Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wunderkind

Rainer Werner Fassbinder
IM LAND DES APFELBAUMS
Gedichte und Prosa aus den Kölner Jahren 1962-63
Edited by Julianne Lorenz and Daniel Kletke
187pp. Munich: SchirmerGraf. 19.80euros.
978 3 86555 019 4

THEATERSTUCKE
674pp. Frankfurt: Verlag der Autoren. 24euros.
978 3 88661 281 9

David Barnett
RAINER WERNER FASSBINDER AND THE GERMAN THEATRE
312pp. Cambridge University Press. £50 (US $90).
978 0 521 85514 3 

In the late 1970s, as the brilliant, brief career of Rainer Werner Fassbinder approached its zenith, the New York Times heralded the prolific young filmmaker, born in 1945, as both “wunderkind” and “messiah” of the New German Cinema. In Germany, where his work regularly provoked outrage and scandal, the left-wing magazine konkret portrayed him as “the thermometer in the asshole of culture”, ridiculing the director’s uncanny ability to operate as a constant irritant on the artistic scene. Since Fassbinder’s untimely death in 1982, from what his friend and frequent collaborator Harry Baer called an “overdose of work”, the importance of his complex cinematic and literary oeuvre has been consistently undervalued in Germany. The 2005 retrospective of the films, designed to celebrate what would have been his sixtieth birthday, was shown first in Paris at the Centre Pompidou and only then came to Berlin in a much scaled-down version. For most Germans, it seems to have been more an occasion for renewed wonderment over a delinquent native son’s international reputation than for celebration of one of their great twentieth-century artists.

Even if Fassbinder’s homeland has been slow to recognize his high standing in film history, the rest of the world has not. To cite just one example, the prestigious Criterion series of classic cinema on DVD has raised a handful of the forty-four films he made in sixteen years to canonical status in the English-speaking world: Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, his oblique, racially charged adaptation of Douglas Sirk’s famous weepie All That Heaven Allows; and the so-called BRD Trilogy (The Marriage of Maria Braun, Lola and Veronika Voss), in which the up-and-down careers of three remarkable women both represent the steeply rising curve of the Wirtschaftswunder and demonstrate its devastating toll on the German national psyche. Such choices reflect the way in which Fassbinder’s influence has been a steady undercurrent in the work of some of the best directors of the contemporary cinema; not only in places where one would most expect it, such as Todd Haynes’s Far from Heaven, the pastiche melodrama indebted despite the allusive title to Fassbinder as well as Sirk, but also in the films of Pedro Almodóvar and Wang Kar-wai.

The guiding force behind the international Fassbinder revival has been Juliane Lorenz, the director’s last film editor and companion, and the president of the Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation. Established in 1987 by Liselotte Eder, Fassbinder’s mother and his actress in many minor and a few major roles, the Berlin-based organization oversees an extensive collection of scripts, costumes and other materials related to the films, as well as literary manuscripts, drawings and watercolours. It has provided the untiring initiative and, equally important, the painstakingly remastered prints which have made the retrospectives of the past fifteen years possible. The Foundation’s most notable achievement has been the restoration of Berlin Alexanderplatz, the fifteen-and-a-half-hour television series based on Alfred Döblin’s great city novel. Its theatrical release this year in February in Berlin and during the week of April 9 in New York at MOMA is a welcome reminder that Fassbinder the director and cinéaste was also a passionate reader of literature. In a 1980 essay for Die Zeit, he recalled being “in the throes of an almost murderous puberty” when he discovered Döblin’s novel, long before his cinematic fathers and older brothers – Raoul Walsh, Howard Hawks, Luis Buñuel, Jean-Luc Godard, and Jean-Marie Straub – had begun to exert their influence on his earliest films.

Im Land des Apfelbaums (“In the Land of the Apple Tree”), an elegantly edited collection of unpublished texts from the rich archival trove of Fassbinder’s literary juvenilia, demonstrates that the young reader also became a precocious writer. The volume combines two carefully bound typescripts with the same title and subtitle (“Lyric Poetry, Prose and a Radio Play”) that the teenager gave his mother for Christmas in 1962 and 1963. Asked once whether she had encouraged young Rainer’s literary inclinations, Liselotte Eder confessed to some hesitation:

       It made me nervous. Remember: the entire Fassbinder clan – his father, his father’s brother, his brother’s children – were all writing poems. And they all sounded like Rainer Maria Rilke! If you went to visit his uncle and his children, you would be presented with original verses by the children. And I said to myself, “Oh God – not Rainer, too! I can’t put up with that”.

The evidence of Fassbinder’s early versifying suggests that his mother succeeded in forestalling any undue Rilkean influence. The editorial postscript points to traces of Schiller’s ballads, typical school-anthology reading, but there are also intermittent echoes of Brecht: the recurring staccato interrogatives of the poem “Justice”– “Ist das gerecht?” (“Is that just?”) – recall the cool intensity of his political verse. The George Grosz-like portrait of the “good citizen” in the sardonic ballad “The Bum’s Saga”, where “Bürger” is rhymed with “Schweinewürger” (a neologism that suggests someone who both strangles pigs and chokes down pork), harks back to an earlier, but no less radical forebear. The brutal imagery and grotesque rhymes revive the scandalous poetic idiom of “Ich habe meine Tante geschlachtet” (“I happened to have slaughtered my aunt”) and other cabaret songs by Frank Wedekind, the playwright provocateur of the last years of imperial Germany.

Despite such striking moments in the poems, Fassbinder’s literary potential is more evident in the short prose. “A Time for Sadists”, a representative story that gestures towards both Kafka and Beckett, presents a brief sketch of a desert penal colony narrated by a Jew whose twelve fellow prisoners include a “pagan” Negro and a Catholic Pole. They are all waiting for God, but “God didn’t come, not now and not later”. After recounting a bloody fight between the Negro, Jack, and a lieutenant who has just murdered other soldiers, the narrator concludes by declaring that he “understands” both of them. The erotically charged description of the black man’s body, which glistens even in the throes of violent physical punishment, and the sympathy with both victimizer and victim anticipate visual and thematic elements in the cinematic work to come.

The radio plays that conclude each volume of Im Land des Apfelbaums – one a satirical portrait of a dysfunctional family, the other an allegory of sexual healing – anticipate one of the dramatic genres in which Fassbinder would produce most of his literary work. In 1991, the writers’ cooperative press Verlag der Autoren published what was then thought to be the complete dramatic works (Sämtliche Stücke). The volume reprinted the original plays Fassbinder wrote for his underground ensemble, the “antiteater”; his often lacerating adaptations of classical dramas and comedies (Sophocles’ Ajax, Goethe’s Iphigenie in Tauris, Goldoni’s Coffee House, Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, and Lope de Vega’s Burning Village); The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, the chamber play of lesbian power dynamics; and Garbage, the City and Death, the controversial melodrama ostensibly about property speculation in 1970s Frankfurt. Also included were pieces, such as the experimental play Werewolf co-authored with Harry Baer, which had been performed but not published during Fassbinder’s lifetime, and a handful of previously unknown radio and stage plays. The most substantial of these is Water Drops on Hot Stones, subtitled “A Comedy with a Pseudo-Tragic Ending”, about two gay men and their female lovers stumbling through destructive musical-chair relationships.

The new edition of Fassbinder’s dramatic works has been given the more provisional title Theaterstücke (“Theatre Plays”), presumably in anticipation of further unpublished plays and fragments surfacing from the archives. It adds one new text, Just a Slice of Bread: A play in ten scenes with a single set. In a variant subtitle, the play is called “Dialogue about an Auschwitz Film”; and, indeed, in this, his first drama, Fassbinder displays all the historical awareness of, and critical sensitivity towards, the Holocaust that he would be accused of lacking by the harshest critics of his last work for the stage, Garbage, the City and Death. A young director who is offered the opportunity of jump-starting his career with a film about the concentration camps agonizes over how to represent the milieu without replicating the Nazi mentality that created them. His idea of estranging the realistic setting through period popular songs on the soundtrack and interviews with actual camp survivors is rejected by the savvy producer. The director stays on, and the final production garners popular success and three national film prizes. Although the play ends with this ironic and, today, no longer surprising affirmation of the power of “Shoah business”, the text contains other provocations. The scenes that dramatize the shooting of the film focus not on the suffering of camp inmates but rather on dissension and exploitation in their ranks, including an incident in which an older man demands a sexual favour from a boy in exchange for food. In a subsequent conversation with a gay friend, the director explains that he hesitates to treat the actual plight of homosexuals in the camps because their social “abnormality” would distract the audience. He also has the unnerving habit of asking people if they are Jews, when he knows they are not, just to see how they will react.

Neither of these two early plays written in 1965–6, which despite their transgressive subject matter are framed in relatively conventional dramaturgical terms, suggests the explosion of experimental inventiveness that would mark Fassbinder’s work with the antiteater. (The lower-case “a” and the omitted “h” signified, as he explained in an interview, opposition to society, not to the theatre itself.) It began in 1968 with Katzelmacher (“Tomcat”), a play about the forced, failed integration of a Greek guest worker into the brutal sex and power games of a circle of German suburbanites. Dedicated to Marieluise Fleisser and indebted to the critical Volkstück she helped to create in the 1920s, the play employs highly stylized versions of the working-class milieu and the dialect- and jargon-inflected language that had been characteristic of the genre. In Preparadise Sorry Now, which received its premiere less than a year later, there are vestiges of the same dramaturgical minimalism, but these are integrated into a much more complex structure. Inspired or rather provoked by the flower-power aesthetics of the Living Theatre’s mystical pageant play Paradise Now, it takes as its darker point of departure the Moors murders of 1963–5. The text consists of six short narratives that sketch the story of Ian Brady, the male half of the murdering couple; nine “pas de deux”, invented dialogues between Brady and his accomplice Myra Hindley (Fassbinder calls her Hinley); a set of fifteen “contres”, in which the “fascistoid behaviour of everyday life” is demonstrated by two characters verbally and otherwise abusing a third; and nine “liturgiques”, so-called textual memories of “liturgical and cultic cannibalisms”. The tension between the macabre, violent content of the realistic and quasi-documentary material and the extreme stylization in the distorted fragments of prayers and hymns jolts the audience back and forth between revulsion and contemplation, a rhythm enhanced by stage directions encouraging alternative sequencing and repetition of the various scenic elements. The unsettling effects of this concept have proven remarkably durable. Only Katzelmacher and Bremen Freedom, the historical melodrama about an abused wife turned serial poisoner, have been more popular on the stage. By 2005, these three plays alone had been produced more than 300 times.

Even if one divides Fassbinder’s writing for the theatre neatly into obvious categories – the unpublished early problem plays, the radical experiments at the limits of linguistic performability, the aggressive adaptations of classical and traditional plays, and the late operatic melodramas – it is not easy to make sense of the breakneck evolution of his theatrical and dramaturgical ideas or of his place in the literature of West Germany. Literary histories still tend to see him chiefly as the author of Katzelmacher and hence as part of the revival of the Volkstück genre by other Bavarian dramatists such as Martin Sperr and Franz Xaver Kroetz. As late as the early 1990s, Reinhold Grimm, the Brecht specialist and professor of German, published an apoplectic screed posing as a scholarly article, in which he argued that Katzelmacher was in fact Fassbinder’s only contribution to German literature and that the rest of the dramatic oeuvre amounted to “a heap of inflated nothingness which, at best, has been fed by imprudence, at worst, by a sordid sensationalism, . . . without any artistic or aesthetic value, without any social or political merit or sense of responsibility”. Thanks to David Barnett’s new study, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and the German Theatre, the first book devoted exclusively to the full range of what he calls Fassbinder’s “theatrical activities”, we now have the framework for a more dispassionate investigation into just how much more complex and interesting this part of his career actually was.

Barnett rightly emphasizes the importance of considering not only the texts of the plays but also the history of their production and indeed of Fassbinder’s own involvement in the theatre as actor and director. In five densely packed chapters, he provides a richly documented account of a meteoric career on and behind the boards. There is a particularly vivid account of the pre-antiteater period in 1967–8, when the young acting student, who had already made two short films, joined a ragtag underground troupe in Munich called the “Action-Theater”. From the beginning, Fassbinder demonstrated a keen interest in the interaction between communal living and theatrical group dynamics, on which such enterprises thrived – and foundered. While he was clearly committed to the typically 1960s idea of cooperative artistic production, he also displayed a penchant for picking and choosing the moment and degree of his involvement. On the one hand, he gladly agreed to co-direct the Action-Theater’s production of Leonce and Lena, Büchner’s existential comedy avant la lettre, and to play the mildly Mephistophelean role of Valerio. Curiously, Barnett neither cites nor comments on Fassbinder’s revelation in a late essay that Valerio was “one of the very few parts absolutely perfect for me”. On the other hand, Fassbinder disappeared during rehearsals for the troupe’s crudely agitprop production Axel Caesar Haarmann. As Barnett shows, he spent the time earning much-needed cash by taking the lead role in a Bundeswehr training film. The improbable sight of a clean-cut young Fassbinder in a military uniform, shown in a still from the film, is one of several striking photographs reproduced in the volume.

Although the subsequent phases of Fassbinder’s work in the theatre – the feverishly written, provokingly staged pieces for the anti-teater, the sudden jump from underground success in Munich to engagements in Bremen and Bochum at two of the most artistically sophisticated regional theatres of the era, and the ultimately disastrous term as artistic director of the Theater am Turm in Frankfurt – are better known, Barnett brings a wealth of new evidence to his critical history of the rehearsals, the productions and the scandals of these intense years between 1968 and 1976. He has studied manuscripts and variants of the dramatic texts, consulted private theatre archives, scrutinized playbills and programmes, and weighed the conflicting evidence of hostile and enthusiastic reviews. He has also interviewed many of the principals of these years, not only the actors Hanna Schygulla, Irm Hermann, Margit Carstensen, Gottfried John, Volker Spengler and others who would go on to play lead roles in his best films; but also theatre directors, writers and drama critics who knew Fassbinder and worked with, and sometimes against, him.

Earlier commentators tended to locate the origins of Fassbinder’s innovative approach to drama primarily in Antonin Artaud’s “theatre of cruelty”, an influence he readily acknowledged. The great, unavoidable model of Bertolt Brecht has generally been understood as merely a rational brake on the wild engine of Artaudian excess. Barnett wants to restore the equal importance of what he calls “a more sensual interpretation of Brecht”. While he goes to great lengths to establish Fassbinder’s early exposure to his famous predecessor, Barnett overlooks evidence that the apprentice filmmaker, who was also already writing plays, considered the theoretician of the Epic Theatre more as a tool or technique than an inspiration. In response to a question about what Brecht has to offer someone who wants to make a film, Fassbinder gave what, even in 1966, must have counted as a routine answer: “The alienation effect, which in films can be applied in a variety of ways”. That he was, however, also exposed to the less theoretically fixated, “sensual” Brecht is clear from one of his earliest film roles. In Volker Schlöndorff’s 1969 film adaptation of Baal, Brecht’s Expressionist debut, Fassbinder plays the title character, a role that, in the words of the Danish filmmaker and critic Christian Braad Thomsen, could double as a scenario for Fassbinder’s own life: “Brecht’s portrait . . . is an astonishingly accurate picture of Fassbinder. Baal is a celebrated poet who does not feel at ease in polite society. He’s a loner, a wandering troubadour who prefers bars and the open sky to literary salons. He is strangely attractive to both men and women, who commit suicide because of him. His honesty can be brutal and cold and yet people like his company”.

Barnett ignores this suggestive parallel; he also makes nothing of Fassbinder’s preference, stated more than once, for Ödön von Horváth, “who”, as the director maintained in a 1971 interview, “unlike Brecht, has a direct interest in people”. Horváth wrote plays whose very titles – Figaro Gets a Divorce or Don Juan Comes Back from the War – announce a critical perspective on the sexual and conjugal myths that Fassbinder sought to dismantle in his own work. The poetically heightened conversational style, the critique of a language of the emotions perverted by jargon and cliché, and the investment in the power of speechlessness in Horváth’s plays – a recurring stage direction is “Schweigen” (“All remain silent”) – are much closer in spirit to Fassbinder’s early work in theatre (and film) than anything Brecht wrote after Baal. If the impact of Horváth on Fassbinder deserves a closer look, then the same is true of Beckett, whom Barnett mentions only in passing. Yet the aspiring film student’s answers on an entrance examination for the Berlin Academy of Film and Television (which he failed) indicate that by 1966 he had read not only Murphy and Molloy; but also several plays including Krapp’s Last Tape, Beckett’s most successful effort, in his view, in which the playwright is “at his best showing the absurdity and ultimate senselessness of a human life”.

Finally, Barnett’s book, which wants to be a contribution to Fassbinder’s “working biography”, does not adequately engage the artistic and intellectual autobiography that emerges from the remarkably coherent series of interviews that accompanied his career from beginning to end. One of these, recorded in 1973 during a five-day trip from Paris to Tangier, Fassbinder called “the novel of the antiteater”, regretting only that it was not “balzacisch” enough. The late interviews, most of which are included in the recently published selection Fassbinder über Fassbinder (2004), contain much valuable information about what is likely to remain the director’s most lasting literary achievement: not his plays but rather his brilliant adaptation of Berlin Alexanderplatz.

Döblin’s 1929 kaleidoscopic montage narrative of the city stood in for the Weimar Republic in Fassbinder’s ambitious, unfinished project for a fictionalized cinematic history of Germany between the Revolution of 1848 and the political doldrums of the 1950s. But its meaning was also personal and autobiographical. The hapless anti-hero, Franz Biberkopf, a proletarian, criminalized Leopold Bloom, becomes a literary alter ego of the director from the outset and crops up constantly both in the films and the plays as characters named Franz, or Franz B or even explicitly “Franz Biberkopf”. Although the thirteen episodes and epilogue of the film give the impression of a creative but scrupulous visualization of the novel, Fassbinder made Döblin’s story his own with subtle changes and additions. As he explained in one interview about the film, even the street names are significant. A scene that takes place at a fictional corner, Jean Paul Strasse and Moses Strasse, also erected signposts for future projects. In the case of Jean Paul, the so-called third classical writer of the age of Goethe and Schiller, we know only that Fassbinder had an idea for a film about this fascinating but difficult author, who, unlike his more famous contemporaries, was primarily a novelist in the Sternean tradition of learned wit. Moses Strasse alluded to a planned television mini series based on Moses and Monotheism, whose recently revised status in Freud’s oeuvre as an unconventional historical novel Fassbinder uncannily anticipated.

Fassbinder once said that he could not help making mental films out of everything he read, and these were only two of the many literary projects swirling around in his mind when he died on June 10, 1982. Before his remains were cremated, Juliane Lorenz placed a fedora in the coffin: in his final years, this had been the elegant accoutrement of a confident directorial persona increasingly battered by a life of excess. She also put in the simple tools of another one of Fassbinder’s many aesthetic trades: pen and paper.
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Leo A. Lensing is Professor of German Studies and Film Studies at Wesleyan University. His edition of The Anarchy of the Imagination, a selection of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's interviews, essays and notes, appeared in 1992.