Introduction: Remembering Fassbinder in a Year of Thirteen Moons

Author(s): Gerd Gemünden

Source: New German Critique , Autumn, 1994, No. 63, Special Issue on Rainer Werner
Fassbinder (Autumn, 1994), pp. 3-9
Published by: Duke University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/488472

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Introduction: Remembering Fassbinder
in a Year of Thirteen Moons*

Gerd Gemiinden

"Why don't you leave the dead in peace? Have they been paid to
let others make all this fuss about them?"' These lines from the penulti-
mate scene of Garbage, The City and Death, Fassbinder's play that
caused considerable controversy for its alleged anti-Semitism, take on
ironic proportions if heard as the author's voice from the grave, return-
ing, as it were, to comment on the ways in which the tenth anniversary
of his death has been celebrated during the summer of 1992 in Ger-
many. Indeed, there was a lot of fuss about Fassbinder, and the ironies
inherent in these celebrations are multiple. It is this ironic and paradoxi-
cal dimension of the act of remembering Fassbinder that I want to
address in these opening remarks, a remembering that happens to fall
on a rare year of thirteen moons which - if we can once more evoke
the voice of the dead as a comment on the present - "will once again
threaten the existence of many."2
First of all, there was the six week Werkschau: Rainer Werner
Fassbinder in Berlin which exhibited in twenty rooms scripts, produc-

* The organization of the Rainer Werner Fassbinder conference at Dartmouth

College where a majority of the papers included here were first presented, as well as the
inclusion of stills in this issue, were made possible by the German Academic Exchange
Service (DAAD). The organizers and editors would like to take this occasion to thank the
New York office of the DAAD, especially Heidrun Suhr, for their support.
1. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Plays, ed. and trans. Denis Calandra (New York: PAJ
Publications, 1985) 188.
2. From the rolling title of In a Year of Thirteen Moons. The English translation of
the script is reprinted in October 21 (1982): 5-50.

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4 Remembering Fassbinder

tion equipment, photographs, storyboards, costumes, and many other

related artifacts - six hundred in all - from the life and times of
Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Among these were grade reports and firs
drawings of the schoolboy; redecorated rooms such as his Munic
"Mansarde" with brown walls and furnished only with a bed, a VCR,
and a typewriter, or the "Biiro" [office] of later years, indicative of
more complex organization and increased production budgets; sets of
various films replete with cameras, lights, clapperboards, and direc-
tor's chair; and, most stunningly perhaps, at the entrance to th
exhibit "a surreal video-landscape"3 with each of his films and eac
installment of his tv series playing simultaneously on a televisio
monitor. As complement to this grand scale exhibition, there was th
retrospective of all but one of Fassbinder's forty-four films, includin
eight panel discussions, and a sixteen-hour open air screening of Ber
lin Alexanderplatz on the Alexanderplatz. And there were screenings
of more than sixty films which had been of special interest to him, o
what he himself had called "Fassbinder's favorites." Organized b
Juliane Lorenz, Harry Baer, and the Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foun-
dation, which was established in 1987 by Liselotte Eder, Fassbinder's
mother, the event was sponsored by the Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathe
Berlin, the Deutsches Filmmuseum Frankfurt (where a smaller photo
graphic exhibition was held), with additional support coming from th
City of Berlin, the State of Brandenburg and several commerci
sponsors, including Sony and Mercedes Benz.
In Munich, a slightly smaller event celebrated Fassbinder under th
motto "Ein Genie stirbt nie" ["A Genius never dies"] with an extensiv
retrospective, theater performances, readings, and music. The two b
public German television stations, ARD and ZDF, as well as the
regional "Third Programs" and some cable channels showed an abu
dance of Fassbinder films, at times making viewers choose betwee
The Marriage of Maria Braun on one channel and Lola on another
The private channel "Eins Plus" ran a summer-long series that included
also less known works such as Martha, Nora Helmer, and Fear o
Fear. Add to this a host of documentaries about Fassbinder and his
group, re-runs of talk shows in which he had appeared, lengthy articles

3. Herbert Gehr, "Die Ausstellung," Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Dichter Schau-

Spieler Filmemacher, (catalogue of the Werkschau) Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation,
ed. (Berlin: Argon, 1992) 172.

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 Gerd Gemiinden 5

in practically all of Germany's leading daily and weekly newspap

personal notes and reminiscences by former friends and co-wor
(including Hanna Schygulla, Karlheinz Bbhm, Armin Mueller
and you can grasp the force of this desire to celebrate someone
during his lifetime was certainly one of Germany's most contro
artists and, as the title of his film I Only Want You to Love Me
gests, also one of the least loved ones.
There was a further irony in the location of the Werkschau in
lin. It was here that the German Film and Television Academy t
turned down Fassbinder's application (the documentation of whi
also on display). In reality, Fassbinder never set foot on the Alexa
platz where the exhibition was located; for his rendition of D
novel, the Alexanderplatz was recreated in the Bavaria Stud
Munich from leftover sets of Ingmar Bergman's The Serpent
The Werkschau comes to Berlin at a time when the newly establ
capital and seat of the unified country's government is changin
infrastructure, driving out a multi-racial counter culture to mak
for state representatives and the state bureaucracy.
The grandiose posthumous tribute to someone whose films and
style consistently challenged mainstream norms and values seem
me indicative of two trends that have dominated cultural politics
Federal Republic during the 1980s. First, there is a general no
and a yearning for better times. It is not by chance that the m
behind the Werkschau were Fassbinder's mother, eager to clean
son's public image, Harry Baer, the most loyal of friends for w
Fassbinder found work until the end, and Juliane Lorenz, his last
panion to whom he had promised marriage. As Andreas Kilb wro
Die Zeit: "The three are allies. They are happy. They've done
Rainer-Werner-Fassbinder-exhibit of the Rainer Wemer Fass
Foundation is their exhibit. It shows Rainer Werner Fassbinder how
they want to remember him: as happy child and early genius, as friend
and hard worker, as king of film and smart intellectual, as cheerful per-
son who only rarely showed signs of depression. Juliane Lorenz, Harry
Baer and Liselotte Eder have shared their lives with Fassbinder. Now
they're sharing their Fassbinder with the rest of the world."4 Many of
the contributions in the hefty catalogue, such as Wim Wenders' "Men-
sch, Rainer" and Herbert Achternbusch's "Eine Rose fiir Rainer Werner

4. Andreas Kilb, "Die H5lle? Die Unsterblichkeit," Die Zeit (12 June 1992).

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6 Remembering Fassbinder

Fassbinder," strike this note of reminiscence. But the nostalgia which

dominated these commemorations is more than a personal affair. It is
also a longing for the heyday of the New German Cinema.
After 1982, few films have been produced in Germany that can
match Fassbinder's in artistic quality and originality. Those of Fass-
binder's generation who went on to make films during the 1980s do
so in a changed environment of film subsidy and international compe-
tition. Herzog's, Schlandorff's, and von Trotta's recent films have
met with considerably less interest from audiences and critics. Differ-
ent conditions of production have forced filmmakers to work at a
much slower pace. Nobody, of course, ever came close to the fever-
ish output of Fassbinder, but Wenders, for instance, who made nine
films during the 1970s now produces feature films at the rate of one
every three to four years. His 1991 23-million-dollar production Until
the End of the World may serve to illustrate the end of the world of
Autorenfilm and of the national cinema of the 1970s. While some of
Fassbinder's co-workers were able to continue their careers success-
fully, (his cameraman Michael Ballhaus and actress Hanna Schygulla
both worked in Hollywood, Peer Raben has become an internation-
ally recognized film composer, and Juliane Lorenz was awarded the
Bundesfilmpreis for editing Werner Schroeter's Malina), most mem-
bers of the 'Gruppe' have returned to the modest occupations they
had had before Fassbinder 'discovered' them. Others, such as Kurt
Raab, Dieter Schidor, Peter Chatel, or Brad Davis have died of AIDS
- but their deaths go unmentioned in Berlin.
In retrospect, it becomes clear that Fassbinder's death has brought
with it also the demise of the New German Cinema even if, as Thomas
Elsaesser astutely observed, he "contributed more to the 'death' of the
New German Cinema when he was alive than after his own death
[because his films] accelerated the changes that have led to the transfor-
mations of the New German Cinema into . .. a host of rather heteroge-
neous forms of film-making, in television and the cinema, at home and
abroad."5 For the most part, Fassbinder's achievements have not been
taken up by others; rather than an example to be followed, his legacy
seems to have been an inhibition for those who came after him. While
one must welcome the opportunity to see the body of his films in its

5. Thomas Elsaesser, New German Cinema: A History (New Brunswick: Rutgers

UP, 1989) 310.

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 Gerd Gemiinden 7

entirety (this being especially attractive for East Germans who, prior to
1989, had only been able to see a few of-his 4films-n West German
television), the 1992 celebrations unwittingly prove that the anniver-
sary of his death comes at a point when his work has been all but for-
gotten. With his recent plea that the playwright Fassbinder should fall
into oblivion, "the more thoroughly . . . the better it will be,"6 Rein-
hold Grimm is only beating a dead horse.
A second trend that accompanied the Fassbinder celebrations is
related to the decline of the New German Cinema but not confined to
the realm of film. This is the trend of remembering and of musealiza-
tion which Andreas Huyssen recently has called the signature of the
1980s - "a decade obsessed with memory. .... More than any of the
earlier postwar decades, the 1980s seemed stuck in the past ... : the
museum debate, the multiple oral and local history projects, the unprec-
edented boom in museum architecture have led some observers to claim
that musealization was the signature of the decade."7 The Historiker-
streit, the incident at Bitburg, and the Jenninger speech commemorating
the fiftieth anniversary of the Reichskristallnacht come to mind here as
well. What is at stake in these questions of remembering and of museal-
ization is never a disinterested representation of the past but an active
reorganization of it - which also informs the ways in which Fass-
binder has been remembered, especially during the year marking the
tenth anniversary of his death. The catalogue of the Werkschau shrouds
the "Dichter, Schauspieler, Filmemacher" Rainer Werner Fassbinder in
an aura of high art. Here he is lauded and remembered by a long list of
illustrious names: German and foreign politicians, critics, directors,
actors and colleagues, including not only Wenders and Schldindorff -
who, with Heiner Miiller, doubled as patrons of the event - but also
the French minister of Culture, Jack Lang, actress Jeanne Moreau,
writer/director Thomas Brasch, and soccer player Paul Breitner (this

6. Reinhold Grimm, "The Jew, the Playwright, and Trash: West Germany's Fass-
binder Controversy," Monatshefte 83.1 (1991): 26. Although Grimm makes this indict-
ment primarily concerning Fassbinder's play Garbage, The City and Death the tenor of his
article leaves no doubt that this evaluation extends also to Fassbinder's other plays (with
the exception of Katzelmacher). Grimm admits to "know but little" (26) about Fass-
binder's oeuvre as filmmaker (let alone Daniel Schmitz's adaptation of the play, Schatten
der Engel) - apparently he considered the filmmaker not relevant for his discussions of
the playwright.
7. Andreas Huyssen, "The Inevitability of Nation: German Intellectuals after Uni-
fication," October 61 (1992): 65.

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8 Remembering Fassbinder

would be comparable to Larry Bird reminiscing about Andy Warhol).

One could be tempted to speak of "Fassbinderbewdltigung" - not a
coming to terms with his controversial oeuvre but instead a neutraliza-
tion that endows him with the status of a classic.
There is a film that amply demonstrates this obsession with mem-
ory and that also demonstrates its implied re-writing of history: Edgar
Reitz's sixteen-hour television saga Heimat. One of television's greatest
successes of recent years, Heimat chronicles the historical changes in a
small rural community by following the various destinies of a family
from 1919 to 1982. History in this film means the experience of history
in the daily lives of the villagers. It is a seemingly disinterested, objec-
tive, and documentary recording of memory that carries great persua-
siveness and the ring of authenticity. By entirely confining the film's
viewpoint to that of its protagonists, however, the filmmaker becomes
complicitous in the villagers' lack of curiosity about the sufferings
inflicted by the Nazis.8 Fassbinder's approach to representing memories
on film and to using film as an intervention into the past drastically dif-
fers from Reitz's;9 a sketch of these differences may provide us with a
way to approach Fassbinder's own legacy. Whereas Reitz's anthropol-
ogy relies on regionalism, oral history and storytelling in order to recre-
ate history "as it really was experienced by the small people,"
Fassbinder highlights his interventions into the past by foregrounding
the past's relevance for the present (most notably in Maria Braun, Lola
and Lili Marleen): history not as it really was but how it presents itself
to an interested interlocutor. Reitz's German requiem mourns the loss of
an untainted notion of Heimat; halfway through this nostalgic film, the
characters become nostalgic for their own past. With Fassbinder's more
authorial command over his characters, the viewer is made aware of
their shortcomings and active repressions; often they come to serve as
allegories for the (wrong) political choices of the German nation. What
unites both filmmakers across these differences, however, is their shared
awareness that the knowledge of history is primarily a knowledge of the

8. For a detailed analysis of Heimat see also the respective chapters in Anton Kaes,
Deutschlandbilder: Die Wiederkehr der Geschichte als Film (Munich: Text + Kritik,
1987), and Eric Santner, Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Ger-
many (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990).
9. The irony of Heimat is that this kind of collaboration between Autorenfilm and
television would in all likelihood not have been possible without the inroads Fassbinder
made with Eight Hours Are Not a Day and Berlin Alexanderplatz.

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 Gerd Gemiinden 9

images of history and that their own films constitute a participa

this historical discourse rather than a reflection of it.
It is this interested and critical approach to interpreting
binder's legacy that we had in mind when planning this special is
New German Critique. Our intention was for this to be neither
nor an adoration but an occasion to examine Fassbinder's controversial
legacy and its relevance for the present. Historicizing Fassbinder from
today's viewpoint means engaging his work in current debates about
filmmaking, auteurism, and personal cinema; about the writing and re-
writing of German film history; about questions of genre; about ques-
tions of gender and homosexuality; but it also means engaging his
work with problems the current political situation is presenting. Here
Fassbinder's films could be made to speak about questions of identity
and nationality, marginality, foreigners, and representing a troubled past
to an audience who knows these troubles only through other representa-
tions - all issues which are setting the political agenda of the 1990s
for a unified Germany. It is here that Fassbinder's oeuvre has to prove
that it is worth the effort of saving it from the traps of musealization
and the fate of oblivion.

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