Rainer Werner Fassbinder and the German Theatre (review)

Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1946–1982) is primarily known as the prematurely gone, überproductive bad boy of the New German Cinema. That Fassbinder had worked for over a year in theatre before making his first feature film, spent ten years (1967 to 1976) as playwright, director, actor, and artistic director, and has left seventeen plays are facts known only to a few. David Barnett's study Rainer Werner Fassbinder and the German Theatre, the first dedicated solely to Fassbinder's work in the theatre, aims at changing this state of affairs. Barnett is right when he states that Fassbinder's theatre work "has been overlooked and erased in the critical literature" (3). His objective is to show that "Fassbinder is truly an international figure in the theatre, as well as in the cinema" (259). The book is the writing of what has been left unwritten—that is, the story of the "climb of a minor actor from a small role in a little-known theatre's production of a Greek classic to a figure of great stature within the West German theatre system" (7). That Barnett ends his book with a lament—"Fassbinder nonetheless remains a marginal figure in the history of the German theatre" (262)—betrays a contradiction that makes this study all the more necessary.

In five chapters and an introduction and epilogue, Barnett provides a cultural, political, and historical contextualization of West Germany as a frame within which Fassbinder's theatre work took place. Chapter 1 depicts the nascent underground-theatre scene of the 1960s (the Kellertheater ["cellar theatres"] and the street theatre) as a response to the political and cultural crisis of the West German Staatstheater ("state theatre"). Fassbinder joined the action-theater, formed as part of the underground in Munich in 1967, as an actor later that year. Within a year and a half of the action-theater's existence Fassbinder established himself as a creative leader of a group of artists that would follow him throughout his theatre and film career. There, Fassbinder started directing and adapting plays and wrote and produced his first, Katzelmacher. The main elements of Fassbinder's aesthetics were already discernible: the centrality of language, the concepts of "demonstration" and de-individuated characters realized through interactions and attitudes, and writing with particular ensemble members and the collective nature of the action-theater in mind.

Chapter 2 follows Fassbinder and his posse into a theatre of their own, the antiteater, where they opposed the bourgeois concept of theatre by emphasizing the active role of the audience in the creation of meaning, the concept of Klassikerzertrümmerung ("reducing of the classics to rubble"), and a postdramatic form. From July 1968 through December 1969 (the date of the antiteater's demise), Fassbinder developed both his directorial skills (an acclaimed staging of Goldoni's The Coffeehouse) and playwriting skill (The American Soldier, Preparadise Sorry Now, and Anarchy in Bavaria).

In chapter 3, Barnett takes us on a national tour with Fassbinder. Invited by the famous Intendant Kurt Hübner to come to Bremen as a guest director, Fassbinder started contributing to the rebirth of the German Regietheater ("Directors' Theatre") by staging productions in Nuremberg, Darmstadt, and West Berlin. During this period (late 1969 to 1973) three new plays were written, two of which, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant and Bremen Freedom, are his most frequently performed.

Chapter 4 is about the big time and the big fall. Fassbinder was fully integrated into the German state-theatre system by accepting the artistic director position at the Theater am Turm in Frankfurt. He stayed there for one fateful season, 1974–75, struggling to negotiate between the new Mitbestimmung ("collective decision-making") and the old highly subsidized German theatre system.

In the last chapter, Barnett's focus is on Fassbinder's play Garbage, the City and Death (labeled by many of its critics as anti-Semitic), the only play in the history of...