Fassbinder's elegantly distanced melodrama is a metaphor for Germany's rise from the ashes of defeat into a maelstrom of progress and capitalist greed, only to end in the ashes of self-immolation. Maria Braun (Hanna Schygulla) is married to the tune of falling bombs and left the next day to begin a life-long wait for her soldier husband. Mobilizing herself upward in his absence, she gathers wealth and personal power in the name of an ideal love that grows increasingly impossible as it grows irrelevant.