Fassbinder was a phenomenon. He not only wrote and directed forty–four memorable feature films in the sixteen years before his death at age thirty–seven, but he wrote fourteen plays, four radio dramas, and many essays, and was a celebrated theater director and actor. Veronika Voss, Fassbinder's penultimate feature, is the third part of his Adenauer trilogy.

Konrad Adenauer, chancellor of Germany between 1949 and 1963, presided over his country's "Economic Miracle": the rise of Germany out of defeat and devastation into a nation in which citizens lived expansively and acquisitively. Fassbinder, always interested in questions of personal, moral, and social identity, wondered what psychological price this astonishing turnaround had exacted. He posited that it was memory that had been affected, and in each of the three films in the trilogy—The Marriage of Maria Braun (Die Ehe der Maria Braun) (1978), which begins at war's end, and Lola (1981) and Veronika Voss, both set in the late 1950s—Fassbinder focuses on German women who succeed by repressing their past. Veronika Voss plays like a film noir, a modern Sunset Boulevard. It is a black-and-white mystery story inflected by shadows and rain, concerning an aging film actress, popular during the Third Reich but now heading toward oblivion, who beguiles and entraps a young sportswriter.