A fine movie that's a story of a life against a historical background - The Marriage of Maria Braun

Rainer Werner Fassbinder's The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979) is a great movie of a type rarely done successfully today, a story of a life, across a background of historical events and culturally transformations, much like a novel, told in a straightforward narrative manner but w/ some inventive touches of style and vision, starting w/ Maria Braun's marriage ceremony, interrupted by a bomb explosion in the first seconds of the movie - a great shock, with echoes throughout the film. Maria marries Hermann during WWII, in an unnamed German city - and we see the rubble and destruction all around - in this and in many later segments. Maria apparently knew her husband for only a short time, and their marriage lasted just a day or two before he was called back to action - and then declared missing in action. Throughout the first "act" of the movie Maria searches for him, which entails joining many other women at a train depot, walking around wearing a placard asking if anyone knows the whereabouts of Hermann Braun. I could, but I won't, go through the whole plot, but suffice to say there are many transformative events, as Maria post war takes a position in an office of a company selling some kind of parts or machinery and, along w/ the company, she rises from extreme poverty and becomes quite wealthy into the 50s - but at great personal cost - symbolic of course both of the recovery of the German economy post-war and the ways in which capitalism and the world of commerce can wreck families and relationships. Striking for its absence throughout - there is no sense of German guilt about the war and about the Nazi era, much less about the Holocaust; I wouldn't say that every work of German cinema and literature should focus on these themes, but wouldn't it be part of anyone's consciousness and environment in postwar Germany? It's not the Maria and others in her family and her milieu are Holocaust deniers or anything of the sort, but it does seem strange that postwar guilt or at least recognition never enters into their conversations and never seems to affect their lives, directly or indirectly. Still, a fine movie in some ways a throwback (it will recall movies like Imitation of Life) but with a contemporary look and style (the interiors of the apartments and housing, and how they evolve over time, are particularly notable - some shot from the Japanese tatatmi-mat perspective) .