Director Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Fassbinder on the set with actor Hilmar Thate
Fassbinder on the set with actress Rosel Zech
VERONIKA VOSS (Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss) A
Munich (105 mi) November – December 1981 d: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Everything I have
belongs to you — all I have left to give you is my death.
—Veronika Voss (Rosel Zech)
Early German cinema masterpieces such as THE CABINET OF DR.
CALIGARI (1920), NOSFERATU (1922), METROPOLIS (1927), and M (1931), with
their themes of ruthless totalitarianism, sadistic violence, and extreme
fanatacism, foretold the rise of fascism and the horrors of the Third
Reich. Half a century later Germany was
still reeling from the ramifications of World War II, where the mixture of
guilt, anger, and confusion, not surprisingly, led to denial. No one was more sensitive to this subject and
its effect on the national consciousness than young German director Rainer
Werner Fassbinder, who in the late 70’s noted, “They can’t have forgotten [the
Holocaust]; they must have had it in their minds when they were creating their
new state. If a thing of so much
significance could be forgotten or repressed, then something must be pretty
wrong with this democracy and this ‘German model.’” Selective memory becomes the central theme of
his BRD (Bundesrepublik Deutschland) Trilogy, offering humanist dramas that
uniquely and effectively tell his and his nation’s story. Winner of the Golden Bear (1st Prize) at the
1982 Berlin Film Festival, the only one of his films to ever do so, Rosel Zech
as Veronika Voss followed Hanna Schygulla in THE MARRIAGE OF MARIA BRAUN (1979)
and Barbara Sukowa in LOLA (1981) in the third of Fassbinder’s BRD Trilogy, one
of the most imaginative critiques of the German economic model in any medium, a
flamboyant, metaphorical, and satiric response to Germany’s “economic miracle”
of reconstruction in the 1950’s, suggesting rampant greed and capitalism
survive by wiping away the historical past, where selective amnesia is a
mandatory condition that allows the rest of German society to move
forward. Veronika’s connection to the
country’s Nazi past is dismissed to the shadows of memory, coming to symbolize
a relic of an unwanted past that must be swept aside to make way for the
future.
In a lurid melodrama and memory play about the past and its
haunting effects on the present, VERONIKA VOSS is one of the better Fassbinder
films, a perfectly conceived visual masterpiece in black and white, gorgeously
photographed by Xaver Schwarzenberger, released 6 months after Fassbinder’s
death, a grim reminder foreshadowing his own death. Notes discovered
after his death reveal this film set in 1955 was intended to be the 2nd of his
German post-war trilogy films, chronologically taking place after MARIA BRAUN
(40’s), and before LOLA (late 50’s). The film is modeled after Billy
Wilder’s SUNSET BLVD. (1950), both featuring a gloomy old house, a fading film
star, a relationship with a younger man, and a comeback attempt, not to mention
a movie within a movie, where the pathologically self-deluding character of
Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) mirrors the long downfall of Veronika Voss
(Rosel Zech), an aging Third Reich actress living in the obscurity of postwar
Munich, where the film was shot, rumored to be the mistress of Goebbels, based
on the real life of actress Sybille Schmitz (VAMPYR, DOES NOT ANSWER — both
1932), later blacklisted by Goebbels, and she committed suicide in 1955.
Fassbinder was reportedly looking for Schmitz to play the mother in PETRA VON
KANT (1972), apparently unaware of her fate, and when discovered, decided to
make her story into this film. The film actually begins with Voss
watching alone in a theater witnessing one of her old, lurid screen
performances in an UFA wartime film entitled Insidious Poison (Schleichendes Gift), where her character is
injected with drugs, signing over all her earthly belongings in a scene that
foreshadows both her final days in the film and Fassbinder’s fate, as he is
also in the same theater sitting behind her watching the film. In real
life, her own doctor, a diabolical, sado-masochistic lesbian Dr. Katz
(Annemarie Düringer), mercilessly exploits her by feeding her morphine
habit, forcing her to sign over what’s left of her life’s fortune as
payment. A prominent theme and certainly of interest is the use of the
song, “Sixteen Tons,” sung by Fassbinder regular Günther Kaufmann (one of
Fassbinder’s former lovers, appearing in all three trilogy films) which
features the lyrics: “I owe my soul to the company store,” eventually
leading to Voss’s tragic suicide.
In a chance encounter, Voss runs into Robert Krohn (Hilmar
Thate) on the street, offering her his umbrella in a downpour of rain, a kind
gesture that she appreciates, describing him as her shelter in a storm. What immediately surprises her is that he
does not know who she is, as she’s a former UFA star still living in the
delirious illusions of stardom, where she’s used to being catered to night and
day while being treated like royalty, forever expecting a return to her former
glory. Robert is essentially an
everyman, the personification of the postwar German, a man who drinks his beer,
pursues his work and his private relations, yet in his life nothing dramatic or
exciting ever happens, working a routine job for a newspaper as a sports
reporter, but gets caught up in the whirlwind of her own delusions, finding her
fascinating, allowing him to rub elbows with the upper class, company he rarely
keeps, where he finds it hard to keep his eyes off of her. Viewed largely through his supposedly
impartial eyes, as he was unaware of her former fame, Robert already has a
girlfriend, Henriette (Cornelia Froboess), a level-headed and attractive girl
who finds his newfound romantic interest amusing, especially when Voss arrives
at their door one evening ready for him to drive her to her lavish country
estate and spend the night, a preposterous gesture that is sealed with a kiss
on Henriette’s cheek as she brazenly steals her man, but doing so in such an
openly alluring and irresistible manner.
Voss’s immense home is like a mausoleum, a lavish corpse with dead
plants and white sheets covering all the furniture to keep the dust from
accumulating, very much like its aging superstar, a relic from a forgotten era,
where she murmurs to him, “I like to seduce ... helpless men.” Unlike Zarah Leander and Marika Rökk,
celebrated UFA stars who continued to be popular in Germany for many decades
after World War II, Voss has no connection to the new Germany, but lives only
in her memory, longing for a bygone past, separated from her ex-husband, the
screenwriter Max Rehbein (Armin Mueller-Stahl), who left her because he could
no longer bear her addiction and its consequences. Only in these moments of memory and
imagination is Veronika Voss allowed to show feelings or affection towards
others. After sleeping with Krohn, she
wakes up horrified, ruled by a neverending emptiness and pain, once more
requiring the services of Dr. Katz.
But Voss is hiding even more personal secrets, as she
doesn’t live at her given address, an old Jewish couple named Treibel live
there instead, Johanna Hofer and Rudolf Platte, who both survived Treblinka,
but are also patients of Dr. Katz, dependent on morphine to obliterate their
memories, literally ghosts of the past whose age belies their wisdom, as they
seem to be dark angels of death, both consumed by their own morbidity, with
tattooed arms from the war, a haunting reminder of the death camps and all who
lost their lives. Voss is actually
living in the home of Dr. Katz, though it feels more like an imprisonment,
bearing a strange resemblance to the German Expressionism of THE CABINET OF DR.
CALIGARI (1920), expressed through a surreal dreamlike home that is oversaturated
in white, creating a ghastly, unworldly presence, ironically playing American
country music on the radio, like Johnny Horton’s Johnny Horton: The Battle of
New Orleans - YouTube (2:33), and Sanford Clark’s SANFORD CLARK Run Boy Run -
YouTube (2:14), representative, perhaps, of her warped state of mind, but
it may also be a comment on the pervasive use of the radio during the Nazi era as
a form of social control, with the wildly exaggerated artificiality of the home
resembling a sterile medical lab where Katz plays ruthless psychological mind
games with Voss, suggesting she, and by implication the nation, have never been
able to overcome their Nazi past, as her wicked brand of authoritarianism
closely resembles the brutal precision of the Nazi past, keeping her patient
addicted to morphine while blatantly abusing her power to arbitrarily authorize
needed treatment only as a means to bleed the actress of her wealth. Robert and Henriette visit Dr. Edel (Erik
Schumann), who heads the Health Department, but he is very noncommittal when it
comes to questions about the distribution of narcotics, suggesting they are
properly regulated, echoing the sentiments of the Third Reich, “The system of
control is perfect. It’s the people that
aren’t perfect.” Partnering together
with Dr. Edel, Dr. Katz and her associates icily connive to become the big
winners of the “economic miracle,” the unscrupulous beneficiaries of the
postwar reconstruction, succeeding beyond their wildest dreams, while nobodies
like Krohn and Voss haven’t got a chance against them. Krohn wants to save Veronika, free her from
the manipulative hold by Dr. Katz, but realizes this is impossible, ultimately
paying a large price, losing his girlfriend in the process, who poses as a rich
widow in need of Dr. Katz’s services in order to help expose her criminal
behavior, becoming yet another victim in the process, murdered by Katz for coming
too close and knowing too much, with Krohn remaining a fool throughout. His efforts are pointless, as Veronika
refuses to be saved, and actually protects her oppressor by cooperating with
the sinister Dr. Katz, becoming slavishly submissive, a more than willing foil,
performing one final scene in front of the authorities, lying to help prevent
Dr. Katz’s exposure to the police.
Impotent to expose such deep-rooted and institutionalized corruption,
Krohn returns to the banal life of a sports reporter.
Blending Brechtian austerity with Sirkian melodrama,
Fassbinder produced forty features in a thirteen year career, where in
addition, he was largely responsible for screenplay, equipment, and editing,
displaying fluid camerawork and astute color schemes while accentuating the
social isolation of his fallen protagonists.
Despite tortured emotions and disintegrating psyches on display,
Fassbinder not only identifies with outsiders and misfits, but exhibits
compassion and even tenderness in their portrayals onscreen. Shining a light on the marginalized,
Fassbinder identifies with working class heroes, examining the root of their
disenfranchisement, awakening us from our own self-induced complacency,
providing intellectually stimulating and emotionally volatile works that demand
empathy and personal investment. A
humanist at the core, Fassbinder’s films have a rare potency, achieved through
extraordinary performances and superb craftsmanship, as the man simply knew how
to make films, becoming one of cinema’s boldest enfant terrible. Displaying
a degree of sophistication in the latter stages of his career, among the most
memorable recollections about this film are Fassbinder’s magnificent use of
white coupled with Veronika Voss’s seductive and positively enchanting
performance of the song “Memories Are Made of This,” Veronika Voss Memories are
made of this - YouTube (2:32), a Marlene Dietrich-like spectacle that is
among the director’s most technically accomplished sequences. In two and a half minutes Fassbinder masterly
interweaves many the director’s primary concerns, a blurring of reality,
fiction and fantasy, a predominance of artifice, including candlelight, visual
composition, spectator vs. spectacle, both physical and psychological
imprisonment, celebrity, along with an intertwinement of desire and destiny in
a multi-layered kaleidoscope of light and shadow. The sequence perfectly casts the central
figure ensnared in a spider’s web, surrounded by the leeches that would
eventually devour her. Broken dreams and
shattered illusions are seen through a prism of rain-soaked, or tear-stained,
windows. This brilliant display of
artistry expands and embellishes the joyless mood of helplessness and utter
despair.
While the subject of drug abuse may mirror Fassbinder’s own
personal descent into a fatal overdose in 1982, just 112 days after winning the
Berlin award, suffering a stroke after two days of binging on cocaine and
sleeping pills, but Voss’s addiction represents an indictment of German
history, where drugs serve as an agent of commerce and a spiraling out of
control capitalism, yet without accompanying safeguards and an understanding of
its misuse and harmful effects, drug addiction can inevitably lead to ruin,
becoming a symbol for the failings of modern society. As Veronika, Zech portrays a drug-addicted
screen idol in the twilight of her career, subsisting on memories of past
grandeur, as if through a fog of hazy recollection, which would include the
brief triumphs and ultimate defeat of Nazi Germany, its impact on the
nation now laid to rest, where death and forgetfulness become synonymous with
forgetting one’s past as a nation forges a new path towards the future. When investigated, the real-life Schmitz
had been living in her doctor’s house at the time of her suicide. She
seemed to be assisted by another doctor, an official working in the Munich
Health Department, who issued the prescriptions, notably 723 instances of
prescribed narcotics in less than three years. The two supplied hard
drugs in exchange for cash and property rights, specializing in celebrities
from the Nazi period, covering for each other when their patients committed
suicide, supposedly when they could no longer pay. In the end, no one was guarding the guardians
of the new age. It has been suggested
that rather than film noir, this is film blanc, not black and white, but black
or white. The white in this film has never been so menacing, so evil, as it is
in the apartment of Dr. Katz and in the room that eventually becomes both
prison and grave to Veronika. Here the unnatural white decor reflects the
clinical presence of death, turning the home into its worst perversion, a test
laboratory for unspeakably cruel human experiments. The white eventually
drives out the black, and with it, pushes into oblivion the person that was
once Veronika Voss. White is, in this context, the drugs she was addicted
to, the whiteness of forgetting, another metaphor for Germany, the soft sleep
of forgetting.
Take one fresh and tender kiss
Add one stolen night of bliss
One girl, one boy
Some grief, some joy
Memories are made of this
Add one stolen night of bliss
One girl, one boy
Some grief, some joy
Memories are made of this
Don’t forget a small moonbeam
Fold in lightly with a dream
Your lips and mine
Two sips of wine
Memories are made of this
Then add the wedding bells
One house where lovers dwell
Three little kids for the flavor
Stir carefully through the days
See how the flavor stays
These are the dreams you’ll savor
With His blessings from above
Serve it generously with love
One man, one wife
One love through life
Memories are made of this
Memories are made of this
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