Fleisser, Marieluise (1901–1974)

German playwright and writer, confidante of Bertolt Brecht, and controversial innovator in the area of the Volksstück (folkplay), who is now viewed as one of the most important female playwrights of the 20th century. Name variations: Fleißer. Born Luise Marie Fleisser in Ingolstadt, Bavaria, on November 23, 1901; died in Ingolstadt on February 1, 1974; daughter of Heinrich and Anna (Schmidt) Fleisser; had three sisters, Anny Fleisser, Ella Fleisser, and Jetty Fleisser, and two brothers, Heinrich (died aged two) and Heinrich Fleisser; married Josef (Bepp) Haindl.

Produced a small but original body of work—particularly the plays Fegefeuer in Ingolstadt (Purgatory in Ingolstadt) and Pioniere in Ingolstadt (Soldiers in Ingolstadt)—that in recent years has been critically reevaluated; was one of the most discussed women writers in the Weimar Republic; saw her books burned by the Nazis and was punished with a publication ban; after a decades-long silence that persisted even after 1945, resumed writing (1960s), enjoying in final years a long-overdue public recognition.

The Bavarian garrison city of Ingolstadt, in which Marieluise Fleisser was born in 1901 and in which she would die 73 years later, was her often-turbulent home for most of her life. Born Luise Marie Fleisser into a large lower-middle-class family (her father Heinrich combined the trades of jewelry maker and ironmonger), the young girl was enrolled in 1914 at the Roman Catholic girls' high school (Mädchengymnasium) in the town of Regensburg. Here she revealed a strong literary curiosity which included secretly reading some of the works of August Strindberg. Although her father insisted that she embark on a "realistic" course of study to qualify for high school teaching, from the very start of her enrollment in 1919 at the University of Munich, Fleisser made it clear that she had other interests. At the university, besides enrolling in a Germanistics course, she was particularly drawn to Arthur Kutscher's popular lectures on various aspects of the theater.

Crucial to Fleisser's later development as a writer were two events that took place in 1922. One was her encounter with the gifted, young novelist Lion Feuchtwanger, who discerned undisciplined talent in the young student from Ingolstadt. Feuchtwanger unsparingly criticized Fleisser's writings but also told her that she had so much talent she needed to write more, and better, pieces. He also insisted that she change her name from Luise Marie to Marieluise.

One evening she attended a performance of the Expressionist play Trommeln in die Nacht (Drums in the Night) by a fellow Bavarian three years her senior, Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956). Written by a supremely confident author who saw himself as both a literary and political revolutionary (he had already embarked on his lifelong allegiance to Marxism and the Communist movement), Brecht's play was a savage exposé of the republican Germany's corruption and despair. Fleisser was overwhelmed by the exuberance of the play and was even more enthralled by Brecht himself when she was finally introduced to him in March 1924 by her mentor Lion Feuchtwanger. By the end of 1924, Fleisser was under Brecht's spell, having decided to terminate her university studies to embark on a writing career. Penniless, she had no choice but to return home to Ingolstadt where she found it impossible to explain her decision to an enraged father.

Although physically unprepossessing, Brecht had an intellectual aura that made him highly seductive to many women; Marieluise Fleisser was no exception. His encouragement, like that of Feuchtwanger, gave the shy young woman from "unenlightened" Ingolstadt confidence in her artistic abilities that did not come naturally to her. From 1924 to 1925, Fleisser, who wrote slowly and painfully, worked on the short story "Adventure from the English Garden" and on the play Die Fusswaschung (Washing of the Feet). The play, clearly autobiographical in nature, was an unsparing portrait of a thinly disguised Ingolstadt held in the grip of a patriarchal regime of ignorance, violence, and self-satisfied provincialism. On opening night, her audience found itself fascinated by a drama that examined how German regional society repressed the desires of the young. Fleisser's characters documented in stunning detail the grief of a group of teenagers who internalized the authoritarian controls of a social environment that was as unthinking as it was conservative and religion-based. Fleisser described her work as simply being "a play about the law of the herd and about those forcefully excluded from it."

On April 25, 1926, the play, renamed Fegefeuer in Ingolstadt (Purgatory in Ingolstadt) and championed by Brecht, received its premiere performance at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin. It was a huge success. Berliners were amazed when the city's two most influential drama critics, Herbert Ihering and Alfred Kerr, who rarely agreed on anything, wrote wildly enthusiastic reviews. Fleisser was given a small monthly subsidy by the prestigious Ullstein publishing firm, enabling her to purchase a typewriter. During the late summer and autumn of 1926, her relationship with Brecht was at its most intense, and she visited him on numerous occasions in his hometown of Augsburg. Late in the year, she moved to Berlin, remaining there until the summer of 1927.

In early 1926, Fleisser began writing another play set in her hometown. In Pioniere in Ingolstadt (Soldiers in Ingolstadt), she probed, in an even more unsparing fashion, the soul-crushing hypocrisies and repressive atmosphere of lower-middle-class life in the German provinces. In writing it, she followed Brecht's advice to closely observe people in Ingolstadt, going for walks with the town's soldiers and noting their dialogue. Premiered in Dresden in March 1928 to mixed reviews, this new play had been written by Fleisser in close collaboration with Brecht. Finding it difficult to steer her talent on a clear course and overwhelmed by Brecht's powerful personality, she not only allowed him to play a dominant role in both conceiving and writing Soldiers in Ingolstadt, but offered little or no resistance to Brecht when he began to plan for a Berlin production of the play. Following on the heels of his enormously successful Threepenny Opera (with a brilliant musical score by Kurt Weill), Brecht intended to present Soldiers in Ingolstadt at Berlin's Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in such a way that the production would create a public scandal guaranteed to attract attention not only to Fleisser but to himself.

The play's premiere in Berlin in early 1929 triggered furiously negative reviews not only from the pugnacious and growing Nazi press, but from the capital's conservative and nationalist newspapers as well. Soldiers in Ingolstadt was viewed as slanderous and obscene, deliberately staged to insult and dishonor venerable German patriotic and family ideals. One reviewer called upon Ingolstadt's mayor to "marry the girl off—maybe then she will give up writing plays, which seems to be the result of unresolved complexes. Bind her hands so she cannot hold a pen anymore!" Positive responses were in a distinct minority, even though some of the laudatory ones included the cultural critic Walter Benjamin's commendation of the drama for so clearly displaying the collective power of the masses in uniform as well as emphasizing its provincial roots.

Rejection and outrage was heard not only in Berlin but in other towns and cities including Fleisser's own Ingolstadt, where the mayor protested at a national mayors' conference about a play he regarded as a "vulgar and inferior work, a slanderous, disgraceful and infamous piece." With much of Ingolstadt up in arms against his daughter, Fleisser's father forbade her from ever again entering his home. Feuchtwanger urged her to sue the mayor for libel (she declined to do so). Brecht's response to the scandal, however, was one of satisfaction and triumph, for he had succeeded in detonating a cultural bombshell, thus bringing Fleisser to national attention and making her probably the best-known (but certainly not the best-loved) female dramatist in German literary history. Deeply upset by what had happened and feeling that she had been cynically used by Brecht largely for his own agenda, Fleisser broke off her relationship with him even before the dust from the scandal had settled.

By the end of 1929, Marieluise Fleisser had become engaged to Josef (Bepp) Haindl, a local swimming champion and tobacco-shop owner who had been courting her for several years in Ingolstadt. Now resigned to working long hours in his tobacco shop, she rarely had the time to devote to new writing projects. Concerned that she might never again write anything of value, Lion Feuchtwanger urged Fleisser to break off her engagement. She did this, but it brought her little happiness, making her feel more vulnerable than ever. To find some degree of stability, Fleisser entered into what turned out to be an extremely self-destructive relationship with Hellmut Draws-Tychsen. A journalist of little talent, Draws-Tychsen was an egomaniac, and his extremely reactionary political views placed him squarely on the other side of Fleisser's political spectrum. The abusive affair would last more than five years during which she was able to write several noteworthy works, including reportage of a trip she and Draws-Tychsen took to the Pyrenees mini-state of Andorra and, more important, the novel Mehlreisende Frieda Geier (Frieda Geier, Traveling Flour Saleswoman).

The early 1930s were difficult years for Marieluise Fleisser. Not only did the unsatisfactory relationship with Hellmut Draws-Tychsen leave her with permanent emotional scars and a lack of confidence as a writer, the rise of Nazism made it impossible for her to feel secure either as a woman or as a well-known leftist. By the end of 1932, Germany's crisis was reflected in Fleisser's own personal travails. Short of funds, she decided to return to Ingolstadt after having made a halfhearted attempt to commit suicide. The onset of the Nazi dictatorship in 1933 brought about the immediate end of intellectual freedom in Germany. Fleisser's books and those of scores of other "un-German" writers were consigned to public bonfires. The self-proclaimed German Rebirth of the new National Socialist state was in fact a reign of terror against all manifestations of freethinking and liberal culture. In Ingolstadt, Fleisser had long been a notorious figure in the minds of religious conservatives, nationalists and Nazis. All considered her to be a scandalous personality, made even worse by the environment she had been exposed to during her years in a culturally alien "Red Berlin."

In 1935, Fleisser was informed that she was under a partial Schreibverbot decreed by Nazi cultural officials; she could no longer publish any books or articles in journals, being only permitted to publish six newspaper articles each year. The same year, she married Bepp Haindl, not out of love but out of economic necessity and even physical fear. (Many of her fellow Ingolstadters regarded Fleisser with great hostility as a Nestbeschmutzerin, a person who had fouled her hometown's nest by revealing its dirty linen to a gawking outside world.) Utterly incapable of understanding his wife's desire to write, Haindl showed no sympathy for Fleisser's avocation, simply informing her, "Writing you can do at night." Later, she would describe the Nazi years as a time when she was "chained up like a dog." Hitler's national tyranny was echoed by Bepp's domestic tyranny, which demanded of Fleisser that she not only put in long hours in the tobacco shop but carry out her domestic chores as well. During the first years of her marriage to Haindl, Fleisser continued to write, even though it proved to be increasingly difficult for her both physically and emotionally. By 1937, despite these difficult conditions, she had been able to complete a working draft of the drama Karl Stuart. The next year, however, Fleisser suffered a serious nervous breakdown. Although she recovered, her health was never to be completely restored. This period of Fleisser's life was recounted in her powerful autobiographical story, "A Quite Ordinary Antechamber to Hell," written in 1963 and revised in 1972.

By 1943, a deteriorating German war situation led to increased dependence on women in the work force even though this obviously contradicted Nazi ideology. Fleisser was assigned unskilled duties in a local factory, but the physical and emotional demands of the job brought her to the brink of another breakdown. Her husband was finally able to pull some strings to release her from these demands. Though Fleisser and Haindl survived the war, both were physically diminished. Haindl, once a perfect physical specimen, returned from the war thin and suffering from heart disease. From 1945 to 1958, Fleisser had neither the leisure time nor the emotional distance from daily cares to carry out major writing projects. Haindl's sudden death in January 1958 led within a few days to Fleisser being stricken with a heart attack. For days, she hovered close to death but eventually began to recover. By the end of 1958, Fleisser had liquidated her husband's business affairs, selling the tobacco shop.

The 1960s witnessed the start of a Marieluise Fleisser renaissance. Although she had received a number of awards in the previous decade, now both scholars and the younger generation of authors took notice. Encouraged by the changing atmosphere, in the early 1960s Fleisser began to write new short stories and even a Bavarian-dialect comedy, Der starke Stamm (Of Sturdy Stock). Toward the end of that turbulent decade, she was working on revisions of both of her Ingolstadt plays. In 1968, the prestigious Suhrkamp publishing house released a new edition of Soldiers in Ingolstadt, and two years later, in March 1970, the new version received its premiere in Munich's prestigious Residenztheater. In 1972, Fleisser's return to the center of German literary life reached an apotheosis when her collected works (Gesammelten Werke) appeared under the Suhrkamp imprint to enthusiastic reviews.

During the last years of her often-frustrated career, Marieluise Fleisser was able to enjoy not only fame but the satisfaction of knowing that a number of Germany's most talented young writers now looked to the entire body of her work for inspiration. Unlike the men of the Weimar and Nazi period who had often manipulated and misused her talent, these mostly male writers—which included Martin Speer, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Franz Xaver Kroetz—used her plays as models when writing their own sociocritical folk plays. While Fassbinder proclaimed that he would never have begun writing had he not seen Soldiers in Ingolstadt, Kroetz noted with approval the contrast between Fleisser's unflinchingly realistic assessment of the working class and Brecht's naive idealizations. Speer, too, gave Fleisser her due as a playwright who had important things to say even in her last drama, Of Sturdy Stock. These and other post-1960 writers were thus able to bring into the next generation of German letters at least some of the raw energy found in the writings of Marieluise Fleisser. She died in Ingolstadt on February 1, 1974.

sources:

Brady, Philip. "Small Town, Small Minds, Small Stage," in The [London] Times Literary Supplement. No. 4590. March 22, 1991, p. 15.

Demetz, Peter. After the Fires: Recent Writing in the Germanies, Austria and Switzerland. NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986.

Fleisser, Marieluise. Pioniere in Ingolstadt. Edited by David Horton. Saarbrücken and Manchester: Universität des Saarlandes-Manchester University Press, 1992.

Fuegi, John. Brecht and Company: Sex, Politics, and the Making of the Modern Drama. NY: Grove Press, 1994.

Kraft, Friedrich, ed. Marieluise Fleisser: Anmerkungen, Texte, Dokumente. Ingolstadt: Verlag Donau Kurier, 1981.

Ley, Ralph. "Beyond 1984: Provocation and Prognosis in Marieluise Fleisser's Play Purgatory in Ingolstadt," in Modern Drama. Vol. 31, no. 3. September 1988, pp. 340–351.

——. "Liberation from Brecht: A Marieluise Fleisser in Her Own Right," in Modern Language Studies. Vol. 16, no. 2. Spring 1986, pp. 54–61.

Marieluise Fleisser Nachlass, Städtarchiv Ingolstadt an der Donau, Bavaria, Germany.

McGowan, Moray. Marieluise Fleisser. Munich: C.H. Beck Verlag, 1987.

Meyer, Marsha Elizabeth. "Marieluise Fleisser: Her Life and Work" (Ph. D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin—Madison, 1983).

Pfister, Eva. "'Unter dem fremden Gesetz': Zu Produktionsbedingungen, Werk und Rezeption der Dramatikerin Marieluise Fleisser" (Ph. D. dissertation, University of Vienna, 1981).

Schmidt, Henry J. How Dramas End: Essays on the German Sturm und Drang, Büchner, Hauptmann, and Fleisser. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1992.

Sieg, Katrin. Exiles, Eccentrics, Activists: Women in Contemporary German Theater. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1994.

Tax, Sissi. Marieluise Fleisser: Schreiben, überleben: Ein biographischer Versuch. Basel and Frankurt am Main: Stroemfeld Verlag-Roter Stern, 1984.

Text + Kritik: Zeitschrift für Literatur. Vol. 64. October 1979 (Special Fleisser issue).

John Haag , Assistant Professor of History, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia