Part of the BRD Trilogy along with The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979) and Lola (1981). "BRD" stands for Bundesrepublik Deutschland, the official name of West Germany and of the united contemporary Germany, period in which those three stories takes place. The films are connected in a thematic rather than in a narrative sense. All three deal with different characters (though some actors recur in different roles) and plot lines, but each one focuses on the story of a specific woman in West Germany after World War II.
R. W. Fassbinder has a cameo role in the beginning of the film sitting behind Veronika Voss in a movie theatre and watching her old movie.
Dr. Ursula Moritz, whom the character of Dr. Marianne Katz is based, was charged with continued offense against the drug law with intent to gain illegal financial advantage. Henriette von Speidel, a seventy-year-old actress, had set the ball rolling towards a legal investigation. The elderly woman had noticed that in recent years two other subtenants of the doctor had apparently taken their own lives. She rented a room in Dr. Moritz's home and was finally able to produce the evidence: 723 prescriptions for narcotics, made out within a period of just under three years. Paul Demmler, an official from the Munich Health Department who was called in on the case, surprisingly defended the accused physician, and the court was not able to establish legally binding proof of a connection between the doctor's practice of prescribing the drugs and Schmitz's death. The tabloids at the time could not accept the verdict (Moritz was sentenced to just four months in prison), and the public learned that the police and the Health Department for months had refused to investigate the charges. The case was never satisfactorily solved, leaving room for speculation.
With the words of Roger Ebert, "Rainer Werner Fassbinder premiered 'Veronika Voss' in February 1982, at the Berlin Film Festival. It was hailed as one of the best of his 40 films. Late on the night of June 9, 1982, he made a telephone call from Munich to Paris to tell his best friend he had flushed all his drugs down the toilet - everything except for one last line of cocaine. The next morning, Fassbinder was found dead in his room, a cold cigarette between his fingers, a videotape machine still playing. The most famous, notorious and prolific modern German filmmaker was 36."