Fear Eats the Soul 2

Ali begins an affair with the bartender who encouraged him to ask Emmi to dance in the first place. It looks like their relationship is doomed, until the couple revisit certain aspects of that first date. They agree that it only matters that they are together and Ali collapses from a stomach ulcer while they are dancing.

Fassbinder’s partner at the time, El Hedi ben Salem played the character Ali. Austrian actress, Barbara Valentin, who went on to form a relationship with Queen's Freddy Mercury, played Emmi. Fassbinder made an appearance in the film as Emmi’s son-in-law.

Naturally, this film raised issues about race and discrimination in German society during the 1970s, although its allusions to Hollywood films emphasize that any conclusions we draw will likely have broader applications as well. Angst essen Seele auf also sparked discussions about male sexuality, partly based on the way that Ali’s older wife treats him in the second part of the story. One could read the scenes in which Emmi objectifies Ali as the fetishization and feminization of the Other and draw from many works on racial theory, including Edward Said’s Orientalism.

Angst essen Seele auf has also influenced other films, for example, Todd Haynes Far From Heaven (2002). Haynes himself speaks about the links between these three films in the introduction to the Criterion Collection’s DVD edition, also linking them to Sirk’s earlier work.

See Also

Cottingham, Laura. Fear Eats the Soul. London: British Film Institute (1995).
Elsaesser, Thomas. “Historicizing the Subject: A Body of Work?” New German Critique 63 (Autumn 1994): 10-33.
La Valley, Al. “The Gay Liberation of Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Male Subjectivity, Male Bodies, Male Lovers.” New German Critique 63 (Autumn 1994): 108-37.
Wartenberg, Thomas E. “Can Romance Function as Social Criticism? A Defense of Unlikely Couples.” Journal of Social Philosophy 33 (Summer 2002): 310.

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Fear Eats the Soul 2