FASSBINDER, RAINER WERNER (1945–1982)

German filmmaker.

During his lifetime, much of what was written about Rainer Werner Fassbinder gave the year of his birth as 1946. It seems that Fassbinder may have encouraged the publication of that erroneous date, perhaps as a means of making his extraordinary productivity—he directed more than forty films between 1969 and 1982—appear all the more prodigious. It is worth entertaining the possibility, though, that the substitution of 1946 for 1945 might have other kinds of significance with regard to Fassbinder's films and his controversial politics. Perhaps the most famous filmmaker of the so-called New German Cinema of the 1970s and 1980s, Fassbinder saw film as "a political instrument, in the sense that it can describe and expose the underlying problems of society" (Whitney, sec. C). He made the recent history of Germany, and of West Germany in particular, the focus of much of his work as a director. Central to Fassbinder's understanding of the history of West Germany was his conviction that "in 1945, at the end of the war, the chances which did exist for Germany to renew itself were not realized. Instead, the old structures and values … have basically remained the same" (Elsaesser, 1996, p. 25). In light of that remark, Fassbinder's endorsement of the publication of 1946, rather than 1945, as the year of his own birth might be seen as a way of dissociating himself from the history of the nation that several of his most important films recount in melodramatic allegories.

Beginning in the mid-1970s, Fassbinder was continually caught up in political controversies concerning his approach to representing German history, in particular the place of anti-Semitism in that history. Fassbinder repeatedly declared that in his films he "wanted to show that National Socialism wasn't an accident but a logical extension of the bourgeoisie's attitudes, which haven't altered to this day" (Thomsen, p. 95). In line with that belief, Fassbinder's 1975 play Der Müll, die Stadt und der Tod (Garbage, the city, and death) draws connections between Jewish property speculators, prostitution rings, and corrupt politicians in contemporary Frankfurt, which provoked inflammatory accusations of left-wing anti-Semitism in the press and ultimately led to the cancellation of the production of the play scheduled for that year at Frankfurt's Theater am Turm. Fassbinder's so-called BRD Trilogy (BRD stands for Bundesrepublik Deutschland or Federal Republic of Germany), a suite of films comprising The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979), Lola (1981), and Veronika Voss (1982), frames the history of West Germany allegorically in its melodramatic depiction of the lives of the title characters of the three films. The films incorporate references to—and sometimes, by means of the montage of both film and sound recordings, direct citations of—the transmission of recent German history in the media of photography, film, and radio.

In the BRD Trilogy and elsewhere, Fassbinder's work brings together his emulation of the formal techniques of both the early-twentieth-century avant-garde and classic Hollywood cinema, the former represented, for example, by the German novelist Alfred Döblin, whose monumental novel Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) Fassbinder adapted in 1980 as a fourteen-part serial for West German television, and the latter epitomized for Fassbinder by the melodramas or so-called women's films directed by the German-born Hollywood filmmaker Douglas Sirk in the 1950s. Fassbinder's films also include adaptations of Theodor Fontane's novel Effi Briest (1894) (Fontane Effi Briest, 1972/74) and of Marieluise Fleisser's 1929 play Pioniere in Ingolstadt (Recruits in Ingolstadt), which Fassbinder set in the present when he directed his film version in 1970.

In addition to his work as a film director, Fassbinder had a significant career as a writer, director, and actor in the theater, and he appeared as an actor in films directed by others, as well as in many of his own. In 1978 Fassbinder took part in the production of the film Deutschland im Herbst (Germany in autumn), which was made as a collective work by thirteen German filmmakers and writers, including Heinrich Böll, Alexander Kluge, and Volker Schlöndorff, in response to the interrelated events of the so-called Deutscher Herbst (German autumn) of 1977: on 5 September, the kidnapping of the German business executive, right-wing public figure, and former National Socialist Hanns-Martin Schleyer by members of the Red Army Fraction (RAF; sometimes rendered into English as Red Army Faction); on 13 October, the hijacking of a Lufthansa jet, which resulted in the death of the plane's pilot, by members of the RAF in collaboration with members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine as an attempt to exert pressure on the German government to agree to release prisoners in exchange for the release of Schleyer; on 18 October, the suspicious deaths, in Stammheim Prison near Stuttgart, of three members of the RAF (Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Jan-Carl Raspe); and the subsequent murder of Schleyer on 19 October. In his part of the film, Fassbinder insists on the problematic and sometimes paradoxical connection between authoritarianism, violence, and domination in politics and public life, especially in recent German history, and in intimate, especially familial, interpersonal relationships. Fassbinder's portrayal of himself as he berates his mother and his male lover for their expressions of sympathy with the positions taken by the German chancellor Helmut Schmidt's government in response to the RAF's acts of terrorism is at once unflinching and self-indulgent, with Fassbinder, drunk and high on drugs, embodying a political problematic that preoccupied him throughout his brief but exceptionally productive career.

See alsoDöblin, Alfred; Cinema; Germany; Wenders, Wim.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Elsaesser, Thomas. New German Cinema: A History. New Brunswick, N. J., 1989.

——. Fassbinder's Germany: History, Identity, Subject. Amsterdam, 1996.

Fassbinder, Rainer Werner. The Anarchy of the Imagination: Interviews, Essays, Notes. Edited by Michael Töteberg and Leo A. Lensing. Translated by Krishna Winston. Baltimore and London, 1992.

Kaes, Anton. From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film. Rev. ed. Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1989.

Kardish, Laurence, and Juliane Lorenz, eds. Rainer Werner Fassbinder. New York, 1997.

Santner, Eric L. Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany. Ithaca, N.Y., 1990.

Thomsen, Christian Braad. Fassbinder: The Life and Work of a Provocative Genius. Translated by Martin Chalmers. Minneapolis, 2004.

Whitney, Craig R. "Fassbinder: A New Director Movie Buffs Dote On." New York Times, 16 February 1977, sec. C.

Brigid Doherty