woman made to stand for it; what Bill’s death, a Black American killed so that the German marriage can survive, says beyond the plot. It yields on return in its sound, which few viewers hear whole the first time. Held because the allegorical reading, once seen, organises most of the rest.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Released in 1979, so force and reach are scored together, in the field of the cinema of the 1970s. The intrinsic force is real: the film made the history of the Federal Republic available to popular melodrama without consolation, and showed that the New German Cinema’s quarrel with its fathers could fill cinemas. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it was Fassbinder’s greatest commercial success; it opened the trilogy completed by Lola and Veronika Voss and helped set the terms of the German historical film after it, which Edgar Reitz’s Heimat (1984) answers from the other side; and the Sirkian line it carried runs on to Todd Haynes. In a decade of The Godfather and Jeanne Dielman, it reorganised a national cinema more than the medium.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric across forty-seven years. The form is whole: the film as released survives without loss, and later digital restorations are repair. Presence is continuous and steady: in repertory and in retrospectives of Fassbinder, on television, on every home format, in sets of the trilogy, and in every course on the New German Cinema; it is the Fassbinder film most often shown. It is not the widest presence a film can have. The surface of postwar rubble, nylons and the Adenauer years is period recreated in 1978 and ages as period; the late-seventies colour shows a little, not enough to charge. The bar is cleared by a tenth.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight. Michael Ballhaus’s camera keeps Maria within frames and moves through the house with a restless grace. The sound mix carries the period’s radio and its building noise, hammering and drilling, under intimate scenes, and makes the history audible rather than spoken. Hanna Schygulla’s performance, cool, comic, imperious and opaque, is a surface that is the meaning; Ivan Desny’s Oswald is courteous and sick; Peer Raben’s score lends a borrowed grandeur. The opening and the ending are made to the highest standard. The costs fall in the middle: some supporting playing is broad by design and broad in effect, the economy of a fast shoot shows in some interiors, and the office scenes are staged more flatly than the house.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the wedding signed in the rubble, the bride dragging the registrar back to stamp the paper, played half as farce; and the house going up on the day of the World Cup. One law governs both: the marriage exists as a document, and every feeling in the film is converted into an exchange that can be signed. Bill is paid in body and in lessons in German, Oswald in work and nights; the mother takes Wetzel for comfort; Hermann sells the years to Oswald; the radio sells the nation its rebirth. Comedy and death obey the same law, across a range from a farcical wedding to a killing. The strain is slight: the coda answers to a different law, the essay’s rather than the drama’s.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Judged on what a film of about two hours holds. History is held fully, from the bombing to the founding of the Federal Republic’s myth of itself. The economy is held in the black market, a textile firm, exports and unions; the family in Maria’s mother, her grandfather and the friends’ marriage; marriage and sexuality as contract; the occupation and race in Bill; the law in a court and a prison; the state in the radio and the chancellors. They are integrated: the recovery, the marriage and the house are one plot. What holds the axis below the rest: consciousness is held only at the surface, by design, and Maria’s interior is kept from the viewer; the sacred is absent; labour is seen from the director’s office; the war itself is offstage.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.2 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.6, The Made at 8.5 and The Unconcealment at 8.4. A film that survives whole and is its director’s most shown; a making in which the camera, the sound mix and one performance carry the history without stating it; and a disclosure that can be stated and holds, that the Federal Republic deferred its feeling into accumulation and the deferral consumed what it was for.
Limiting Dimension
The Sublime at 7.7: the film rises at its two ends and once in the middle, and distrusts transport elsewhere by principle, its long middle level and dry. Above it, The Encompassed at 7.9, where history, the economy, the family, the law and the state are held in one plot while consciousness is kept to the surface and the sacred is absent, and The Inevitable and The Swerve at 8.0: the spine is compelled but its mirrors and office scenes are not, and the Sirkian method was already Fassbinder’s own.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.0 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 8.5, The Living Form at 8.3, The Inner Law at 8.3, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on four of five: The Imperishable at 8.6 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.4 falls a tenth short, The Archetypal Deep at 8.2 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.2 three tenths short, and The Swerve at 8.0 five tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.7, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.9. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The summit is withheld by the Epochal Gate and by the aggregate, 8.2 from a sum of 98.3, below the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Die Ehe der Maria Braun as released, the German theatrical version first shown at the Berlin festival in February 1979 and in West German cinemas from March 1979, in German with some English, about 120 minutes (some listings give 115), from the wedding in the rubble to the chancellors in negative. Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder; screenplay by Peter Märthesheimer and Pea Fröhlich, from an idea by Fassbinder; photographed by Michael Ballhaus; music by Peer Raben; edited by Juliane Lorenz and “Franz Walsch”, Fassbinder’s pseudonym. Later digital restorations are repair of the same film, not separate objects, and bear on The Imperishable only. The film opens what was later called the BRD Trilogy, with Lola and Veronika Voss; it is judged alone. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Every axis is judged on the German film; English subtitles are a reader’s aid rather than the object, and nothing here is charged to them. No line of dialogue is held to the word, so none is quoted, and speech is described. The minor scenes, of the mother’s household, the office and the reading of the will, are described in outline only. Details that could not be verified are not given, among them the production companies and producer, the award given at Berlin, the aspect ratio, which chancellors the coda shows and leaves out, which broadcasts beyond the search for the missing and the football commentary are heard, the count of radio and building sounds, the share of screen time, the film’s standing abroad on release, and the particular books written on it.