Jus Sanguinis, Jus Soli: West German Citizenship Law and the Melodrama of the Guest Worker in Fassbinder’s Angst Essen Seele Auf

“Human beings can’t be alone . . . but they can’t be together either,” quipped Rainer Werner Fassbinder, star director and enfant terrible of the New German Cinema movement (1992, 79). For Fassbinder, human togetherness was a problem, not an answer, an artistically generative paradox stalled indefinitely at the crossroads of misanthropy and jouissance. Caught in the crossfire of political and social codes of belonging, erotic dramas of compulsion provided continual grist for the mill of Fassbinder’s prolific yet brief directorial career. To understand what constructed, for Fassbinder, this particular link between compulsion and belonging, conflict and togetherness, eros and polis, Fassbinder’s films must be considered within their historical framework, a period in German history when the question of national identity was being reexamined across every cultural and aesthetic milieu.¹

Fassbinder’s 1974 social melodrama, Angst Essen Seele Auf (Ali, Fear Eats the Soul) stands out in particular among his many films of the period as the most seemingly hopeful and yet most bitterly critical treatment of this socially specific and historically located problem of human togetherness. Dwelling neither on Fascist recidivism, nor on vestigial cultural ideologies, nor on the traumas of war, this film’s critique is aimed instead at West Germany’s melioristic social project; specifically, the film pits itself against certain neoliberal fictions of rehabilitation that would conflate economic gains with social “progress.” The film reveals that this deliberate cultural project entails less a renewal of West German national identity than a denial of the true economic and legal conditions underwriting the nation-state’s present prosperity.

Angst Essen Seele Auf has been predominantly discussed under a film studies historical rubric that situates its genre—melodrama—and its status as an adaptation. As a West German remake of Douglas Sirk’s 1955 melodrama All That Heaven Allows, Fassbinder’s film portrays the socially stigmatized interracial and intergenerational romance of a working-class couple: a Moroccan Gastarbeiter (guest worker) whom everyone calls “Ali” (El-Hedi ben Salem) and a West German cleaning woman, Emmi (Brigitte Mira), who is many years Ali’s senior. As a commentary on the West German Gastarbeiter crisis, this film provides a useful analytic for thinking through how noncitizen migrant workers and refugees come to be structurally positioned as stateless individuals suspended within the social, atomized and isolated yet made “useful” by and through perpetuated incompatibilities between laws and national ideologies.²

Fassbinder’s films are famously read as being dedicated to satire of bourgeois mores; yet in Angst Essen, a melodrama of love against steep odds also illuminates a crucial historical and social moment in which postwar citizenship law was being newly articulated to state economic strategies. Presenting, then, a brutal biopsy not only of the bourgeoisie but also of neoliberalism’s early globalizing stages, the melodrama of class in Angst Essen can equally be read as a melodrama of citizenship. I will discuss how, within this film, we may meditate not only on melodrama’s implicit ambivalence toward romantic norms, but also on the legal and political structures that ground and distort affective investment as a form, itself, of belonging. We will see, in the frustrated marriage plot of Angst Essen, a micropolitical staging of the damages and exploitation that result as ascendant forms of economic rationality—seeking methods to subordinate the potentially antagonistic legal category of citizenship—re-create citizenship law as a convenient accomplice in the era of decolonization.

Angst Essen presents an acerbic, incisive, and unforgettable account of the human suffering sustained through economic manipulation of citizenship law, as its wholly compromised yet undeniably compelling romance between two working-class subjects allegorizes an impossible compromise: that compromise made between state-controlled labor markets and neoliberal economic policies. It unremittingly reveals what Douglas Crimp, writing on Fassbinder’s general oeuvre, has termed “the catastrophic effect of property relations on lovers” (263)—only here, the catastrophe lies in how denying citizenship to guest workers effectively transforms them into the state’s economic property. This argument will go beyond...