Critically and commercially this was Fassbinder’s most successful film worldwide. As a parable of post World War II Germany, the film recounts the life of Maria Braun (Hanna Schygulla) from an impoverished war-bride into a successful business woman. The best known of Fassbinder’s trilogy of historical films about the Federal Republic’s "economic miracle" and one of the major productions of the new german cinema, The Marriage of Maria Braun also demonstrates Fassbinder’s ambition to produce the German equivalent of a classic Hollywood movie.