‘ <i>Das Spiel ist aus!’</i> : Football and History in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s <i>BRD Trilogy</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the intersections between football and history in the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. It focuses on the three works—The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979), Veronika Voss (1982) and Lola (1981)—that compose the BRD Trilogy, Fassbinder’s ambitious chronicle of the postwar history of West Germany, from ‘zero hour’ in 1945 to the uneasy prosperity of the late 1950s. Scholarship on Fassbinder has rarely focused on his passion for the game and the ways in which it influenced his art. Yet football features at critical moments in each of the films in the BRD Trilogy. By examining three themes—football’s role as a marker of postwar masculinity in crisis; football’s importance in showcasing (via radio commentaries) the soundscape central to Fassbinder’s reimagining of 1950s West Germany; and football’s role in the illusion of historicity that underpins the BRD Trilogy—this article analyses Fassbinder’s deployment of the game as a sympathetic witness to the male incapacity for transformation after 1945. In integrating Fassbinder’s work into not only the political, but also the cultural history of West Germany, it reveals football’s quietly powerful role in shaping postwar German society.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".