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  • The Prison-House of Narrative
  • Maxwell Miller (bio)
The Marriage of Maria Braun, directed by Thomas Ostermeier, playscript by Peter Märthesheimer and Pea Frölich, from the film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 2010 Brooklyn Academy of Music Next Wave Festival, Brooklyn, New York, November 17–21, 2010.

Towards the end of The Marriage of Maria Braun, the titular heroine finally builds the house of her dreams. The randomly scattered furniture that had earlier populated the stage, anonymous as a hotel lobby, is reconstituted into a living room. A small model of this home spins slowly downstage, recorded by a live feed camera and projected on the upstage wall: the Teutonic ideal of a single family home. This house, the fulfillment of a decade of sacrifice, stands as a testament to the marriage that has formed the bedrock of Maria’s life. But despite the momentous occasion, the feeling among the characters is not one of celebration but of resigned incarceration.

This house was always intended to be the home where Maria and her husband Hermann would finally start their life as man and wife, a life deferred by World War II and then his imprisonment. Instead, it becomes her emotional tomb as she waits endlessly for him to return from a mysterious, self-imposed exile in Canada. Meanwhile, work consumes her life. A listless relationship with her boss, the textile manufacturer Oswald, provides a modicum of companionship, but the years of disappointment and waiting have transformed her into a bitter, cynical woman. Her sole consolation is the single rose Hermann sends each month to remind her of his love, which, covered in thorns, provides more pain than solace.

“I have to pay for my sins,” Maria informs her mother, but what sins she means we cannot know for sure—she has committed more than a few to get where she is. The sin of adultery? She had slept with many men on her climb to the top of the business world, wielding her body like a weapon. Or the sin of pride, of indulging in the wealth and power she yielded? Or maybe the sin of murder? Years earlier, she had killed her lover, an American G. I., when Hermann miraculously returned from the war, though her husband took the blame and was incarcerated. Or perhaps, subconsciously, she [End Page 58] is referring to the sins of her Germany, a nation so eager to forget its past and embrace its “economic miracle” of the 1950s. In Ostermeier’s production, histories, collective and personal, are never truly forgotten or outrun.

Ostermeier’s production, part of the 2010 Brooklyn Academy of Music Next Wave Festival, is an adaptation of the 1979 film of the same name, written and directed by German auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder. The first installment in Fassbinder’s Bundesrepublik Deustchland trilogy examining the fascist roots of West Germany, The Marriage of Maria Braun is the story of a canny woman who claws her way to success in the chaos of the post-war period. Like the leading ladies of the other two films in the trilogy, Maria doubles as both heroine and allegory, her rags-to-riches transformation paralleling Germany’s post-war fate. And like Germany, her success is predicated on a refusal to look backward. As her mother stitches her dead father’s clothes in a ritual of remembrance, Maria counsels her to barter them instead: “Father won’t need them anymore, and we need firewood,” she says.

But while the characters may be able to ignore the past, the audience is keenly aware of it. Though the Holocaust is never mentioned verbally, the psychological weight of the past is established in the first minutes of the production. Ostermeier begins with projected images of Hitler and happy Aryans flickering on the back curtain, like childhood home movies, while two actors recite love letters addressed to the Führer. Except for the addition of this opening scene, Ostermeier’s production follows Fassbinder’s screenplay virtually word for word.

Ostermeier has said that he did not rewatch the original, relying solely on the screenplay and vague memories as inspiration— and, to anyone familiar with the original film, it...

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