The opening scene startles with its use of blue, a colour that pierces the amber/brown colour scheme of the whole series and announces something important. Reinhold wants to offload Trude, his new girlfriend, onto Franz. But Franz refuses. He’s happy with Scilly. Besides which, ‘even broads are human beings and have feelings’. Reinhold will have to learn how to end his own love affairs, which by the end, he does, brutally. But not before betraying Franz.

Cursed be the man

Franz gets lured into a robbery. He’s so nice, easy-going and trusting that he doesn’t have a clue until he’s in the middle of it.  By then, it’s too late, and his attempts at resistance annoy Reinhold to the point that Reinhold throws him out of the getaway car, and Biberkopf gets run over. ‘Cursed be the man who trusted in man, saith Jeremiah, For he shall be like the heath in the desert, and shall inhabit the parched places, in a salt land, not inhabited. The heart is deceitful and wicked. Who can know it?’

The Fassbinder Stock Company

What caught my eye in this episode was the preponderance of the Fassbinder stock company (Karl Scheydt, Irm Hermann, Lilot Pompey, Ivan Desnay, Volker Spengler, Gunther Kaufmann) and the way lights are reflected in the actors eyes.

There is no cause for despair

Fassbinders’ narrational voice-over, all seemingly taken from Döblin’s novel, are very allegorical and poetic, and read by Fassbinder with a real world-wearyness even though the last line in the episode is , ‘There is no cause for despair’

Lights reflected

José Arroyo