Angst essen Seele auf
Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Writer: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Cast: Brigitte Mira, El Hedi ben Salem, Barbara Valentin, Irm Hermann, Elma Karlowa, Anita Bucher, Gusti Kreissl, Doris Mattes, Margit Symo
Seen on: 30.1.2025

Content Note: (critical treatment of) racism

Plot:
One night, Emmi (Brigitte Mira) ducks into a bar in her neighborhood that she had always walked past before. As she enters to the stares of the mostly immigrant customers, it takes all her courage to stay and have a coke. The bartender (Barbara Valentin) dares her Moroccan customer Ali (El Hedi ben Salem) to ask Emmi to dance. When he does and Emmi actually accepts the invitation, an honest connection grows between them, despite the fact that Ali speaks only a little German and Emmi is almost 30 years his senior. To the shock of everybody, they get married only a short while later. But happiness in a racist society is not so easy to come by for them.

Angst essen Seele auf is a fascinating film that is still way too current and still packs a punch. It draws a direct line from Nazi-ism to Germany in the 70s, and seeing it in 2025, the line still goes on unbroken.

Angst essen Seele auf is not a love story per se. It’s a story about two lonely people who decide to be together and combat loneliness that way. And this would probably be a winning strategy, if it wasn’t for the racist society around them – and inside them. Because as much as Emmi is open to Ali, she still brings her own share of racist baggage: She would like to eat at Hitler’s favorite restaurant just once. She would rather participate in the bullying of her new co-worker for not being German than position herslef against her colleagues. She has no problem showing off Ali to said colleagues by having them fondle his muscles.

And that’s just one well-meaning person. Other people are not well-meaning and what Emmi and Ali face together is a constant barrage of looks, closed doors (figuratively and literally) and harsh comments. It’s no wonder if their relationship starts to crumble under that kind of pressure.

Watching it 50 years after it was made, two things really struck me on a meta level. One was that the film was so clear in the way national socialism still permeates everything even 30 years after the war. I mean, I was not so naive to think that everything had already been dealt with (haha, jokes on us, it still hasn’t been dealt with) but there was a shift in the 80s when people actively started to engage with what happened and tried to deal with it instead of just pretending it never happened in the first place. That shift hadn’t happened there yet. And the second thing was that this film may as well have been shot last year, so little of the underlying problems it talks about have changed.

It’s a powerful movie with beautiful performances by Mira and ben Salem (I can’t help but think that Fassbinder’s own relationshop with ben Salem makes this movie so true) that should be considered essential watching for Germans and Austrians.

Summarizing: insightful and great.