A Companion to Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Brigitte Peucker

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781405191630
• eBook ISBN: 9781444354058
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

A Companion to Rainer Werner Fassbinder is the first of its kind to engage with this important figure. Twenty-eight essays by an international group of scholars consider this controversial director's contribution to German cinema, German history, gender studies, and auteurship.

• A fresh collection of original research providing diverse perspectives on Fassbinder's work in films, television, poetry, and underground theatre.
• Rainer Werner Fassbinder remains the preeminent filmmaker of the New German Cinema whose brief but prolific body of work spans from the latter half of the 1960s to the artist's death in 1982.
• Interrogates Fassbinder's influence on the seminal ideas of his time: auteurship, identity, race, queer studies, and the cataclysmic events of German twentieth century history
• Contributions from internationally diverse scholars specializing in film, culture, and German studies.
• Includes coverage of his key films including: Gods of the Plague (1970), Beware of a Holy Whore (1971), The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), Martha (1973) (TV), World on a Wire (1973), Effi Briest (1974), Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), Fox and His Friends (1975), Fear of Fear (1975), Chinese Roulette (1976), In a Year With 13 Moons (1978), Despair (1978), The Third Generation (1979), Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) (TV), and Querelle (1982).

PART I

Life and Work

1

The Other Planet Fassbinder

Juliane Lorenz

I

It is impossible to talk about the meaning of life without using the wrong words. Imprecise words. But these are the only words we have. So let’s start!

These were the words with which Rainer Werner Fassbinder began a conversation in late June 1977 with author and dramaturg Horst Laube,¹ a kindred spirit from his Frankfurt days. The interview was to serve as a companion piece to an edition of plays published under the title of Theaterbuch 1 the following year.² The two met in the breakfast room of the Schweizerhof Hotel in Berlin, where Fassbinder was staying while he served on the jury of the 27th Berlin International Film Festival. It was relatively early – six in the morning – but at eight Fassbinder had to view the first film in the festival’s competition section, and he had risen a bit earlier to have sufficient time for the interview. The festival’s new director, Wolf Donner,³ had put together a promising program for the year’s competition, including not only several New German Cinema films, but the first Russian entry.⁴ A sense of renewal was in the air. In the area of foreign policy, the Federal Republic of Germany was pursuing a policy of rapprochement with the German Democratic Republic and the Soviet Union. It was only inside the country that there were rumblings of unrest. The first generation of the Red Army Faction (RAF)⁵ – Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Jan Carl-Raspé, Holger Meins, and Ulrike Meinhof – had thrown the country into a state of alarm with their leaflets, banks robberies, and targeted attacks. After their arrest in spring 1972, preparations were made for the most spectacular criminal trial in postwar German history – the Stammheim trial.⁶ The proceedings finally got underway in January 1976 after an initial ten-month period in which evidence was heard and numerous motions were filed charging procedural irregularities and court bias. In the meantime, second-generation RAF members who were still at large had launched additional attacks and kidnapped figures that represented the state. In April 1975, six RAF terrorists took hostages in the West German embassy in Stockholm, demanding the release of their imprisoned RAF leaders. After they shot two diplomats and a mistakenly detonated bomb set the entire embassy building on fire, the cycle of violence escalated: in the following years there were murders and dead on both sides. A period of agitation and hysteria began in the Federal Republic of Germany: the bleierne Zeit, or “leaden times.” The great majority of the German population had no real understanding of the RAF’s aims, but they also feared the state, which was tightening restrictions on the democratic order and making every individual feel its own uncertainty. The state used the climate of fear to suggest to the public that it had to be protected from an even greater threat, using every means possible. Anyone suspected in any way of condoning or supporting the anarchists’ and terrorists’ goals – and of damaging democracy and the state – was branded a “sympathizer.” What democracy was and how it was to be defined was determined by those in power. The aims of the ’68ers – often lumped together with those of the RAF – were increasingly marginalized and described using erroneous labels such as “left-wing fascism.”⁷ The boundaries between enemy, sympathizer, and those committed to learning the truth became more and more blurred.

This was also true in the much-needed debate on the causes and consequences of the Holocaust – and on the fact that Nazi criminals were serving as decision-makers in public office. Anyone who wanted to discuss these issues was muzzled or placed under surveillance by the authorities. Any prominent person, intellectual, poet, philosopher, or artist who held left-wing political views brought suspicion upon themselves – above all the author Heinrich Böll.⁸ In his books and writings, Böll described the causes of the German war crimes, their suppression, as well as their effects on present-day life in the Federal Republic of Germany. As early as 1972, Böll caused a domestic scandal when he appealed for fair treatment of RAF members in an essay entitled “Does Ulrike Want Mercy or Safe Conduct?” (“Will Ulrike Gnade oder freies Geleit?”). He also used the article to examine Ulrike Meinhof’s character and development. Afterward Böll was decried as an “intellectual sympathizer” with terrorism, especially in conservative circles. Böll also showed an interest in these themes in his stirring 1974 novel The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, Or: How Violence Develops and Where It Can Lead.⁹ Böll’s comments in the preface are typical: “The characters and plot of this narrative are fictitious. If the portrayal of certain journalistic practices bears similarities with the practices of the Bild-Zeitung,¹⁰ these similarities are neither intentional nor accidental, but inevitable.” In expedited proceedings, the German government quickly passed a series of laws that challenged the principles of the democratic legal system.¹¹ Radikalenerlass (Anti-Radical Decree)¹² and Rasterfahndung (dragnet investigation)¹³ were among the words I learned in my youth. And what I will never forget are the television surveys in which people were asked their views on both the Stammheim trials and the RAF prisoners and advised: “Do them in,” “gas them,” “gun them down on the run,” or “throw them over the Wall” (into East Germany). Thirty years after the end of the Second World War, in the wild, constantly changing, and culturally exciting 1970s, in a period marked by increasing social progressiveness, the Federal Republic of Germany was still not at peace.

II

If there is anything, then there is movement. See? And things evolved in such a way that at some point a solar system emerged that now no longer moves because it moves in a regulated way. If it is to be set in motion again, there has to be something that destroys something else. That is the reason why people were created.

(Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1977)

Horst Laube had turned on his tape recorder. He was listening intently to Fassbinder talk about the background to his play Garbage, the City, and Death and its origins while he served as artistic director of the Theater am Turm during the 1974–75 season.¹⁴ And above all about the “scandal” unleashed by the play after distribution began of the first edition in spring 1976.¹⁵ Since that time and until it was officially premiered in Germany in 2009, no other postwar German play had provoked this type of debate, a debate whose causes had nothing to do with Fassbinder.¹⁶ On the contrary: they were linked to a fundamental German problem – in particular, to the relationship between Germans and Jews in the Federal Republic of Germany. Thirty-three years after the end of the Second World War, there had evidently been no real reconciliation between these groups. Otherwise a fictional Jewish character in a theater play – portrayed on the same level as a Nazi murderer and criminal, yet identifiable as a metaphor – would not have provoked such a heated response from respected feuilleton reviewers. An important point: during the original conflict in 1976 – that is, while Fassbinder was still alive – those attacking him were not Jews, but conservative voices in the country who did not want a debate on Germany’s past or the relationship between Germans and Jews. And they had a simple reason: questions demand answers – and trigger additional questions. Fassbinder was paraded about as an anti-Semite so that the anti-Semitism that existed among many members of the population could go unexamined.

In his play Fassbinder, as author, portrays a character called the “Rich Jew” – a real estate speculator – with all his strengths and weaknesses. He is not a one-sided figure who is only “good” or only “bad.” An artist and author who really has something to say will always engage with the society and time in which he lives: Fassbinder took a close look at the world and recognized what was happening around him. It was impossible to disregard the wounds inflicted on German cities by the war and the subsequent reconstruction efforts with all their eyesores, especially in Frankfurt. The Jewish residents and building owners in Frankfurt’s Westend district, which had been laid out as a stately residential area in the nineteenth century, had been expelled during the Second World War, murdered in the extermination camps, and dispossessed of their property by the Nazis. As is completely understandable, the majority of Holocaust survivors and their descendants no longer wished to live in Frankfurt. After protracted restitution proceedings, the Rothschild family, for example, sold three-quarters of its real estate holdings to the city of Frankfurt and the rest to an insurance and trading company. This company tore down the old buildings and built high-rise complexes, which led to a run on the surrounding properties and to rampant real estate speculation. Compounding the problem was the extensive damage done by bombs, the rubble of the war and the postwar periods, as well as the need to close gaps in the urban landscape. The small size of the city center, which included Westend and the adjoining train station neighborhood, made these vacant lots highly desirable for banks. The city of Frankfurt took an interest in these developments since, with its growing financial center, it aimed to become a substitute capital of the country. Encouraged by these developments, the owners of the adjacent buildings did everything in their power to get rid of their tenants, since they paid relatively low rents for apartments in spacious nineteenth-century buildings. After the vast damage caused by the air attacks of the Second World War and the horrors of the Holocaust, another wave of destruction hit Frankfurt. On many of the fences that went up around vacant lots passers-by could read graffiti in large letters: “Jews are speculating here, and the city is protecting them.” But the fact was that the real estate speculators who were plying their trade with a shallow awareness of history came from all faiths, and they were all supported by the Frankfurt building authority under Mayor Rudi Arndt (known as “dynamite Rudi” to his opponents). The result was violent street battles and squatters occupying the buildings.

Fassbinder’s play deals with the first battle over buildings in Frankfurt and the background to this struggle.¹⁷ This is made clear by stage directions on the first page: “On the moon, because it is just as uninhabitable as the earth, especially the cities.” The dialogues are explosive – there is no denying that. And they can be read as anti-Semitic. But the words that Fassbinder, as author, puts into his characters’ mouths do not reflect his own views. Many reviewers have been unable or unwilling to make this distinction. A heated discussion was begun by Joachim Fest,¹⁸ who accused Fassbinder of being a “left-wing fascist.”¹⁹ All the critics who put pen to paper after Joachim Fest cited his article in the FAZ newspaper as the main source of a chain of evidence demonstrating (or better: attempting to demonstrate) Fassbinder’s anti-Semitism.²⁰ Suddenly Fassbinder’s play, based on the structure of Greek tragedy, was accorded its own reality and point of view. Writers in German feuilletons raced to offer their personal interpretations, which could be categorized according to whether they viewed the play from a “right-wing” or “left-wing” interpretative angle.

The misuse of the term “left-wing fascist” with respect to Fassbinder appeared in an article in Die Zeit entitled “Fassbinder, a Left-Wing Fascist? A Poet and a Thinker Disgraces Himself” (“Fassbinder, ein linker Faschist? Ein Dichter und ein Denker blamieren sich”).²¹ According to this journalist, although the work was a “protest drama” that went on a “poetic rampage,” it was not left-wing literature by a long shot. Other writers – even Joachim Fest himself – argued that the play’s contents reflected political conditions in Frankfurt in the early 1970s. To defuse the situation, Frankfurt publisher Siegfried Unseld recalled the edition of plays, entitled Rainer Werner Fassbinder Stücke 3, and asked Fassbinder to write a counter-statement, promising him that his work would be redistributed to stores once the matter had quieted down. Although Fassbinder issued this counter-statement, the publishing house never made good on its promise but pulped the entire run.²² The actual issue – i.e., the question of whether anti-Semitism had existed or continued to exist in Germany – was no longer addressed. Worse still, the discussion that conservative forces in politics and the arts feared, a discussion that they believed could derail the normalization process or expose its weaknesses, was never conducted.²³ This increased Fassbinder’s fears of a new fascism in Germany, and until his death he felt profound grief that he had been so misunderstood. Noteworthy is that, in the surveys inspired by Fassbinder’s play, eighty percent of those questioned said that anti-Semitism still existed in the West German population.²⁴

When Fassbinder was asked whether he, as author, had been too biased in the way he approached the topic, he answered in the negative, saying that he viewed the character of the Rich Jew in an absolutely positive light. The Rich Jew, he explained, was the only character in the entire play capable of love. Fassbinder also emphasized that his work was a stage play and that playwrights had to be given the chance to explore an issue using risky, even questionable methods: “Otherwise, you’ll just end up with the same dead stuff like everything else on the German theatrical scene.” He added: “The play shows disregard for certain safety precautions …. I have to be able to react to reality without regard for the consequences. If I can’t do that, I can’t really do anything anymore.”²⁵ If we examine the collected articles and essays that have appeared over the years – particularly the texts that contain heated responses to the renewed attempts to premiere the play in Germany – it becomes evident that, apart from the question of whether the work is to be judged as brilliantly or poorly written (which is indeed addressed by the writers), it was simply premature for 1976. A play in which the main character is a German-Jewish construction magnate called the Rich Jew by its author – such a play was a provocation. At this point neither Jews nor Germans had managed to fully understand historical processes. Traumatized emotions were also involved, since both perpetrators and victims of the Holocaust were still alive.

Nevertheless, Joachim Fest pursued surrounding political issues, claiming that “No matter what form fascism has taken up to no...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I: Life and Work
• PART II: Genre; Influence; Aesthetics
• PART III: Other Texts; Other Media
• PART IV: History; Ideology; Politics
• Selected Bibliography
• Index