Representing Blackness: Instrumentalizing Race and Gender in Rainer Werner Fassbinder's <i>The Marriage of Maria Braun</i>

Abstract

The Marriage ofMaria Braun uses race and gender to highlight certain as- pects of West 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 director, was stubbornly determined to make that confront his country's recent history. While his most explicitly his- toriographie films—The Marriage ofMaria 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 stra- tegy that is itself a kind of historiography (37). Given Fassbinder's (and his generation's) fixation on cultural and national identity, it is not surprising that his historiographie confront issues that make up the so-called German question, such as Vergangenheitsver- drangung (repression of the past), Vergangenheitsbewaltigung (coming to terms with the past), and the ways intersections of gender, sexuality, class, and race are inscribed in West culture. Within this gen- eral field of thought I want to consider the representation of West Ger- man and US institutionalized practices regarding race and gender in The Marriage of Maria Braun. I will argue that the film focuses on these