ABSTRACT
Although Fassbinder’s fame rests on his work as the most controversial, successful, productive and original film-maker of the Federal Republic, his place in a survey of West German literature is ensured by his own contributions as author to the theatre and by his dependence on German (and foreign) authors in his adaptations. The three original plays later transferred to other media are Katzelmacher (1968 as a play, 1969 as a film), on the persecution of a Greek guest-worker by the young men of a village community, which can be related to the critical Volksstücke of Kroetz and Sperr in its debt to Marieluise Fleißer, to whom the film version is dedicated, Bremer Freiheit (1971, television version 1973), on the authentic case of a female poisoner in Bremen in 1820, and Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant (1971, film 1972), on an exploitative lesbian relationship. Plays which never made the transition to film or television but were mainly performed at the Munich antitheater include Preparadise sorry now (1969), on the Moors murderers Brady and Hindley, Werwolf (with Harry Bär, 1969), Anarchie in Bayern (1969), Blut am Hals der Katze (original title Marilyn Monroe contre les vampires (1971)), in which a visitor from another planet is turned into a vampire, and the never-realized Die schönen Tage der Faschisten, on Evita Peron. His productions of Ferdinand Bruckner’s Die Verbrecher (1967), Fleißer’s Pioniere in Ingolstadt (1971 for both theatre and television), Goethe’s Iphigenie auf Tauris (1968), Molnár/Polgar’s Liliom (1972) and Heinrich Mann’s Bibi (1973) as a revue are in some instances radical reworkings. His films include Wildwechsel (1972) by Franz Xaver Kroetz, Fontane Effi Briest (1974) (the nineteenth-century novel by Theodor Fontane), Bolwieser (1977) by Oskar Maria Graf and, most important of all, in a remarkably faithful rendering of a work to which Fassbinder was especially attuned, Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin, televised in fourteen parts in 1980. His dramatization of Der Müll, die Stadt und der Tod (published in 1976, performed in New York in 1987) by Gerhard Zwerenz has yet to appear on the stage of the Federal Republic.
