Das Mädchen Rosemarie (A Call Girl Named Rosemarie) has regained something of its erstwhile status as “the prestige problem film of German cinema” of the 1950s in recent scholarship, due to the latter's investigation of postwar redefinitions of gender roles. Film in particular is now seen as “an exploration of contradictions between two conflicting bourgeois models: the model of bourgeois family order pitched against postwar visions of mass participation in bourgeois affluence.” The problematic boundaries of women's consumerism were thematized in melodramas such as Die Sünderin (The Sinner, 1951), where a female “single city dweller threatened to sabotage German reconstruction by renouncing motherhood in favor of selfish pleasure-seeking.” Like Die Sünderin, and like other West German Problemfilme (social problem films) of the period, Das Mädchen Rosemarie thematizes sexual relations that are seen as a social issue of larger concern for a postwar society perceived as unstable and corrupt; like these other films, too, Rosemarie links this problematic to one of luxury consumption as a political problem for the Germany of the Wirtschaftswunder. Yet the ambiguity and complexity of the film cannot be rendered legible within the historical framework of consumption alone. Below West Germany's postwar “cultural” surface tensions of consumerism versus community, deeper structural transformations were taking place that could not help implicating film production.