I chose to watch Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, directed by Ralner Werner Fassbinder, because I haven’t seen a lot of foreign films and I am a huge history buff. I wanted to get an inside perspective on what racism was like in a post World War II Germany. The film explores the social issues of racism in Germany as the plot focuses on Emmi, an older German widow, finds love in a younger Moroccan immigrant named Ali.

Although the film is greatly influenced by Douglas Sirk, the film is very unconventional. Fassbinder shot the film in only fourteen days at a cost of the equivalent of $98,000 (Smith). The film started off as a side project for Fassbinder that he was able to quickly produce between larger projects. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul became Fassbinder’s longest lasting and most loved film of his short career, due to his untimely death in 1982. The film deals with a theme of racism that is not easily swallowed by the audience. The ambiguous ending with Ali landing in the hospital with ulcers due to stress, and the uncertain future of the relationship also make this film unconventional.

The film starts with Emmi venturing to a bar, an immigrant hangout. She usually walks right past this bar on her way home from work, but due to the rain, she enters to have herself a cola. With Fassbinder’s camera techniques, you can see Ali squished in the background. This technique is used throughout the entire movie, making it impossible for one character to move without leaving the frame and symbolizes the tension that is born with the characters passion for each other (Horak 1974). Ali goes over to speak with Emmi, and they dance and eventually go home together.

The film then goes on to explore the racial tension that the couple encounters as the quickly and wildly fall in love. Emmi’s neighbors become visibly upset when the Arab man starts staying in her apartment. They decide that Emmi needs to start cleaning the stairwell twice a month because his kind of people bring in much more dirt than other people. Emmi’s landlord immediately accuses her of subletting her apartment to him because he can’t see any other situation that Ali would be staying there. When the landlord confronts them, Emmi immediately says that they are getting married. The landlord leaves, and Ali likes the idea of marrying Emmi, so they get married shortly after. There is the awkward scene in the restaurant that was frequented by none other than Adolf HItler, where there server is noticeably confused as to why the couple is dining together. When Emmi tells her children that she has married Ali, they are furious at her. Her son, Bruno, smashes the television in, calls her a whore, and all of the children leave promptly. The reactions of everybody around Emmi isolates her from her life, although she is happier than she was before because she has the love of Ali. The cultural aspect of this film is very accurate to post-war Germany in that they were very wary of outsiders and still had the Nazi frame of mind.

When Emmi’s co-workers find out that she married Ali, they isolate her by eating lunch a flight of stairs below her, with Emmi still in the frame. They are trying to protect themselves from what they consider to be a foreign threat. Near the end of the film, that aspect comes full circle when the shot is mirrored, this time with Emmi helping isolate a new foreign girl. The need in Germany at the time was to isolate outsiders in order to protect the German heritage (Haynes). Even the language barrier that is present between Ali and Emmi, because Ali’s German is still perfecting, isolates Ali from her and even causes him to seek the refuge of other women. It is naturally hard for him to express his feelings, but the fact that he can’t communicate with Emmi how he should be able to makes it even harder for him to tell her what he is thinking.

The film continues to explore just how bad racism was in Germany at that time, and how hard it was for people, especially outsiders, to cope with it. The ambiguous ending of the film placing the blame on Ali’s ulcers on the stress of living as an immigrant in Germany dictates that the only answer for Ali’s health problems is to move out of Germany to get away from the stress. The only answer the doctor had for Ali’s stress was to leave, because it was so hard for foreigners at the time. The racism from the Germans isolated outsiders in a way that it was an “us against them” mentality. Foreigners were not accepted and were worked to the bone to the point of exhaustion at minimum pay. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul  did a wonderful job of showing the cultural significance of racism in this setting, while promoting a love story that was peculiar and fascinating.