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 abandoned the next day to begin a lifelong 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. Hanna Schygulla established herself as the most exciting new German star since Marlene Dietrich in just the kind of self-mocking and yet aggressively confident role we had previously only associated with Dietrich. Fassbinder's best-known film abroad, and the film that put New German Cinema into American parlance, Maria Braun was in no way an artistic sellout. Rather, for both Schygulla and Fassbinder, it was a culmination.