Representing blackness: instrumentalizing race and gender in Rainer Werner Fassbinder's The Marriage of Maria Braun.

The Marriage of Maria Braun uses race and gender to highlight certain aspects of West German post-World War II cultural identity and to critique West Germany's failure to effect social and political change in the postwar years. Analyzing three pivotal sequences from the film, the essay discusses the ways in which Fassbinder stages Maria's collaboration with white male power at the expense of the two African-American characters. The essay ends by asking whether Fassbinder's portrayal (and, perhaps, reproduction) of racialist and sexist practices have the potential to result in a socially transformative cinematic praxis. (IMOS)

As has often been observed, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, more than any other German director, was stubbornly determined to make films that confront his country's recent history. While his most explicitly historiographic films--The Marriage of Maria Braun (Die Ehe der Maria Braun, 1978), Veronika Voss (Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss, 1981), and Lola (1981), subtitled BRD 1, 2, and 3--are not, as David Bathrick says, "films about history," they are "characterized by a cinematic strategy that is itself a kind of historiography" (37). Given Fassbinder's (and his generation's) fixation on German cultural and national identity, it is not surprising that his historiographic films confront issues that make up the so-called "German question," such as Vergangenheitsverdrangung (repression of the past), Vergangenheitsbewailtigung (coming to terms with the past), and the ways intersections of gender, sexuality, class, and race are inscribed in West German culture. Within this general field of thought I want to consider the representation of West German and US institutionalized practices regarding race and gender in The Marriage of Maria Braun. I will argue that the film focuses on these intersections by way of its portrayal of Maria, Bill, Hermann, Oswald, and "Lonely Richard," and that the film uses these characters to perform particular parts of West German post-World War II cultural identity. The film reveals this identity as constituted by Maria's collaboration with white male power at the expense of the other (Bill and Richard). To this end I will discuss ways the film configures Maria as achieving an illusory, temporary, and derivative power that is purchased through her manipulation of the men in her life.1 I will focus on Fassbinder's instrumentalization of Maria as well as of Bill and Richard, the two African-American characters in the film, in order to demonstrate Fassbinder's view that post-World War II West Germany did not achieve a cultural renewal by examining its racialist and sexist practices.

Maria Braun (Hanna Schygulla) first sees Bill (George Byrd) in the Moonlight Bar, a US servicemen's hangout. It is spring 1945, and she has just begun to work as an Animierdame ("hostess") in the bar, which is off-limits to Germans. The spectators, too, see Bill for the first time. During a slow evening, Vevi, the bartender (Isolde Barth), advises Maria to get on with her life and not to lose time waiting for Maria's husband Hermann (Klaus Lowitsch) to return from the Eastern front. She points out Bill, who is sitting alone at a table at the edge of the dance floor. As she tells Maria, incongruously comparing the black serviceman to Willy Fritsch, a white Weimar screen heartthrob, Bill is real, healthy, strong, and enamored of Maria. As Vevi points him out, Bill stands up and, looking up at them, seriocomically bows to the two women, who are seated some distance from him on a platform at the bar. Maria gets down from the barstool, walks to Bill's table, and asks him to dance with her. Mobile camera framing invites spectators into the bar as if on a tour, capturing the entire mise-en-scene. Two people watch this meeting: Vevi observes from the bar, and Bronski, the bar's manager (Peter Berling) gazes sporadically from behind the curtain of his office. Within this triangulated configuration, Vevi functions as the "pointer," Bill as Maria's target, and Bronski, by inhabiting the panopticon, functions as the law tout court. (2) Maria, whose approach to Bill is reflected in a mirror that hangs high on the wall, functions, as she so often will in this film, as deputy for the law. The sequence ends with a medium close-up of Bronski, frowning at Maria and Bill dancing.

This sequence sets up a sort of map to the film's presentation of racial stereotypes. Quite apart from the historical references invoked by the off-limits bar and the laws against fraternization between Germans and Americans, the physical space of the Moonlight Bar is arranged to resemble an apartheid-style territory that reflects not only West Germany's early post-World War II occupation period, but also segregationist practices in both the US armed forces and the American South in the 1940s and 1950s. Even though the Moonlight Bar is occupied by African-American soldiers (some dancing to "The Moonlight Serenade" and others sitting at tables, drinking), the Germans, who are in fact trespassing, are positioned physically above the patrons. Thus, the mise-enscene creates the overarching effect that Bill's introduction is framed in a cinematic ("put into focus") and in a figurative ("set up" and "trapped") sense. (3)

Stationed in Germany right after World War II as part of the US Army occupation forces, Bill functions as an emblem of African-American soldiers' cultural and social otherness. His association with the victorious army makes him appear to have more social power than Maria and her family: he can provide them with food and even luxury goods like wine and coffee. But Bill's position in Germany is profoundly unstable, both diegetically and extra-diegetically. African-American soldiers were not, even as they fought the German fascists, equal in status to white American soldiers. From the very beginning, Bill's social power is contingent not only on how his white fellow soldiers (and the military institution)judge it, but also on how the white German population perceives it. This point is communicated dramatically when he is killed after Maria has taken off his uniform. (4)