Rainer Werner Fassbinder and the German Theatre (review)

This book is the first fully comprehensive study of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's work in the theatre - a much under-researched area in the creative output of a director who is more widely known for his prolific experimental film work. Avoiding the all too prevalent biographical and sensationalizing interpretive approach to Fassbinder's films and plays, Barnett offers a carefully researched history and analysis of Fassbinder's theatrical career - from the time he joined the action-theatre in Munich as a stand-in in 1967; through the productions of the anti-theatre, which he co-founded, and his directorial work in some of the top, state-subsidized German theatres; to his short and troubled artistic directorship at the Theater am Turm in Frankfurt. The last chapter discusses Fassbinder's unrealized theatre plans and evaluates the ongoing resonance of his work in Germany after his premature death, at the age of thirty-seven, in 1982, including the national theatre scandal surrounding the cancelled Frankfurt production of his play Der Müll, die Stadt und der Tod (Rubbish, the City and Death) in 1985.

On first encountering the book, the reader may be forgiven for thinking that its title sounds overly ambitious: how could the discussion of a director who is often considered marginal and one who had such a short career in the theatre to boot also shed light on the German theatre? In fact, the book delivers far beyond expectations on this score: by thoroughly contextualizing and historicizing every phase of Fassbinder's work within the larger political and theatrical structures he was working in and against, Barnett introduces the reader to a wealth of useful and important background information - albeit, of course, mostly about the modern West German theatre. For these contextual discussions alone, the book ought to be recommended to every student of German theatre. Barnett introduces us to the intricacies of the highly subsidized system of Staatstheater and Stadttheater [state theatres and city theatres] in post-war West Germany, with its powerful Intendanten [artistic directors] and its emphasis on Regietheater (a director's theatre), as well as to the network of small alternative Kellertheater [cellar theatres] from which Fassbinder emerged in the 1960s. Moreover, he links Fassbinder's development to wider political contexts, such as the 1968 student revolution, which are indispensable for an understanding of the political and aesthetic experimentations of his generation of theatre makers, as well as their attempts at changing traditional, hierarchical production practices to structures marked by Mitbestimmung [collective decision making].

Barnett's analysis of Fassbinder's theatre works is the result of pioneering primary research in the largely untapped archives of the Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation and other German archives, as well as of extensive interviews conducted with Fassbinder's main actors and associates. A sense of excitement about this work "at the coalface" pervades the study and the reader can follow Barnett's veritable detective journey by switching back and forth between the main text and the notes, which are helpfully rendered as footnotes not endnotes. The book is also generously illustrated with production photos, some of which are published here for the first time, that facilitate a greater understanding of the performances discussed.

What I find most praiseworthy and useful about this study is Barnett's painstaking attempt to reconstruct, describe, and analyse the actual performance styles of each production from newspaper reviews, program notes, interviews with actors and eyewitnesses, and (if available) audio, TV, and film recordings. While this procedure can never perfectly capture the nature of the performances, it does give a very good sense of their various non-psychologizing, presentational acting modes and helps to guard against misreadings of Fassbinder's plays. In his aesthetics and working methods, Fassbinder is deeply influenced by Brecht's concept of Verfremdung [alienation], but, as Barnett shows, he develops his own original arsenal of post-Brechtian, de-individualizing defamiliarization techniques. Thus in one of his own plays, Katzelmacher...