Gisela uhlen tweets about love and war

Rainer Werner Fassbinder's landmark of German cinema opens in an absurdist tone. Eventually they are forced out of the rapidly disintegrating building and have to sign the certificate, cowering on the floor as debris and shrapnel rain down. The surrealist introduction, though, is all too similar to the realities of post-war society in Germany the director goes onto depict.

It's a damning indictment of the German post-war society and economy. The film is an intelligent, technically proficient and complex critique of this period, weaving metaphors for the German body politic and psyche of the time. Initially, Maria is just like all the other widows waiting hopefully at the train station, which appears to be the only building of any sort in the city that hasn't been flattened during the war.

Working as a mistress in an illegal bar for allied occupying forces, she is at first no different from her mother, who seizes the rare packs of cigarettes that come her way, trading them for her most precious jewellery. But soon the gap between Maria and her relatives becomes vast.

Gisela uhlen tweets about love and war: But every girl loves

After an abortive attempt at escape through an affair with a black US army sergeant, she uses her feminine wiles to work her way to the top of a lucrative textiles company. She eventually purchases her own detached house in the country, while her sister and mother are left to tread between beams of roofless houses to get to their rooms.

It is allegory for the get-rich-quick atmosphere of the time - for the select few, and by any means - as is her relationship with her actual husband, jailed soon after his return. Her affairs are for both herself and him, she insists, so that they might be better off upon his release.