Let us take, for example, Emmi's colleagues as a good reference point for the prejudices of the petit bourgeoisie against Gastarbeiter. According to these women, Gastarbeiter are lazy, violent towards women and have only sex on the mind. And yet, in the next scene we meet Emmi's daughter, whose white, German husband is feigning illness in order to have time off work and is too lazy to raise himself out of his armchair to fetch another beer, preferring to order his wife to do this on pain of a beating should she refuse. So, through the juxtaposition of these two scenes, Fassbinder makes it abundantly clear that Gastarbeiter do not have a monopoly on laziness and violence . .
Furthermore, two contrasts can be observed. One is Emmi's local grocer, who refuses to serve Ali because he supposedly does not speak good enough German. The irony of this scene is that the grocer himself speaks a broad Bavarian dialect of German, which can itself be difficult to understand and which is considered by many not to be good German by dint of not being standard German.
The other, perhaps more obvious, contrast is the way Emmi changes from being the outsider, ostracised because of her relationship with a younger Gastarbeiter, to actively participating in ostracising a Yugoslavian colleague, Yolanda . I believe that Fassbinder uses contradiction and contrast to demonstrate in a direct manner how unfounded our prejudices are, how little society thinks about issues before it forms an opinion on them and how even the victims can find themselves becoming perpetrators if social pressure on them is great enough. He also chooses in this film not to attack the establishment' as he has in previous and subsequent films . Instead, he prefers to provoke us as individuals, the lower middle classes, the cinema viewer, into addressing our own prejudices by highlighting our narrow-mindedness and, in this case, the Nazism which lies dormant within German society.
