Fear Eats the Soul: (Angst Essen Seele Auf) 9781839021794, 9781839021824, 9781839021800

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BFI Film Classics

The BFI Film Classics series introduces, interprets and celebrates landmarks of world cinema. Each volume offers an argument for the film’s ‘classic’ status, together with discussion of its production and reception history, its place within a genre or national cinema, an account of its technical and aesthetic importance, and in many cases, the author’s personal response to the film. For a full list of titles in the series, please visit https​:/​/ww​​w​.blo​​omsbu​​ry​.co​​m​/uk/​​serie​​s​/bfi​​-fil​m​​-clas​​sics/​

For Leslie Siobhan Singer. A very good Fassbinder and a very good friend.

Fear Eats the Soul [Angst essen Seele auf ] Laura Cottingham

THE BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY is a trademark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in 2005 by the British Film Institute This edition published in 2020 by Bloomsbury on behalf of the British Film Institute 21 Stephen Street, London W1T 1LN www​.bfi​.org​.uk The BFI is the lead organisation for film in the UK and the distributor of Lottery funds for film. Our mission is to ensure that film is central to our cultural life, in particular by supporting and nurturing the next generation of film-makers and audiences. We serve a public role which covers the cultural, creative and economic aspects of film in the UK. Copyright © Laura Cottingham 2005, 2020 Laura Cottingham has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. 6 constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover artwork © Sam Smith Series cover design: Louise Dugdale Series text design: ketchup/SE14 Images from Fear Eats the Soul (Angst essen Seele auf ) © Filmverlag der Autoren/ Tango Film (Munich) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: PB: 978-1-8390-2179-4 ePDF: 978-1-8390-2180-0 ePUB: 978-1-8390-2181-7 Series: BFI Film Classics Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

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 Contents Acknowledgments6 1  A Career of Despair

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2  The Theatre and its Anti-Teater 16 3  An Imperfect Realism

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4  Mirroring Douglas Sirk

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5  The Story of a Marriage

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6  ‘Fear Eats the Soul’

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Notes96 Credits99 Bibliography100

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 Acknowledgments To write on Fassbinder fulfills an undergraduate fantasy that consequently begs for acknowledgment of two especially influential professors, both formerly of the University of Chicago: the late great Gerald Mast, that pioneering cineaste; and Raymond Geuss, the inspirational Frankfurt School scholar. Likewise, I must thank Richard Peña, who allowed me the special luxury of screening Fassbinder’s Third Generation in multiple private viewings during its Chicago premiere at the Film Center at the School of the Art Institute over twenty years ago. The opportunities and experiences of youth inflect and direct our futures; I have been awed and enamored of Fassbinder’s special vision since that initial immersion. I would also like to thank all of the friends and colleagues who generously offered hospitality and cultural insights during my search for Fassbinder in today’s Germany, including Alice vom Brüch, Klaus vom Brüch, Petra and Joachim von Mengershausen, and Ulrike Rosenbach in Cologne; Roger Buergel and Ruth Noack and the Noack family in Bremen; Yvonne Doderer and Yam in Stuttgart; Pietro Fiore and Susanna Noack in Frankfurt; Klaus vom Brüch and Dirk Snauwaert at various times in Munich; Johannes Schütz in the Alsace; Frank Wagner in Berlin; and Peter Weibel and the Centrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie in Karlsruhe. Finally, thanks to everyone at the British Film Institute who assisted in the production of this small book, especially Rob White, who provided such conscientious and sensitive editing.

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1 A Career of Despair Angst essen Seele auf/Fear Eats the Soul (1973) won the German Film Prize and Fassbinder himself listed it in his own Top Ten. The director’s then current boyfriend, El Hedi ben Salem m’Barek Mohammad Mustafa, stars as Ali, a guest worker from Morocco who marries a widowed cleaning woman thirty years his senior. Their cross-generational, cross-cultural and mixed-race love affair is met with ridicule and consistent acts of cruelty from nearly everyone around them. A portrait of prejudice and pettiness in everyday postwar Germany, Fear Eats the Soul is, despite an abundance of awful wretchedness, perhaps Fassbinder’s most tender and optimistic work. From 1966 until his early death in 1982 at the age of thirty-seven, Rainer Werner Fassbinder made over forty films. The years of his output roughly coincide with the halcyon years of rock and roll, which were, not coincidentally, years of intense political and personal rebellion in Germany and elsewhere. Like the primary innovators in rock music who generally lacked professional training in voice or guitar, Fassbinder was himself a self-taught filmmaker. His films wrestle with the medium of film-making, Rainer Werner Fassbinder

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with the act of cultural representation itself and with the authority invested in all conventions – including those of cinema – and suggest that art must change life to make life more livable. ‘At some point’, Fassbinder insisted during a 1974 conversation about Fear Eats the Soul, ‘films have to stop being films.’1 In his brief, excessively prolific career, Fassbinder worked in a range of genres, often combining more than one together in a single film, including gangster, satire, crime, noir, autobiography, pseudoWestern, television soap opera, social criticism, Brechtian ethnography, literary classic, science fiction, documentary and melodrama. Emotional violence, shame, self-pity and regret permeate Fassbinder’s films and were inter-twined in the roller-coaster of euphoria and angst that was his life. As noted Fassbinder historian Thomas Elsaesser exclaims: ‘Here, surely, is a director who practiced an unparalleled symbiosis between living and filming, loving and hating, working and dying.’2 In Fassbinder: The Life and Work of a Provocative Genius, Christian Braad Thomsen introduces him like this: He was gentle and brutal, tender and cynical, self-sacrificing and egocentric; he was ruthlessly dictatorial and yet always dreamed of working in groups and collectives. He was obese, unkempt, slovenly, went around in a leather jerkin and looked like a boozer in the bar on the corner. But when he worked with the camera and actors, he had the grace and vitality of a ballet dancer. The ugly frog turned into a handsome prince when he was kissed, not by a princess, but by the film camera, which in an early film Fassbinder described as a ‘holy whore’.3

Fassbinder insisted that he made films ‘for personal reasons only’. Certainly no major film-maker has ever worked as closely, crudely or honestly with the personal histories of his actors and himself. ‘Few directors’, asserts one of his American interpreters, ‘insinuate their own lives into their films with as much passionate intensity.’4 This is not to say that his films are autobiographical in the way that a memoir or a documentary attempts to be. All artists, but

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especially those working within a narrative tradition, necessarily draw on life experience. Fassbinder’s particular distinction is the depth, temporal and political, embedded in his characters and situations. He understood that history is written into our very bodies, that events of the past have determined not only our names, the colour of our skin, the way we dress and speak, whom we love and marry, but also the way we feel – even in our most innermost thoughts. History, language, custom, culture, politics, economics, memory: these are the prison houses his work tries to unlock. Dealing directly with the history and situation of his own Germany, his films address the personal and political problems faced by all of us who live in highly industrialised societies built on exploitation, imperialism and nationalism. Because of his unique contributions to film-making, his work remains rich in suggestion and demonstration for those of us concerned with the future of film and art. Like Bertolt Brecht, Fassbinder utilized different theatrical conventions and cinematic ploys to encourage his audience to think. His comments on Effi Briest (1972–4), the film he worked on while simultaneously making Fear Eats the Soul, provide some insight into his thoughts at that time: It is an attempt to make a film entirely for the head, a film, that is, in which one doesn’t give up thinking but instead begins to think, and just as in reading one really makes sense of letters and sentences only through imagination, so it should also happen in this film. Thus everyone should have the possibility and the freedom to make this film his own, as he sees it.5

His creative energies were continually drawn toward themes of entrapment, including the claustrophobia of marriage and family life, the oppressive labour conditions of workers, the inherent distrust between petty criminals and the hypocritical conventions of middleclass living. Commentaries on Fassbinder, especially those circulated in his native West Germany during his lifetime, ‘make frequent reference to the director’s unhappy childhood and parents’ divorce, as if the

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social and emotional disarray of his individual youth sufficiently explains a pessimistic view of society, marriage and the family. Fassbinder was born in Germany in 1945, less than a month after World War II ended. Postwar West Germany maintained many of the ideological components that had been central to Nazi philosophy: suspicion of foreigners, contempt for nonAryan people, subordination of women, the criminalization of homosexuals. Nazi ideals and Nazi supporters necessarily inhabited the Germany of Fassbinder’s youth: hardly anyone else was left. The Jews, intellectuals, Communists and other dissidents had all been slaughtered or exiled. Some of the same officials served under both Hitler and his successors. The narrowly elected first Federal Chancellor of West Germany, Konrad Adenauer, had been forced into exile during the war for trying to resist Hitler. Postwar, as Federal Chancellor during the Wirtschaftswunder or ‘economic miracle’ of 1949–63, Adenauer faced the daunting task of rebuilding and reconciling an economically and otherwise destroyed Germany. Or, rather, ‘half’ of Germany. East Germany was itself a material and symbolic manifestation of the suicide Germany committed in World War II: the nation literally cut itself in two. Fassbinder’s expansive filmography includes historical works, such as his international success, The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978), which consider Germany’s immediate postwar years, along with films, including the epic, Berlin Alexanderplatz (1979–80), set during the rise of National Socialism. Fassbinder himself was dead before the unification of East and West Germany in 1989. In Fear Eats the Soul, the film’s heroine, Emmi Kurowski (Brigitte Mira), acknowledges she was a member of Hitler’s party as casually as if admitting to being a baptized Catholic, a practizing Lutheran or a Saturday-evening pinochle player. Fassbinder’s films not only dare to attest to the widespread support the Third Reich received from the general population but also, more importantly, continuously reiterate that fascism is not simply a governmental problem but a psychic corruption that begins at

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Fassbinder as Emmi’s son-in-law Eugen in Fear Eats the Soul

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home, in marriage, in the family, in the self. Like so many other social critics, Fassbinder was not often able to control the horrible things he recognized around him or in himself. It is a testament to his artistic honesty that he frequently cast himself, as he does for his appearance as Emmi’s son-in-law in Fear Eats the Soul, as a swinish, barbaric, sadistic man. Though the legacy of the Third Reich fuelled his political and creative imagination – and set the historical stage for his own life drama – he identified the root prejudices of Nazi ideology as aspects of European culture that predated and outlasted Hitler’s Germany. The standard narrative structure in a Fassbinder film is that it opens in the middle of a problem and, as the film progresses, the problem gives rise to further difficulties. ‘Repetition, variation and reversal – that is the pattern of Fassbinder’s closed melodramas,’ observes James Roy MacBean. ‘But the reversal is not reversal of fortune; no, on the contrary, it’s a redoubling of misfortunes, a compounding of the woes of life, which by the end of the film have come to press in from new, unexpected quarters as well as from their old sources.’6 The vice-like grip Fassbinder’s films exert on the viewer, the psychological and political tightening of so many harsh and often unpredictable screws, not only alienated Fassbinder from the entertainment-seeking members of his first-run audiences but also greatly dismayed – even outraged – politically progressive viewers during the 1970s who had reason to hope that Fassbinder would provide new and affirmative characterizations of the emerging civil rights, gay rights and feminist mobilizations. One critic attacked Fox and His Friends (1974), Fassbinder’s only outwardly homosexual film, claiming its ‘version of homosexuality degrades us all and should be roundly denounced’.7 Similarly appalled by the ‘freak show’ aspect of The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), critic Caroline Sheldon concluded that Fassbinder and ‘other gay film-makers are no more sympathetic to lesbians than straight ones’.8 But Fassbinder never affirms. The political value of his work exists, as Richard Dyer first suggested, in ‘the way the films can be taken up,

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used, made to do political work through discussion, critical debate and so on’.9 The standard pattern of negative escalation that accompanies Fassbinder’s plots takes its toll on his lead characters, who usually find themselves dead, in hospital or otherwise wrecked by the end of a film. A stiff silence of existential desperation creates a continuous tension in his films, technically communicated in his tendency to allow the camera to remain fixed on a troubled face or strained group. Frequently his films not only end unhappily but without any resolution at all, as if Fassbinder, in a desperate attempt to reveal the suppressed aspects of human social dynamics, is himself left groping. His unique insight was that politics, economics and prejudice divide human beings so far from each other that we can never be whole. It could be said that all of his work is about hypocrisy. Or perfidy. Or self-deception. In response to the routine charges of ‘pessimism’ lobbed against him, he countered with: I don’t see my films like that. They developed out of the position that the revolution should take place not on the screen, but in life itself, and when I show things going wrong, I do it to make people aware that this is what happens unless they change their lives. If, in a film that ends pessimistically, it’s possible to make clear to people why it happens like that, then the effect of the film is not finally pessimistic.10

The rapidity with which Fassbinder worked – ‘This guy turns out movies like other people roll cigarettes,’ they used to say – guaranteed that at least some of his work would be sloppy – and it is. But his best films, including Fear Eats the Soul, Fox and His Friends, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, In a Year of Thirteen Moons, The Third Generation, Fontane: Effi Briest, Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven, The Merchant of Four Seasons, Beware of a Holy Whore, The Marriage of Maria Braun, Berlin Alexanderplatz and Fear of Fear, succeed remarkably. His prescience was such that

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more than a few of the themes he explored that were considered idiosyncratic or of fleeting, sensational-only interest when they were made in the 1970s have subsequently emerged as crucial social and political issues in the twenty-first century. These include the Gastarbeiter theme in Fear Eats the Soul; the male-to-female gender reassignment in In a Year of Thirteen Moons (1978); the complications of gay male love in Fox and His Friends; the chemical tranquillization of the housewife in Fear of Fear (1975); and the suggestion, in The Third Generation (1979), that contemporary governments might manufacture terrorism to support their own political agendas. Fassbinder’s capacity for social prophecy was due to the rapacious alertness of his critical eye. The narrative written into his cinematic characters was, after all, often already written into the lives of the people he used as actors. In Fear Eats the Soul, ben Salem

Fassbinder’s mother, Lilo Pempeit (on the right), as a busybody in Fear Eats the Soul

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is not an actor playing a Gastarbeiter called Ali: he is a Gastarbeiter playing a Gastarbeiter. As one of the judgmental, petty-minded busybody neighbours in Emmi’s apartment building, Fassbinder’s mother (Lilo Pempeit) plays the same part in Fear Eats the Soul that her son gave her in numerous other films, and was, no doubt, his summation of her character. It was his intense determination to find and reveal cultural and personal corruption – in himself, his mother, his friends, his Munich, his Germany – that fuelled him as an artist. It is also what distinguishes his best work from that of lesser, more commercial directors who cling so desperately to the superficial possibilities of cinema.

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2 The Theatre and its Anti-Teater Although it was not rare for film-makers in the first part of the twentieth century to come to the cinema from the stage – from either or both theatre and opera – among Fassbinder’s generation a background in the theatre was more unusual. Fassbinder’s only professional training was in the theatre, as an actor. (He twice applied to film school and was both times rejected.) He joined Munich’s Action-Theatre in 1967 and the next year formed a new company called the Anti-Teater (after the Action-Theatre was closed by police). Both troupes included many of the same performers and technicians. From 1967 to 1976, Fassbinder wrote, staged, directed and performed in dozens of theatre productions. Some of his plays, including Katzelmacher (1968), The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972) and Bremen Freedom (1972), he also made into films. The West German experimental theatre scene of the 1960s that Fassbinder and his colleagues fostered found inspiration in the ideas of Antonin Artaud (whom Fassbinder featured in a television series); the theories and plays of Bertolt Brecht (a major influence on Fassbinder’s writing, staging, acting and politics and whose work he adapted for the stage in 1968); The Living Theatre of the renegade New York-based impresarios Julien Beck and Judith Malina (whose work he responded to in his play, Preparadise Sorry Now, 1968); and the general Zeitgeist of political, artistic and personal upheaval that permeated every industrialized capital at the time. The Anti-Teater collective included people Fassbinder would rely on personally and professionally throughout his career, especially during his first decade of movie and television production, among them Kurt Raab, Hanna Schygulla, Ingrid Caven, Ursula Strätz, Peer

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Raben, Harry Baer and Margit Carstensen. According to Christian Braad Thomsen: From the beginning he lived with his most important actors and collaborators – and even if they weren’t actually living together, Fassbinder’s mania for work did not leave much time for a private life. For Fassbinder there was no boundary between work and leisure, between colleagues and outside friendship, between art and life.11

His theatre background and contradictory attraction toward communal living made it both practical and natural for Fassbinder to work with an ensemble cast. His experience as an actor in experimental productions also contributed to the anti-acting style he encouraged early in his film career and provided him with the artistic basis from which to cast non-actors, such as ben Salem, in leading roles. In addition to performing in his own plays and films, Fassbinder continued to act under the direction of others, for both stage and screen, even after his films began to enter regular commercial distribution. He performed for Jean-Marie Straub, Dieter Lemmel, Volker Schlöndorff, Ulli Lommel, Daniel Schmid and, in his final film role, played a dipsomaniac police detective in Wolf Gremm’s futuristic Kamikaze ’89 (1982). After his appointment in Frankfurt as artistic director at the Theatre am Turm in 1974–5 led to disastrous charges of anti-Semitism against his play, Garbage, The City and Death, Fassbinder quit directing for the theatre. He directed for the stage only once subsequently, a 1976 production of Clare Booth Luce’s The Women (Frauen in New York), which he also filmed for television. Literature was also extremely important to Fassbinder. So was the writing of scripts. Writing appears to have been central, if not crucial, to his practice: it allowed him to personalize his material. The films which he did not write or adapt himself are among his worst efforts. He lived for the period of shooting, but of the pre-production activities, he favoured and continually put

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Fassbinder on set

his primary energies into scripting and casting. He was so eager to write, cast and shoot, he often made only cursory visits to the editing suite. This is not to say that he did not once fly to Brazil only to reject it as a location; or insist that a nylon stocking cover the lens in the filming of Berlin Alexanderplatz, to further darken the shot; or that he did not make sketches every morning indicating the setups the cameraman should follow for the day; or was not instinctually aware of the differences between how and what Margit Carstensen and Hanna Schygulla could perform; or was not mindful of the placement of a particular prop; or did not understand the importance of editing. Of course he did. But he often edited in the camera, preferring as he did the single take. Fear Eats the Soul, however, was shot with multiple retakes. ‘This is the first film

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where I bothered to film ten, fifteen, even twenty takes of a shot,’ Fassbinder confided to an interviewer. ‘I really wanted to get the maximum from each moment.’12 The writing process and his intense personal involvement with his cast were more central to Fassbinder’s practice than is usually feasible or desirable for commercial film-makers. Andy Warhol’s New York Factory scene is an obvious precursor to Fassbinder’s communal band of performers and amphetamine-driven production schedules. Another master of the prolific who prioritised working with amateur talent, Warhol made hundreds of films of various lengths between 1963 and 1968, before his directorial career ended when Valerie Solanas, a disgruntled writer-actor, shot him (and he became the producer of films directed by other members of the Factory, most notably Paul Morrissey). In addition to their similar entourage-style process, Fassbinder’s early films have a stylistic connection to Warhol, as Manny Farber and Patricia Patterson observed in 1975: All of his appetites (for the outlandish, vulgar and banal in matters of taste, the use of old movie conventions, a no-sweat approach to making movies, moving easily from one media to another, the element of facetiousness and play in terms of style) are those of camp and/or Warhol.13

A mercurial antipathy to Hollywood values, both moral and stylistic, forms the basis of Warhol movies and laid the blueprint of early Fassbinder (before he set his sights on an Academy Award). As Tony Rayns, editor of one of the first serious book-length considerations of Fassbinder, noted: The formal and syntactical determinants in Fassbinder’s early films have little or nothing to do with Hollywood models. The rudimentary techniques in films like Love is Colder than Death, Katzelmacher and Gods of the Plague certainly belies an assertive stance, a desire to create ‘strong’ meanings and effects. This stance could be construed as a challenge to Hollywood’s classical ‘affirmative

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discourse’, but the stylistic strategies that support it have as little to do with Hollywood film grammar as those in Warhol/Morrissey’s moral homilies on life amongst the hookers and junkies of the Village.14

During the 1970s, enough mutual recognition existed between members of the New German Cinema (or, more specifically, its gay male contingent) and the Warhol/Morrissey scene that they began to exchange talent: for instance, Fassbinder actor Udo Kier appeared in Morrissey’s Blood for Dracula (1973) and Flesh for Frankenstein (1974); and a late-Factory favourite, Candy Darling, plays a part in Werner Schröter’s The Death of Maria Malibran (1972). Warhol’s influence on the development of experimental cinema – in particular, the transference of cinematic representations of gay male experience out of the porn houses and into the art houses – continued a cultural process that had begun decades before, notably in a work by Europe’s most celebrated homosexual/criminal/ artist, Un chant d’amour (1950) by Jean Genet. Fassbinder’s last film is based on Genet’s 1953 novel, Querelle de Brest, for which he commissioned Warhol to design the poster. But, during a brief meeting in New York in 1982, Fassbinder and Warhol had little to say to each other. ‘He’s strange, Fassbinder’, was the typically empty remark Warhol gave his dairy.15 According to Dieter Schidor, who accompanied Fassbinder to the Factory, Warhol told them that he loved Querelle (not telling them, though noted in his diary, that he had left the screening before the film’s conclusion).16 In Love is Colder than Death, author Robert Katz offers the following reenactment of that conversation: ‘“Oh Mr. Fassbinder,” Warhol said. “I saw Querelle. It made me hot for the whole day!” Fassbinder’s eyes opened wide. “We have to remember that,” he whispered to Schidor in German. “What a slogan!”’17 Although not one, apparently, that was ever used. A few months before, Warhol had visited the Querelle set in Berlin, an occasion that prompted a similarly tweaked response in the artist’s

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diary that focused more on the film’s lead actor, Brad Davis, than upon meeting, for the first time, its director: Met Fassbinder, and he was wearing outrageous clothes, the leopard-skin jodhpurs, and one of the guys standing there said he thought Fassbinder had dressed up like that just for me because he usually wears just plain black leather. He looked like a circus trainer.18

Although inspired by Warhol’s artistic experimentation and the cultural bravura of his manifest homosexuality, Fassbinder’s commitment to politics, literature and theatre gave him a sense of narrative and moral purpose that was never Warhol’s mien. Fassbinder also possessed a stronger commitment to a fuller mastery of cinematic practice than Warhol ever aspired to. Warhol’s films, like his painting and sculpture, fixate on the surface. Fassbinder’s films mine the depths. While Warhol’s work glides seamlessly, apparently meaninglessly, Fassbinder repeatedly digs deep into darkness. Fassbinder is the coal miner to Warhol’s figure skater; Fassbinder engaged deliberately with social and historical material. Both artists were and continue to be routinely accused of ‘cynicism’. But Warhol’s cynicism is one of facetiousness, Fassbinder’s of despair.

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3 An Imperfect Realism Fassbinder was not interested in perfection. His disregard for conventional standards of movie-making quality is apparent in his films and is not simply the result of budgetary and time restraints. The kind of technical issues that plague commercial hacks did not bother him: minor flaws in continuity, such as alterations in hair colour or clothing; the accidental appearance of a piece of equipment in the frame; or a few seconds lapse in the sound looping. Michael Ballhaus, the cinematographer on fifteen of Fassbinder’s films, remembers: There were certain things he couldn’t be bothered with. When a spotlight showed up in the upper corner of Petra von Kant, that really irritated me. It shouldn’t have occurred – but Fassbinder did not really mind, since it did not divert from the scene. A few people might notice, but most people wouldn’t even see it. Technical perfection simply did not matter that much to him. What mattered was the timing of the scene, the correct rhythm. That had to be right at all times. That’s what he always had his eye on.19

Actor Mario Adorf, who plays one of the lead characters in Lola (1981), recounts a similar exchange: We had just shot a scene and he said, ‘Fine, that’s it.’ And I said, ‘You want to leave it like that?’ He, ‘Yes, why?’ And I, ‘Well, I blew a line, I was not at my best, can’t we do a little ...’ And he said, ‘You want it slightly more perfect but I couldn’t care less about your perfection.’ That was a very significant and typical Fassbinder remark. He was not interested in perfection.20

In the Poetics, Aristotle defines the ‘perfect tragedy’ as one whose characters have committed or suffered something terrible.

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In this sense, Fassbinder’s films are nearly always perfect. His general disregard for conventional or technical perfection has both artistic and philosophical implications. Perfection is always only an illusion. It does not exist. If applied to realist or naturalistinspired art productions, the idea of perfection is inherently a false construct: the imitation of life, whether on canvas, stage or screen, is incapable of achieving perfection because it is not and can never be life. While the performing arts are perpetually renewed in time and space, the conclusiveness of film places it closer to the dangerous precipice of inertia inherent in painting. The most visionary of the nineteenth-century practitioners of pictorial representation struggled desperately with this inertia. The goal for Vincent van Gogh (to whom Fassbinder dedicated Despair, 1977) was to keep the life – the energy, the reality – in the art. In defense of his refusal to adhere to the late-nineteenth century standards of technical perfection in European painting, of technique as a form of illusion, falseness and superficiality, Van Gogh philosophised: ‘They are neither the best pictures, nor the best people, that have no faults’.21 If considered philosophically, the idea of perfection has fascistic implications. It is objectifying. When applied to humans – ‘the perfect face’, ‘the perfect body’, ‘the perfect race’ – it is dehumanizing. To aspire to perfection always implies fetish and usually suggests force. It is interesting to consider the contrast between Fassbinder’s anti-perfection and its opposite as manifest in the films of Nazi film-maker Leni Riefenstahl, whose Triumph of the Will (1935) and Olympia (1936) are two of the most technically polished movie products of the twentieth century. And two of the biggest, longest and most dangerous lies ever spun through a film projector. Fascist aesthetics embody a ‘contempt for all that is reflective, critical and pluralistic’, asserts Susan Sontag in her reconsideration of Riefenstahl. ‘Such art is hardly confined to works labeled as fascist or produced under fascist governments. (To cite films only: Walt Disney’s Fantasia, Busby Berkeley’s The Gang’s All Here, and

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Kubrick’s 2001 also exemplify certain formal structures and themes of fascist art.)’22 Film, perhaps more than any other art medium, offers too many cheap satisfactions. Fassbinder himself called it ‘the holy whore’.23 The synthesis of photographic simulacra with multiple artistic traditions endows film a power, and hegemony, over the other arts. The Nazis were among the first, but not the last, to exploit the propagandistic power of the cinematic. In the one-man war Fassbinder fought with himself and those around him, he wrestled with the cinematic medium in an attempt to kill the dishonesty, smugness and superficiality he saw in himself, in Germany, in German history – and in film. Fassbinder’s cavalier relationship to technical perfection belies a commitment to a realism that aims to keep the life in the art. His artistic and technical choices deliberately allow serendipity, lack of resolution, reflection – even indecipherable confusion – to coexist with the nearly inescapable sense of finality (and perfection) associated with a finished product. The ultimate Fassbinder paradox (and there are so many) is that he insisted that life is more important than art while he simultaneously destroyed himself for his work. Like other artists, Fassbinder used drugs to artificially ignite the source of creative imagination and to block out the loud demands of the worldly obligations that interfere with art production. Western art, since the beginning of Modernism, has been forged out of the desperation and egotism of drug use. Drug addiction enables the maintenance of an existence (or the illusion of an existence) separate from daily reality. The life of an artist, John Cassavetes insisted, is, anyway, ‘a substitute life’. Fassbinder justified his own narcotic dependency with references to Rimbaud, Proust and Freud, but he could also have cited Baudelaire, Van Gogh, Artaud, Cocteau, Genet and the most innovative of his rock and roll contemporaries.24 Fassbinder’s excessive reliance on alcohol, caffeine, tranquillizers, nicotine, amphetamines and cocaine and his

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overeating, especially during the last years of his life, is well documented. So is his tendency to engage in acts of violence and deception, and his general disregard for human life (including his own). When he overdosed in Munich in 1982, he was working on a screenplay for a new movie based on a novel entitled Cocaine. According to biographer Robert Katz, a 1982 day in the life of Fassbinder included, along with the visit to Andy Warhol’s Factory: a marijuana cigarette smoked in the waiting room at the Gaumont offices; two bottles of Jim Beam; Valium and sleeping pills; and a junkie-like demand that Querelle’s producer should immediately provide him with ten thousand dollars in cash.25 Although alcohol is the most conspicuous sensory enhancement used, and abused, in Fassbinder films, narcotic addictions are crucial to the plots of some of his features, such as Fear of Fear and Veronika Voss (1982), and present, if incidental, in others. Likewise, in the pseudo-documentary footage featured in Germany in Autumn (1978), Fassbinder himself orders drugs by telephone, snorts cocaine and, in a fit of cocaine-induced paranoia (real or dramatically induced) flushes a bag of cocaine down the toilet. As the titular hero in Fox and His Friends, he portrays a carnival worker whose lottery winnings allow him to enter the society of wealthier men he previously only had the opportunity to meet when turning tricks in public toilets. Fox dies at the end of the film, as Fassbinder did at the end of his life, of a drug overdose. More than a few film historians and Fassbinder supporters have sought to disengage the directors’ problematic life from his work, as if the divestment of biography (particularly one such as Fassbinder’s) inherently enhances the value of the art. But to apply a system of formalist or anti-autobiography evaluative criteria to Fassbinder’s cinematic accomplishments diametrically opposes what is most unique, prescient and contributive in his work. Fassbinder’s own corruption, if not a direct or inevitable result of a determined investigation of life, was, nonetheless, related to that process. The poetic and political truths revealed in films such as Fear Eat the Soul

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are not the result of detachment but the outcome of intense, even maniacal, immersion. Had he not worked so directly from his own admittedly gnarly experiences, his films might only have resulted in unremarkable examples of the genres he often imitated. Some of the best of Fassbinder is a Trojan Horse that looks like kitsch but is art. His mastery of theatrical and cinematic conventions was always at the service, even subordinate to, his own personal search for truth: for discovering, and seeking escape from, reality. Fassbinder’s work suggests a new kind of realism, one related and indebted to the international recuperation of cinematic language and culture that characterized the immediate postwar period. And one fuelled by the international counterculture rebellions of antiwar protests, student uprisings, drug use, rock music, sexual experimentation and social upheaval that further characterized the late 1960s and 1970s. At the beginning of his career, certain formative cinematic preferences were already manifest in the familiarity and enthusiasm for Jean Vigo, Luis Buñuel, Jean-Luc Godard, Sergei Eisenstein and Michelangelo Antonioni that he precociously cited for his (failed) entrance exam to film school in 1966. He composed his first short in 1966 out of ‘love for Rohmer’s Le Signe du Lion, and his second he considered ‘a little like Godard’.26 His first feature, Love is Colder than Death (1969), is the only one whose dedication pays homage to other film-makers: Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer and Jean-Marie Straub. Fassbinder arrived on the wave of a new cinema as it was being reconstituted in all the dominant film-producing cultures of the West, including France, Italy, the UK and the United States. Like everything about Germany during the twentieth century, the West German film situation was unique. Although Germany had been a world leader in film technology and the cinematic arts before World War II, what little Hitler had left undamaged at Ufa during the war the United States government quickly disassembled. The specific economic and historical terms that governed film and television production in West Germany during the 1960s and 1970s directly affected Fassbinder’s

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rapid pace of working and practical possibilities for national and international distribution. In 1962, when Fassbinder was just seventeen years old, twenty-six West German screenwriters and film-makers signed their names to a statement delivered at the Oberhausen Film Festival. The declaration, subsequently known as The Oberhausen Manifesto, called for a Neue Deutsche Kino: The collapse of the commercial German film industry finally removes the economic basis for a mode of film-making whose attitude and practice we reject. With it, the new film has a chance to come to life. The success of German shorts at international festivals demonstrates that the future of the German cinema lies with those who have shown that they speak the international language of the cinema. The new cinema needs new forms of freedom: from the conventions and habits of the established industry, from intervention by commercial partners, and finally freedom from the tutelage of other vested interests. We have specific plans for the artistic, formal and economic realization of the new German cinema. We are collectively prepared to take the economic risks. The old cinema is dead. We believe in the new.27

Successful lobbying efforts on governmental legislators led to the formation of a national film board entrusted with allocating film subsidies, and to the establishment of two film schools, including the Deutsche Film und Fernsehakademie Berlin, which opened in 1966 and to which Fassbinder had unsuccessfully applied. Though he failed to enter the film education programme introduced by the Oberhausen Manifesto, Fassbinder quickly established himself within the professional network of film-makers, commercial and independent producers, film prize judges and government representatives that coalesced in West Germany during the mid1960s under the banner of the New German Cinema. Like most of his colleagues, Fassbinder worked as a writer-director-producer. He was a founding member of the Filmverlag der Autoren, a director/ producer-owned company established in 1971 that distributed most

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of the films associated with the New German Cinema. (He sold his shares in 1977, claiming he was being cheated.) He was notorious for creative financing. In A Man Called Eva (1982), a biopic based on his life and released after his death, Fassbinder is depicted setting fire to a pile of unpaid bills. His rate of production was so accelerated (in 1973–4, for instance, he released seven features) that more than one of his producers begged him to slow down because he was glutting his own market. Working at such a rapid pace enabled Fassbinder to float and piggyback divergent sources of capital and labour. He would, for instance, negotiate a commercial commission from one of the television studios and offer the paid jobs to potential cast and crew members on condition they also agree to work on a forthcoming, less capitalised project at lower salaries or for free. As Thomas Elsaesser has noted: ‘When one studies the background to his production, one discovers a careful pattern of TV co-productions, commissioned work, films produced by his own company, subsidised films, production grants and prizes.’28 Like other practitioners in European postwar cinema, Fassbinder also looked across the Atlantic to the American commercial film industry, to Hollywood. Like a good truffle pig, he found something in the dirt worth saving, studying even. A 1971 recommendation from Peer Raben, the composer who scored over twenty-five of Fassbinder’s films (including the theme song for Fear Eats the Soul), led Fassbinder to the Hollywood films of Douglas Sirk.

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4 Mirroring Douglas Sirk Like Fassbinder, Detlef Sierck (he changed his name to Douglas Sirk in the United States, in keeping with that nation’s custom) came to cinema from the theatre. Before Hitler drove him out of Germany in 1937, he staged productions of Beaumarchais, Brecht, Heinrich Mann, Pirandello, Wilde, Strindberg, Molière, Shakespeare, Shaw, Sophocles, Kleist, Schiller and other classic and contemporary works. He also worked briefly, from 1934 to 1937, as a film director at the Ufa studios before fleeing to Italy, then Switzerland, then France, finally boarding the last boat out of Holland to the United States. From 1939 until 1958, Sirk made movies in Hollywood. His films insert meaning – cultural references, moral questions, social criticism – into hackneyed, studio-commissioned scripts that, in the hands of another director, would have resulted in forgettable movies. Sirk, like Fassbinder, had a special talent and feeling for actors. He had also achieved what Fassbinder was looking for in the early 1970s, what he knew he needed if he was to continue making fullfledged, real-budgeted, 35mm films capable of obtaining international distribution: commercial success and a mainstream audience. In 1971, Fassbinder viewed six films by Sirk featured in a retrospective at the Film Museum in the Stadt Museum, Munich. The experience changed his conception of how to make a movie. It took him away from the more experimental style of the Anti-Teater and brought him closer to more mainstream narrative models, especially the melodrama, Sirk’s forte. It also connected him artistically, psychologically and historically to a member of Germany’s prewar anti-Nazi intelligentsia. The films of both men share a similar existential pathos combined with a curious affinity for kitsch. According to Sirk: ‘There is a very short distance between high art

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and trash, and trash that contains the element of craziness is by this very quality nearer to art.’29 In 1971, Fassbinder published an essay on Sirk after visiting the retired director in Switzerland. In 1977, he played an alcoholic writer in a Tennessee Williams production Sirk staged with students in Munich. Fassbinder spoke often of the pivotal role Sirk’s work played in his development.30 Fear Eats the Soul is the only Fassbinder film directly inspired by a Sirk picture, All That Heaven Allows (1955). Set in a small New England town, Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson star as the unlikely couple. She’s a widow, a member of the country club set. He’s a much younger man. They meet on the lawn of her home, where he’s employed to trim her trees. They fall in love. When they announce their plans to marry, her friends and family turn maliciously against her. She cuts off the engagement and begins to suffer migraine headaches. A terrible accident occurs that brings the two estranged lovers back together at the end of the film. Fassbinder’s alterations of Sirk’s tear-jerker include upping the ante on the political implications of the contested marriage. Fear Eats the Soul introduces racial and national difference, and shifts the setting from small-town American wealth to working-class contemporary Munich. Sirk’s small-town New England, with its central church steeple, big white houses and immaculately groomed tall trees, was completely manufactured in a lot at Universal Studios. Fassbinder’s Munich was Munich. Sirk’s original has its own internally suppressed homosexuality in Rock Hudson and invisible lesbianism in Agnes Moorehead (who plays the widow’s best friend). It’s possible the handsome Rock Hudson, whom Sirk discovered and made into a star, was partially responsible for Sirk’s special pull on Fassbinder. But, if so, it was a somatic response that Fassbinder never acknowledged. Decades after leaving Hollywood, Sirk confided to an interviewer that leading ladies routinely complained that Hudson wouldn’t really kiss them, and that it took special direction to transform the manloving Hudson into a mainstream-appropriate, heterosexual-acting

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film star. Careful viewing of All That Heaven Allows reveals that Hudson’s face does not always look right. He is not really interested in Jane Wyman. He is not acting right. In one exchange, Wyman asks Hudson if he is trying to ‘make a man’ of her. In Written on the Wind (1957), another Sirk picture featured in the 1971 Munich retrospective, Hudson tells Dorothy Malone that he cannot be her lover, saying, ‘I would never be able to satisfy you’. Fassbinder’s review quotes this suggestive exchange,31 but there is nothing else to suggest that he read it as gay coded. The first Hollywood star to reveal he was living with AIDS, Hudson died from the disease in 1985.32 In addition to her supporting actress roles under Sirk’s direction, Moorehead managed an acting career by avoiding (or not being offered) roles that required any demonstration of man love, an almost unimaginable challenge for a Hollywood actress. She appears as Wyman’s unmarried best friend in another Sirk picture, Magnificent Obsession (1953), and reached national stardom in the 1960s as the elegant witch and grandmother in the long-running American television sitcom, Bewitched. Fassbinder strongly identified with Sirk’s exploration of social repression. ‘Human beings can’t be alone,’ he writes, ‘but they can’t be together either. They’re full of despair, these films.’33 Sirk’s Hollywood films are indeed full of dead souls. In masterpieces such as Imitation of Life (1959), Written on the Wind and The Magnificent Obsession, Sirk presents postwar America as a culture suffocating from spiritual emptiness in the midst of great wealth, a theme Fassbinder recognized as relevant to West Germany’s own postwar descent into unbridled, unthinking materialism. The dialogue between the myth of America and the myth of Germany that runs throughout Fassbinder’s filmography surfaces in Fear Eats the Soul. Unlike some of his contemporaries in the New German Cinema, including Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders, Fassbinder never made a film in the United States. But America – its music, its money, its promises, its military, the fascination it held for postwar Germany – is everywhere present in his work. The myth

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of America hung almost as heavily on Fassbinder’s generation of Germans as did the legacy of Hitler: America the Liberator, the Conqueror, the Land of the New. The West Germany of Fassbinder’s youth was occupied by United States soldiers: American privates caroused the streets, their generals lived like kings and their radio flooded the airwaves. One of Fassbinder’s favourite pop singers, Elvis Presley, served on guard duty in Frankfurt after he was already an international musical sensation, including in Germany (where even today Presley is known by the popular epithet of Der König). Fear Eats the Soul is itself a very American story. The American story. An immigrant’s story. Like that of so many immigrants, Ali’s relocation is economically motivated. He leaves his native Morocco (‘A beautiful, schön place’, he says) because he needs work. Fassbinder’s Ali is ben Salem but he is also the universal foreigner in a strange land who faces prejudice, hardships, discrimination, misunderstanding and fear. Because he is the product of Fassbinder’s life and imagination, he goes to the place Fassbinder literally took ben Salem. He goes to the city of Fassbinder’s life and death. He goes to Munich.

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5 The Story of a Marriage In Fear Eats the Soul, social criticism, documentary and autobiography fuse with the director’s intention to remake Douglas Sirk’s melodrama. The plot of Fear Eats the Soul also owes inspiration to a newspaper item, as Fassbinder explained in 1973: I had already used the story in a film once. It was actually in The American Soldier, where it was told by a barmaid, in a long sequence where the girl [Margarethe von Trotta] sits on a bed. It’s about an old German woman who is around sixty and a young Turkish guest worker. They marry and one day she is murdered. Nobody knows who the killer is – whether it was her husband or one of his Turkish pals. But I did not want to tell the story the way it actually happened. I wanted to give the young Turk and the old woman the chance to live together.34

Fassbinder regularly condensed autobiographical material within just such found scenarios (his films are ‘autobiographical to a hitherto unparalleled degree,’ insists Thomas Elsaesser). Fear Eats the Soul is no exception. It crystallizes the emotional hubris, charts some of the sociopolitical tensions and marks the chronological end point of Fassbinder’s failed love affair with ben Salem, whom he met in 1971 at the so-called ‘Arab sauna’ in the Rue Wagram in Paris and took to Munich to be his lover and companion. Fassbinder had a lifelong habit of giving starring roles to friends and lovers he intended to discard. Although many continued to work with the director even after the collapse of their personal relationship, ben Salem’s career as a Fassbinder actor was unusually brief. He makes a brief appearance as a hotel prostitute in Martha (1973), shot in the months just preceding the production of Fear

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Ben Salem as Ali in Fear Eats the Soul

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Eats the Soul, and has a secondary role, also as a sex worker, in Fox and His Friends, shot a few months after the completion of Fear Eats the Soul. But he never appears again. After a violent breakdown precipitated by Fassbinder’s withdrawal of emotional and financial support, ben Salem fled from the German police and hanged himself in a prison cell in Nîmes in 1977. Querelle, unreleased at the time of Fassbinder’s own death, is dedicated: ‘To my friendship with El Hedi ben Salem m’Barek Mohammad Mustafa.’ The commercial trailer for Fear Eats the Soul heralds a ‘Story of an Impossible Love’. Fassbinder was drawn repeatedly, in life and art, to instances of star-crossed love. For his generation, homosexual love was still, nearly one hundred years after Oscar Wilde, not only star-crossed but stigmatized as taboo and criminal. During the Nazi period, the badge of discrimination and death assigned to gay men was a pink triangle, to lesbians a black triangle. In fascist ideology, heterosexual marriage was to sexuality what Aryan blood was to race. A signed copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf was given to married couples on their wedding day as a gift – and instruction manual for proper living – from the Third Reich. In Fear Eats the Soul, the marriage between Ali and Emmi is a kind of wish fulfilment for Fassbinder: a fairy tale of the life he wanted or thought he wanted with ben Salem, an allegorical marriage of fantasy and bravery against a racist and heterosexist society. Unconventional because of its defiance of normative social prejudices around age and race, the union of Ali and Emmi, in the context of Fassbinder’s filmography, is also distinct because of the refreshing honesty, tenderness and relative independence the partners share. Brigitte Mira, the brilliant actress who portrays Emmi, was one of the first actors Fassbinder worked with who had no direct participation in his personal life, and it is easy to speculate that in all of her Fassbinder roles she appears as one of his more deliberate and conscious self-projections. Fear Eats the Soul was her first appearance in a Fassbinder film. Her next role was as the variety show star in the television production, Like a Bird on a Wire (1974).

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Brigitte Mira as Emmi in Fear Eats the Soul

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Fassbinder identified strongly with the lyrics of Leonard Cohen’s popular song from 1969: ‘Like a drunk in a midnight choir/I have tried in my way to be free.’ Passages from Cohen’s song are used on the soundtrack during two scenes that feature Fassbinder in Fox and His Friends. A maudlin, sensitive story of an unlikely and doomed homosexual liaison, Fox and His Friends is a mirror image of Fear Eats the Soul. The films feature similar social conflicts and many of the same actors. Some of the cross-references between the two films are sly. When, for instance, Fassbinder (as Fox) buys a winning lottery ticket worth DM500,000, the vendor who sells him the ticket is Brigitte Mira.35 Although the narrative trajectory of Fox and His Friends is more akin to that of The Rake’s Progress, while Fear Eats the Soul is rather more Romeo and Juliet, both films focus on a politically taboo love relationship, not unlike Fassbinder’s own with ben Salem. Ben Salem entered Fassbinder’s life during the collapse of the director’s love affair with another handsome dark-skinned man, Günther Kaufmann. Kaufmann’s historically resonant family background is referred to directly and indirectly throughout his Fassbinder career, including in Whitey (1970), where he plays the son of a white male slave owner and a female slave; in Rio das mortes (1970), in a surreptitious moment of dialogue when one character asks him, ‘Where are you from?’, and he replies in knowing contradiction to his non-Aryan skin ‘Bavaria!’; and in The Marriage of Maria Braun. Kaufmann has a minor acting role in Maria Braun, but the romance between an African-American soldier and the titular heroine is drawn from his own biracial, cross-national, wartime parentage: Kaufmann’s mother was German, his father an AfricanAmerican soldier stationed in Germany. In The Marriage of Maria Braun, the pregnancy that results from a similar conception ends in abortion. Fassbinder tried first to ‘marry’ Kaufmann, then ben Salem. Both men were, anyway, already husbands and fathers when they began love affairs with Fassbinder. The various contorted

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and ill-conceived efforts Fassbinder made to reconfigure the personal lives of each man even included his attempt to adopt two of ben Salem’s sons by bringing them to Germany. One son was farmed out to Fassbinder’s mother.36 Ben Salem’s other son was initially thrown into the family of Hans Hirschmüller (the lead actor in The Merchant of Four Seasons), then turned over to Kurt Raab (Fassbinder’s ‘best girlfriend’, one of his original actors and collaborators, his usual art director and a selfacknowledged would-be pederast). Both sons were eventually returned to Morocco. A few years earlier, during his mad pursuit of Kaufmann in 1970, Fassbinder made a legal marriage to one of the regular actresses in his troupe, Ingrid Craven, that was so ridiculous he had sex with his best man – Kaufmann – on his wedding night. The ‘wedding reception’ was filmed and appears as the bar scene in The American Soldier. ‘Getting married was really stupid,’ Fassbinder conceded in an interview for German television in 1978. ‘We shouldn’t have gotten married ... We got involved in something dictated by society which we shouldn’t have done.’37 Marriage and its less respectable cousin, prostitution, was a persistent subject for Fassbinder. In interviews throughout his career, criticism of marriage is one of his regular talking points. About Chinese Roulette (1976), he claimed: The film I’ve made, which appears to speak out for marriage as an institution, is in reality about how infamous, mendacious, and destructive marriages are, and perhaps, precisely because of this equivocation, it becomes stronger than the other films that explicitly speak out against marriage.38

Marriage is the main target of attack in his opening comments for Germany in Autumn, the collaborative New German Cinema response to the 1977 Baader–Meinhof kidnapping of industrialist Hanns Martin Schleyer and the controversial deaths and burials that resulted. But Fassbinder’s on-camera remarks address themselves

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neither to corporate capitalism nor to the importune killings of the Red Army Faction, but to a critique of marriage: I find that marriage is something artificial. In regard to marriage, I make my films so that people who are married or perhaps have a marriage on the rocks can see them and review their own marriage concretely. For example, I think it’s much more positive if a film of mine helps a marriage to fall apart when it’s failing already than it would be to leave the institution of marriage unquestioned, unexamined.39

The sad state of Fassbinder’s own intimate life by the end of the 1970s is revealed in the pseudo-documentary footage for Germany in Autumn that illustrates his abusive interactions with Armin Meir, with whom he was then living in Munich and who, like ben Salem, eventually succumbed to suicide. Like Kaufmann, Meir’s birth was with Hitler as midwife, though more horrifyingly so: his conception was the result of a Nazi compulsory Aryan mating programme. Fassbinder was fond of saying that if you scratched the surface of contemporary Germany, you found a swastika.40 Within his immediate circle of friends and lovers – the real flesh-and-blood children of the war – the unimaginable was often very present and extremely personal. Of course, Fassbinder was far from being the first artist to consider the institution of marriage an appropriate target for attack. A wealth of European cultural contributions critical of the marriage act precedes him. The theme of marriage dominates the novel from its earliest incarnations, in the work of Jane Austen and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Marriage is also the central focus in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Sentimental Education, and the best of Balzac, Trollope, Thackeray and Maupaussant. In theatre, Fassbinder’s second home, one nineteenthcentury drama casts the longest arm into the next century: Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879). It is, of course, a play about a marriage.

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Fassbinder adapted and shot A Doll’s House as a teleplay entitled Nora Helmer (1973) just before he began work on Fear Eats the Soul.41 Contrary to traditional interpretation, Fassbinder claimed he did not regard Ibsen’s play as ‘a question of woman’s emancipation’, and asserted: ‘I haven’t been able to find a shred of evidence in Ibsen’s text for taking Nora as an advocate of women’s liberation.’42 Like Fassbinder, Ibsen also claimed not to be a feminist. In spite of this, according to Eva Le Gallienne, the Norwegian dramatist’s original notes nonetheless support a conventional feminist reading. ‘A woman’, wrote Ibsen in his private papers, ‘cannot be herself in the society of the present day, which is an exclusively masculine society, with laws framed by men and with a judicial system that judges feminine conduct from a masculine point of view.’43 Perhaps Fassbinder could not accept A Doll’s House as a text ‘about’ women’s liberation because nobody, woman or not, finds any liberation. His own adaptation makes this perspective more emphatic. In keeping with his general tendency to end films on a negative note, Fassbinder’s Nora does not walk out, as she does in Ibsen’s last act, but remains in the marriage. ‘You can find the kind of problem that Nora and Helmer had in ten thousand other marriages,’ Fassbinder reasoned, ‘and the wife doesn’t usually leave – where would she go?’44 Before, during and after the completion of Fear Eats the Soul, Fassbinder worked on the film that he frequently referred to as his ultimate, his best, his most beautiful: Effi Briest. Based on the 1895 novel by the Prussian author Theodor Fontane, Effi Briest is a haunting and sympathetic story of a young woman trapped in a bad marriage. Immediately before shooting Fear Eats the Soul, Fassbinder shot another story of a woman held captive in a horrifying marriage, Martha. Nora, Effi and Martha are tragic middle-class heroines, women destroyed by the very conventions – love and marriage – they build their lives around. Fassbinder’s oeuvre illustrates a special preference for female heroines. But not because he hoped to liberate anybody. ‘I don’t

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think it’s not for me to say how women should set about liberating themselves. Every woman must decide that for herself,’ he asserted.45 With the notable exception of Emmi in Fear Eats the Soul, Fassbinder’s heroines are not especially ‘strong’, as so many critics have speciously insisted, but, as Fassbinder shows, essentially stupid. His women – including his titular heroines Maria, Lola, Martha, Effi, Petra, Nora, Lili and Veronika, as well as many others – believe they can succeed through sexual or romantic manipulations and, instead, find themselves doomed. Critical of what he perceived as collaboration with their sexual objectification and economic dependency on men, Fassbinder felt that women use their oppression as a form of blackmail. He also responded to the tragic, and therefore theatrical, implications in women’s search for love from their socially recognized masters. Within the conventions of the Western drama since Racine, women traditionally symbolise suffering, nature and beauty. In patriarchal cultures, men act and women express. The convention of emotionality culturally written onto female bodies also compelled Fassbinder to use them as leading characters: The point is that I feel I can express what I want to say better when I use a female character at the centre. Women are more exciting, because on the one hand they are oppressed, and on the other hand they aren’t really, because they use this ‘oppression’ as terrorisation. Men are so simple: they’re more ordinary than women. It’s also more amusing to work with women. Men are more primitive in their means of expression. Women can show their emotions more but with men it becomes boring.46

In the conventional bourgeois marriages Fassbinder filmed during 1973 – Nora Helmer, Effi Briest and Martha – the relationships between husband and wife are unequal, corrupt and irredeemable. The men wield too much social and economic power. The women are ignorant and defenceless. The husbands so completely internalize the privilege and responsibility accorded men in patriarchy that when

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their wives look to them for the love they have been taught to find in a man, they find instead the punishment and abuse of a patriarch. In Fear Eats the Soul, the power dynamics between hero and heroine are not so horrifyingly static or unequal. This is not a marriage based on the complete economic and social subordination of the wife to the husband. As a guest worker from Morocco, Ali is racially not eligible for direct legal or social support. Emmi is not a middle-class housewife who depends exclusively on a husband for her survival. Emmi earns her own living, and it is into her home and her society that Ali comes to live. Her salary and his are comparable: Fassbinder even shows them counting out, bill by bill, their respective weekly earnings. Ali’s outsider status is partially compensated for by his youth, bodily strength and masculinity. In the beginning of their relationship, the external forces arrayed against them – the sexism and racism of everyday Munich – forge and sustain a bond between them, a will for their love to survive. Ultimately, the same social forces that bring them together will tear them apart. But in the first months of their love affair they are more companionable, tender and lovable than any romantic couple or ‘marriage’ in Fassbinder’s films.

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6 ‘Fear Eats the Soul’ Fear Eats the Soul presents a detailed illustration of European racism as implicit, continuous and normative in everyday Munich during the 1970s. Fassbinder believed that his country’s postwar economic miracle was attained at a profound moral and political loss. Likewise, he felt that National Socialism, as he informed an interviewer in 1977, ‘was not an accident but a logical extension of the German bourgeoisie’s attitudes, which haven’t altered to this day’.47 Fassbinder had already explored the theme of Germany’s distrust and hatred of guest workers in an earlier film, Katzelmacher, whose title is taken from a racialized pejorative meaning ‘cat fucker’, and which features Fassbinder himself as the Greek Gastarbeiter or Katzelmacher. Popular in various European countries from the 1950s to the 1970s, guest worker programmes were governmentorganised efforts to rebuild the infrastructures and inexpensively and quickly replenish-labour forces lost in the war. Gastarbeiters from nations even more impoverished (and usually ‘less white’) were brought to host countries at low wages, disallowed full social benefits and refused access to citizenship. The denial of citizenship extended, in most cases – Germany included – to children born to the imported foreign nationals. Both Katzelmacher and Fear Eats the Soul focus on the social opposition a male Gastarbeiter encounters when he enters into sexual relations with local German women. The opening credits for Fear Eats the Soul run over a fixedcamera shot, a close-up of a water-filled pothole in a darkened street. Lights from passing cars shimmer in reflection in the muddy pool, an abject and shallow abyss that represents the void into which we all journey, that void called Life. Arabic music is the first sound in the

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film, and for a while it is the only sound. A dedication at the close of the credits introduces what will become a running commentary of sly aphorisms, weary platitudes, twisted clichés and other cues that signify ironic intention: Das Glück ist nicht immer lustig (‘Happiness is not always fun’). The first shot of the opening scene reveals Emmi, a short, fleshy middle-aged German woman, entering a neighbourhood bar. The camera angle is wide and we see this small figure from across what appears to be an empty room as she enters uncertainly, with shyness. The Arabic music feels strange, exotic, disjunctive, and so is the emptiness: where are all the beer drinkers, smokers and card players? The opening shot does not reveal the ‘bar’ per se. Fassbinder offers instead a thick line of bright red-covered empty tables, shot like a bullet through the centre of the frame; or like a bloody road that leads from the viewer’s seat to the door. There are more than a few compositions in Fear Eats the Soul reminiscent of Vincent van Gogh, and this is one of them. The path of red tables that curve toward the door is an interesting compositional twist on the ubiquitous road that vanishes on the horizon line of so many Impressionist landscapes. The palette is very Arles: excessive burnt yellow and dead brown, drowned in red. This opening scene is shot very flat, like a classic twocamera documentation of a theatrical performance, as if the whole world – and the little bitty part of it shown here – is just a stage. The dynamism we associate with film, the close-ups, tracking, jump-cuts and montage we have come to expect, is restricted throughout the film and helps to sustain its static, Brechtian affect. The first cut is to the back of the room, to the physical bar itself, where an extended group of people, strung together, just hanging around, glare at the newcomer. Emmi is immediately cast as an outsider here: a stranger, to this scene at least. The cold eye of the group against the newcomer – against the film’s viewers, too – is a favourite Fassbinder camera setup. In Fear Eats the Soul, this initial juxtaposition of point-of-views within the opening scene establishes

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what will become a paradigmatic editing formula throughout the picture; crosscutting between an individual and a group point of view. This editing pattern makes a philosophical comment on one of the film’s central themes. The camera swings like a pendulum back and forth between individual and group, between the integrity of the self and the demands of a majority. This is, of course, one of the great themes of Western heroines since Antigone. But in the context of post-Hitler Germany, the question of individual action and socially enforced conformism takes on implications it is doubtful even Sophocles could have foreseen. Antigone had only to bury with ceremony one brother. Germany buried unceremoniously more than six million. The bar revellers silently eye this new and unfamiliar person with discernible suspicion. Feeling their wary eyes on her, Emmi slides into a chair at the table closest to the door and farthest

Barbara Valentin as the owner of the Asphalt Bar

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away from the bar, from the others. The owner of the Asphalt Bar (Barbara Valentin), a large, voluptuous blonde with a worldweary attitude, shuffles over grudgingly to take the unwanted newcomer’s order. Barbara Valentin, whose character is never named in Fear Eats the Soul, is statuesque, her height further exaggerated with platform shoes. In the opening scene, she wears bright red knee-high leather boots and a simple black dress, cut low to reveal sumptuous breasts. Fassbinder’s favourite women often look like drag queens. Barbara Valentin’s eyes are really dramatic, and in Fear Eats the Soul are often additionally emphasized with heavy mascara and false lashes (excepting, one assumes, the scenes shot when no one showed up to do the make-up, when her lashes are natural and she looks different, less theatrical). Her peroxide blonde hair is pumped up with hairspray and a detachable fall, a common hair accessory in the 1970s when wigs and hair attachments enjoyed mainstream popularity among women. Like most of the cast, she often seems to be dressed in her own clothes. Hers are the clothes of a 1970s party girl: more specifically, a fag hag. She wears fishnet and brightcoloured pantyhose, big earrings. In one scene, she wears a glittery, tight-fitting shirt coordinated with a hot pink miniskirt; in another, a leopard print dress with matching headscarf; while in another, she slides through the bar in a geometric patterned midi-dress like some kind of Mod pasha. She seems to have as many costume changes as Scassi designed for Barbra Streisand in On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1970). In Fox and His Friends, she plays a more sophisticated fag hag, an elegant accessory to an antiques dealer and his stylish, if rakish, friends. Had she lived in Montmartre during the 1880s, Barbara Valentin’s strikingly indolent and towering femininity would have caught the eye of Toulouse-Lautrec. Later in the film, when she leans over her domain to take a customer’s order from across the Asphalt’s shiny metallic countertop, it looks like a weary, low-rent update on Édouard Manet’s last major painting, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882).

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Emmi apologizes. ‘It’s raining outside,’ she says. She orders a cola. The regulars at the Asphalt Bar belong to two discernible social groups: young local women and dark-skinned male guest workers. In Germany, guest workers and other Arabic-speaking immigrants are often colloquially derided and misidentified as ‘Turks’, though many, like Ali, are from Morocco, Egypt or elsewhere. In fact, ‘Ali’ is not his real name, but rather a racialised epithet, a name he has accepted because it is idiomatic for Germans automatically to call him that. Fassbinder’s original title for the film was ‘Every Turk is Called Ali’.48 Ethnographic details concerning contemporary German society abound in Fear Eats the Soul, especially observations that testify to the crucial importance of race – or, rather, racist attitudes – in establishing the social organization, sexual life, economic policies, labour structure, psychological defences and daily life of the people of Munich. Emmi sits alone at her table near the door. The Asphalt is a place for Arab guest workers to hang out, listen to Arabic music, drink beer – and pick up local chicks for sex. Fassbinder spent a lot of his off-duty time in gay male bars and brothels (at one point even living upstairs from the Deutsche Eiche, a Munich bar and sex club). The bar and brothel scenes of his films, including this one, are drawn from his vast experience within the homosexual prostitution network (in his youth as a seller of sex and later as a frequent buyer). He met ben Salem at just such a place in Paris. A euphemistically named ‘bathhouse’ or ‘Arab sauna’, it was, like the Asphalt Bar, a sexual meeting ground with a notable Arab presence. In all of his films except for Fox and His Friends, Fassbinder’s extensive international familiarity with the social settings of the homosexual sex trade is transposed here into a heterosexual pick-up joint – and one apparently not served, unlike the drinks, on a cash basis. When one of the young women casually asks Ali if he’s leaving with her, Ali says his dick is broken. Mein Schwanz ist kaput. One gets the sense that Ali is as tired of servicing German women as

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At the Asphalt Bar

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he is of fixing the German cars he repairs every day at his job as a mechanic. In retaliation for his refusal, the rejected woman goads Ali into asking Emmi to dance. It’s a cheap, cruel joke, like the kind that miserable teenagers play: a mean little game of intended humiliation. The younger woman is mocking Emmi because of her age, because of her outsider status in the bar. When Ali acquiesces and Emmi accepts his offer, the younger German women further dramatize their bad joke. As the unlikely couple takes to the dance floor, the bar owner flicks on special dance lighting. They are the only dancers. Throughout the film, Emmi and Ali will be presented alone in public spaces, a recurring visual metaphor that illustrates the lack of social support they experience. They have, in a sense, no society. In this, our lovers’ first conversation, Ali reveals that he is from Tismit, Morocco. His speech, like the title of the film, is in broken German, the German of someone who is not German. Characters in Fassbinder films often speak in geographically inappropriate dialects, a device that ridicules the idea of a singular national or racialized culture. During his work in the Anti-Teater under the influence of Jean-Marie Straub, Fassbinder developed an anti-naturalist style of acting that features a deliberately artificial, distanciated delivery of lines. This anti-acting performance style continued the anti-naturalist tradition developed by Brecht during the 1920s and 1930s. In the production notes on for his play, The Mother (1931), Brecht explains: The Mother was written in the style of Lehrstuck (‘play for learning’), although it requires professional actors. The play’s dramaturgy is anti-metaphysical, materialistic and NON-ARISTOTELIAN. Thus it declines to assist the spectator in surrendering himself to empathy in the unthinking fashion of the Aristotelian dramaturgy; and it relates to certain psychic effects, as for instance catharsis, in an essentially different manner. In the same way as it refuses to tacitly hand over its heroes to the world as though to an inalterable destiny, it also has no intention of handing over the spectator to a ‘suggestive’

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theatre experience. Rather its concern is to teach the spectator a most definitely practical conduct that is intended to change the world, and for this reason he must be afforded a fundamentally different attitude in the theatre from that to which he is habituated.49

After his 1971 encounter with Douglas Sirk’s movie-making style, Fassbinder began (with difficulty) to work toward more and more seamless and incandescent narratives with as little reflection and criticality as possible. Beginning with The Merchant of Four Seasons (1971), the acting style in his films starts to assume more naturalistic proportions and reaches the apex of his ‘Hollywood Style’ in The Marriage of Maria Braun in 1978 – before going all baroque and queer, finally, in Querelle. Fear Eats the Soul arrives in the middle of the arc of films that define Fassbinder’s movement away from the Anti-Teater style and towards Hollywood-as-isism. It incorporates both styles of acting. Brigitte Mira, a highly trained, extremely accomplished and gifted actress, absorbs the role of Emmi completely. She can cry on cue, and she does – over and over again. Ben Salem, however, is not in the film to act. He is in the film to be himself. This rare casting combination, the pairing of an extraordinarily accomplished performer with a complete amateur, accounts for a special tension in the film. A tension dramatically and sociologically heightened because ben Salem is not simply outside the theatre, but outside of German culture altogether. During the dance, Ali tells Emmi how it feels to be a guest worker: ‘Germans with Arab no good.’ ‘German master. Arab dog.’ When Emmi asks him his real name, Ali responds with his real off-camera, off-the-continent appellation: El Hedi ben Salem m’Barek Mohammed Mustafa. It is just such moments of actual, factual, real-life, no-acting-here that puncture the tawdry television sensibility Fear Eats the Soul deliberately sets up. Indeed, Fassbinder is otherwise so efficient in his re-creation of the touch and feel of cheap sentiment that one notable British film guide misunderstood the film completely, calling it an: ‘Unexceptional moral tale which

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can hardly have been necessary given the infrequency of such cases [of cross-racial, cross-generational marriage].’50 The film can be read this superficially and perhaps is inevitably viewed so by spectators who live without irony, angst or critical intelligence. The dynamic of insider-outsider that opens the first scene and brings our lovers together under kitschy lighting keeps spinning throughout Fear Eats the Soul. It is perpetual. This is a portrait of German life composed of desperate bonding between two lonely people, where exclusion is always threatened, punishment automatic and petty sadism abounds everywhere. At the centre of the bull’s eye of this spinning cycle of contempt is Ali, the Ausländer, the Gastarbeiter, an outsider created out of European imperialism and Hitler’s special vision. Ali is not German and, therefore, he is not only wrong – he is a threat to all that is German. Watching Fear Eats the Soul, one wonders, as Fassbinder wants us to, what it is about being German and living in Germany that is so great? The Munich presented in Fear Eats the Soul is small, dilapidated, emotionally and otherwise impoverished. Considered by many to number among Germany’s most beautiful cities, one never gets a glimpse of that touristic seductiveness here. Munich’s idyllic Isar River, the dancing marionettes in the town hall clock, Ǻlter Peter’s grave steeple, the Königsplatz the old open market, the expansive Englischer Gardens, the ghost of Ludwig II, the Nymphenburg Palace and all the other natural and cultural attractions that comprise Bavaria’s capital are never shown or even mentioned. The wealth of the city, its internationally championed beers, BMW automobiles (and, not incidentally, position as the centre of German film-making during the 1970s), are never referenced. Nobody even eats one of Munich’s celebrated white sausages. Rather, the Munich of Fear Eats the Soul is a place where people work long hours to survive, and not so happily. In the stripped-down, weary, ugly urban landscape of Fear Eats the Soul, Fassbinder illustrates Munich’s dirty soul with footage of potholes and pettiness, deliberately refusing to show even a

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glimpse of the city’s picture-postcard vistas. Munich, after all, was the birthplace of National Socialism and continued, postwar, to rally behind ultraconservative causes. Fassbinder always portrays his native land as a land without love, compassion, sympathy or understanding. If he allows that Germany is anything more than loveless, it is only to admit that it is guilt-ridden and corrupt. Fassbinder wants to reveal the dirt and to tell us what stinks. It is no wonder that during his lifetime, Fassbinder incited his fellow West Germans to unparalleled paroxysms of anger and rage. (And the City of Munich refused, even decades after the internationally revered film-maker’s death, to honour him with a strasse or a platz, despite the persistent lobbying efforts of his supporters.) Women as drag queens There is also something gothic and disturbingly medieval in Fassbinder. How small he makes us feel, as if each one of us is only a little ant scurrying about in some forlorn, oppressive and punishing cathedral. The vicious and petty attitudes that lead to direct interference in Emmi and Ali’s search for happiness are immediate and constant. They leave the Asphalt Bar together, and one might hope they have left that sorry scene behind them. Entering the lobby of her building, they continue the kind of polite conversation people engage in when they have just met. He asks her about her work and she hesitates. ‘I don’t like to say. People always give you such a funny look,’ she confides, looking ashamed. Emmi is framed in profile, against a background of dilapidated mailboxes that line the building’s front entrance. It is not clear whether these date from the mid-1950s, when residential buildings in central Munich were either built or reconstructed, or whether the weary mailboxes were found in the rubble sometime after World War II. If you try to date the architecture in formerly bombed-out Germany, it makes you crazy: it illustrates the synthesis of creation and destruction, of war and peace, too obviously, too uncomfortably.

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Mrs Karges, Emmi’s neighbour (Elma Karlowa)

The entrance hall in Emmi’s building is, anyway, a mess. There is moisture oozing out of the side wall, or maybe it is an incredibly bad paint job. In this semi-squalid setting of reconstructed propriety and working-class anxiety, Emmi tells Ali she is a Putzfrau, a cleaning woman. It’s a terrible society, Fassbinder knows, that shames and demeans those who clean while rewarding and cherishing those who lie, cheat, steal and kill. Outdoors the rain continues. Emmi invites Ali in for a cognac and he hesitates: ‘I’d like to, but ...’. Emmi, who is so energetic, encouraging, spontaneous, matter of fact, interrupts conclusively: ‘People always say “but” and nothing ever changes.’ As they walk up the stairs toward her apartment, one of her neighbours appears, ostensibly to return borrowed money. But pure motivations are rare for Fassbinder characters and this interaction again proves the rule. As Emmi and Ali move on toward the next landing, the debt payer

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becomes the gossip. She rushes to her neighbour next door, as fast as if to warn that the house is on fire. It’s only 9.30 p.m. but both women are already wearing night clothes, standing on the landing of this dingy building. Mrs Karges whispers conspiratorially, with much disdain: ‘Mrs Kurowski’s got a foreigner [Ausländer] up there!’ ‘A nigger?’ ‘Well, not that black, but pretty dark.’ ‘She’s not really German herself, with a name like Kurowski!’ ‘I wonder what she’s up to with him?’ ‘Maybe she’s buying a carpet?’ Emmi lives in a widow’s building it seems, a home for worn-out women without men, a kind of retirement community whose occupants act like bitchy drag queens. Fassbinder’s female characters, including in this film, are not often based on women or women’s lives, but rather a combination of his own projection of what he thinks a woman is and, according to patriarchal convention, what he can make a woman symbolise. Sometimes, like other gay writers and film-makers active before the Stonewall era, he uses women – or, rather, images of women – as substitutes for men, because homosexuality was not considered an acceptable subject for mainstream books, films or plays. Fassbinder did not want a marginal career in the gay male cinema subculture: he was no Kenneth Anger. So, like Marcel Proust, E. M. Forster, Christopher Isherwood, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Edward Albee and other writers whose homosexual lives were more than a few decades ahead of what their respective societies considered acceptable (and legal), Fassbinder transposed female parts onto characters drawn from men he knew. The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant is the most obvious example of his tendency to use gender-role reversal as a theatrical device: the laconic all-female cast is based on Fassbinder (in the character of Petra) and his love affair with Günther Kaufmann (Karin, Petra’s consort). According to one biographer: ‘Rainer never challenged the view held by

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those closest to him that every word in the play was spoken either to or by him’.51 In 1985, Volker Spengler (who appears in numerous Fassbinder films, including as the lead character in In a Year of Thirteen Moons) returned The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant closer to its biographical and historical origins and staged it with an all-male cast. The Bitter Tears and Women in New York (1977), a teleplay based on Clare Booth Luce’s 1936 play, The Women, which the gay Hollywood director George Cukor filmed in 1939, are Fassbinder’s only all-female casts. In keeping with convention, he often converted his material toward heterosexuality. Fassbinder was in touch with his envy of women. He played out his female identification in a social ritual popular among gay men of his and prior generations: his male friends and intimates were christened with female nicknames. Rainer was himself ‘Mary’ (‘Bloody Mary’ to some). He referred to the men closest to him as, variously, ‘my best girlfriend’, ‘my second best girlfriend’, and so on, and his inner circle routinely exchanged the female pronouns ‘she’ and ‘her’. According to more than a few accounts, Fassbinder’s (hardly original) wish was to look like Marilyn Monroe. As one friend remembers: ‘He wanted to walk down a staircase wearing feathers and a gown.’52 Fassbinder’s acceptance of his envy of women – of our fetishized beauty, cultural traditions of narcissism and civility, evening gowns and whatever is meant by ‘femininity’ – brings an interesting perversity to his female caricatures. With Emmi posited as his own projection (albeit of his most noble and well-intentioned self), her/his neighbours are women of manufactured propriety and suspect ‘womanliness’. Their teased hair and over-painted faces resemble tawdry drag-queen glamour, their persistent menacing and heckling calls forth the punishing threats of a mythic monster mother (Fassbinder’s own mother literally among them). They spend their days and evenings keenly observing the comings and goings of this drab and unremarkable building. They gossip, they harp – and

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they regularly clamour for help and vindication from male authority figures. Against Emmi and Ali, they repeatedly call in the landlord and even the police. ‘You know who Hitler was?’ Upstairs in her kitchen, Emmi tells Ali that her husband was Polish, that her parents opposed her marriage: ‘My father hated all Ausländer. He was a party member. Hitler’s party. You know who Hitler was?’ ‘Hitler? Yeah.’ ‘I was in the party too. Everyone was, or almost everyone.’ The script abounds with such simple and simultaneously complex statements. What does it mean that a follower of Hitler can come to befriend, love and marry a member of a racially despised group? Is Fassbinder telling us that all followers of any ideology are hypocrites? Or is he suggesting, in spite of himself, that constructive change is possible, that we can all become free of ignorance and prejudice if only given the chance? As Fear Eats the Soul unfolds, we come to see Emmi as a basically good person, a living embodiment of Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil, someone who could join the Nazi Party without harbouring any hate, someone whom Karl Jaspers’ lectures on the degree of individual German culpability for wartime atrocities would have absolved from accepting any personal responsibility for the horrors of the Reich. Emmi repeats the word ‘Hitler’ over and over again throughout the film, in the most banal circumstances and the most neutral of tones. Hitler (and the unassimilable horror his name represents) is the unspeakable name that simply keeps being spoken, as gently and as naturally as the wind rustling the leaves on a tree. In the 1970s Munich of Fear Eats the Soul, Hitler is no unapproachable allegory or grotesque ghost from the past. He is simply in the air. He is everywhere. In contrast to other film-makers from the New German Cinema, Fassbinder approaches the overburdened signification of Hitler with hyperrestrained realism. His Hitler is not the epic, demonic, Wagnerian

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phantasmagoria of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s Hitler: A Film from Germany (1977). Seated in front of a framed picture of European bucolic bliss, Ali explains the basic geographical and kinship terms of the Berber family structure (‘Father Berber. Berber walk all over Africa’). The horsey scene hung on the wall above his head is reminiscent of Rosa Bonheur’s The Horse Fair (1853), the print that hangs near the sad bed of the repentant chemist in Anatole Litvak’s Sorry, Wrong Number (1948), which depicts the horse farm the ill-fated chemist dreams of owning. The horse print in Emmi’s kitchen serves a similar purpose: it is a fantasy of where Emmi, and perhaps even Ali, would like to be, a place other than where they are. Paintings are symbols of delusion in Fassbinder. Like the mirror, another persistent decorating trope (borrowed from others, especially Sirk and Chabrol, sometimes quite obviously), pictures hung in Fassbinder interiors are not reminders of life’s possibilities. Rather, they mock the confines his characters face. Always trapped, his characters seek (false) visions of escape. Mirrors, too, reflect merely the illusionary surface of life, a misleading imitation of life. To place a horse scene – and with thatched roofs! – behind Ali as he speaks of his father ‘walking all over Africa’ is not only suggestive of the persistent and unreachable fantasies of greener pastures and other places but also of breeding, the forced breeding of animals. And, under Hitler, of people. ‘Berber walk all over Africa,’ says Ali, as he explains why his sisters come from other mothers and other nations. Berbers are nomadic. They live without that most coveted and contested of Western possessions: private property. The Berber is the Wandering Jew of North Africa. And are any of the horses pictured on the wall behind his head what we call, in English, an Arabian? The Arabian Horse refers to any of a variety of a breed of swift, compact horses developed in Arabia that usually have grey or chestnut hair. The first thoroughbred horses were created through the forced mating of an Arabian stallion with an English mare (of

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negligible ancestry). To underscore this relationship between the forced breeding of animals and the Third Reich’s coercive racialized breeding programmes, Fassbinder could have set Fear Eats the Soul in Stuttgart (‘Stud Garden’), the German city named for the place where mares are forcibly mated. Suggestive knick-knacks, tacky paintings and ironic murals appear throughout Fear Eats the Soul and in most Fassbinder films. Along with the ubiquitous wigs and suggestive coy twists on Brechtian-style acting, these studied pieces of kitsch reflect Fassbinder’s debt to camp. Perhaps more than any other film-maker, Fassbinder’s work balances and synthesizes the specific collusion of camp and politics that ended the 1960s. During the Stonewall era – the years that just preceded and immediately followed the 1969 Greenwich Village riot against a routine police raid on the Stonewall, a gay bar on Manhattan’s Christopher Street – the camp sensibility took an interesting twist. It was affected by the gay rights movement. Where camp had been ironic, flippant, sarcastic, over the top, insiderish and even a bit catty and cruel, the new gay aesthetic was proud, defiant, straightforward, optimistic and simple. Camp had more style. Gay rights had more righteousness. Both sensibilities offered a transitional, occasional or partial aesthetic: the face of Judy Garland and the Rainbow Flag are both limited icons. The cultural risk of camp rests in its too-easy dissolution into kitsch; the artistic danger of politics is its easy slide into didacticism. Fassbinder is one of the few artists of the twentieth century who moved seamlessly between the twinkle-toes pranks of gay camp and the flat-footed ploddings of radical rant. Fassbinder arrived on the cusp of the tension between the traditional camp aesthetic and post-Stonewall radicalism. Few men of his generation reflect this tension more emphatically in their personal lives and artistic lives. Fassbinder ‘the married man’, the faux-heterosexual – who went from one gay male bathhouse to another, one dramatic homosexual love affair to another. His complicated emotional and sexual life informed his choice of

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cinematic material and dictated its restraints. His career depended on an ability to reach a mainstream audience and had to conform to the ruling assumption that heterosexuality is the basic and rightful unit of social, sexual and emotional life. His comments in regard to Fox and His Friends, his only film that deals explicitly with contemporary gay male life, are telling: I think it’s incidental and beside the point that the story has to do with gays. It could just as well take place among other people. I even think that people pay more attention to the details for this reason, because if it were only a ‘normal love story’ the melodramatic aspect would have loomed much larger. I think that a moment comes when people stop noticing that they’re watching gays, but then they’re going to ask themselves: what have we just been watching? We’ve seen a story that took place among people whom we in fact consider unnatural. And through such bewilderment, through a piece of positive shock, the whole story also looks different.53

In Germany during the 1970s, there was little that was ‘incidental’ about homosexuality. Though a vital subject matter in the experimental margins of urban cultures and emerging lifestyles within the feminist and gay rights movements, lesbianism and homosexuality were unacceptable subjects for the commercial stage and screen. Fassbinder’s special and enduring strength rests in his unique capacity to play the mainstream against the margins, artistically and politically, often simultaneously. The particular campiness of Fassbinder’s mise en scène must also, to a great extent, be credited to Kurt Raab, the art director on most of his films, from Gods of the Plague (1969) to Satan’s Brew (1976). Raab’s style of art direction relied heavily on theatrical symbolism and camp affect, a style that meshed well with Fassbinder’s own. Although Raab is not credited for the art direction on Fear Eats the Soul (in some sources, Fassbinder is named as art director, and in others, no credit is given), the art direction is, nonetheless, very much in the school of Raab.

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‘What is the meaning of life, anyway?’

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It is still raining and Emmi invites Ali to spend the night. She even gives him a pair of her dead husband’s pyjamas. The pyjamas are too small. He cannot sleep and comes to her room. The next morning he awakes in Emmi’s bed. She is shocked that she has had sex with this person, this young man from Africa. ‘My God’, she exclaims, when she wakes to his naked torso in her bed. She goes into the bathroom to look at herself in the mirror, to see if she is the same person, to see if she can recognize herself now that she has broken a few significant social taboos. Parallel lines, imprisoned lives Emmi goes to work. While eating lunch on the steps of the building it is their job to clean, her co-workers exchange racist statements about Gastarbeiters. This scene illustrates particularly clearly one of the film’s most consistent visual patterns: the parallel lines that run like prison bars from scene to scene. Vertical bars are everywhere. Many scenes, beginning with the first coffee in Emmi’s kitchen, are shot through a door to include the door’s frame, visually emphasizing a sense of entrapment. In other scenes, parallel lines crop each side of the frame to resemble curtains, such as those used to hide and reveal actors on a stage. We are all locked into this false reality – this prison, this theatre – we call life. The captives in this scene, the Putzfrauen, are not only prisoners. They are also the police. Their racist gossip is centred around and against women like themselves, middle-aged German women, who befriend and marry Gastarbeiters. The faces of Emmi’s co-workers screw up in contemptuous hatred, they toss around hateful epithets. ‘Some women would stoop at anything ... I’d die of shame ... filthy whore.’ Fassbinder documents this phenomenon over and over again: that prejudice is perpetrated by individuals, in the family, at the workplace, among your neighbours, in you. There is a slowness in Fear Eats the Soul, an almost morbid pace, that further reifies the feeling of entrapment. The camera often sits on its subjects, waiting, like a police inspector, for them to talk.

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Oppressive framing in Fear Eats the Soul

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A steady reiteration of clichés also works to maintain this static affect, as Chris Fujiwara notes: There’s a sense throughout the film that the world has become still – a feeling of timelessness, conveyed not just through the long, strange moments of silence and immobility, but also through the way the characters of Fear Eats the Soul constantly generalize about life. ‘Fear Eat Soul’ (a closer translation of the film’s ungrammatical German title, Angst essen Seele auf). ‘Time heals all wounds.’ ‘Money spoils a friendship.’ ‘In business you have to hide your aversions.’ ‘Half of life consists of work.’ ‘Germans with Arabs not good.’ ‘Think much, cry much.’ ‘Dark clothes look so sad, don’t they?’ ‘It’s no fun drinking alone.’ The sententiousness of these lines adds to the film’s impression of stillness. In them, a way of looking at life has solidified and become accepted as natural and permanent.54

‘Sex clings to women like a skin’: Emmi’s daughter Krista (Irm Hermann)

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Or as the released prisoner says when he returns to his childhood neighbourhood in Germany in another Fassbinder film, The American Soldier: ‘Oh Germany! Where Nothing Changes!’ Emmi next confronts the anger and prejudice of her daughter Krista (Irm Hermann) and son-in-law Eugen (Fassbinder). Their marriage is a classic Fassbinder representation of heterosexual life, the union of a pimp and a whore. Hermann, one of Fassbinder’s first live-in lovers (whom he pimped), appears in his first film, the 1965 short, The City Tramp, and in dozens subsequently, including as Marlene in The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. Her shrill, neurotic style is a hallmark of Anti-Teater acting and conveys a sense of intense repression. The scene opens with Eugen seated in the foreground reading a newspaper, as Krista waters plants on a small balcony. She is dressed only in an undergarment, a black lace slip. Fassbinder ruthlessly reminds women, over and over again, what we wish we could escape or at least forget: that we are born into a caste of sex workers. ‘Sex’, pronounced the great feminist philosopher Monique Wittig, ‘clings to women like a skin.’55 In Fassbinder, a woman’s skin is lingerie. The soundtrack at the opening of this scene deliberately mocks its tableau of petit bourgeois patriarchal bliss with studio-manufactured chirps of bird sounds. Fassbinder liked to make fun of the Germanic enthusiasm for nature. He thought nature was as phoney as culture. Few cameras are more sarcastic and unsympathetic to the illusionary hopes and petty foibles of human weakness and depravity than his. Perhaps the greatest philosophical and psychological difference between Fassbinder and Sirk is that the former eschews all sympathy. Sirk’s characters are, like Fassbinder’s, miserable creatures trapped by false conventions. But Fassbinder thinks we deserve it. The opening dialogue between Emmi’s daughter and son-in-law quickly establishes the sadomasochistic basis of their relationship. He issues orders and threatens violence. She goads him on: ‘Get me a beer!’

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‘Get it yourself.’ ‘If I have to get up you’re going to get it good!’ ‘You wouldn’t have the energy.’ ‘You’ll see.’ Into this scene of domination and violence called family life arrives Emmi. She is surprised to find Eugen, a factory worker, present. He should be working. He claims to be sick but is just malingering. Krista calls him a lazy pig. Eugen rants against the Turkish foreman at his job, and as his vitriolic racist speech escalates, his need to bully his wife escalates too. Fassbinder understood well the perpetual wheel of the will to power, how it spins out of control to include everything and everybody; and how conveniently class structures and social divisions enable this cycle. Race, class and gender divisions enhance the possibilities for individual as well as political exploitation. Because he is frustrated and oppressed at his job, Eugen seeks control over the social group history has given him to dominate: women, in the person of his wife. Like most Fassbinder heroines, Eugen’s wife is accustomed to and comfortable with male abuse. Krista not only expects abuse, she encourages and inflames it. It is a rarely met challenge for any two people to consider themselves equal when they are not considered equal within the society they live. The marital imbalance between Krista and Eugen, between a man and a woman, foreshadows the disequilibrium between Emmi and Ali, between a German and an Ausländer, that will come later. Although Fassbinder was no feminist, he was also no apologist for male privilege. His men, especially his husbands, are consistently depicted as loutish and despotic. In a 1973 conversation with actress Margit Carstensen, whose title roles include Petra, Martha and Nora, Fassbinder evidences a stronger understanding of the depth of women’s oppression than Carstensen, who would prefer to believe that the problems women face can be solved simply, through a personal attitude:

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mc

Martha’s behavior, it seems to me, is that of a sick person.

rwf

She’s not sick, though, she’s just like all other women.

mc Not all women. Not me for instance. Or if I were like that, I’d fight back. rwf How are you going to fight back against something that’s been done to women for a thousand years? And while this has been going on, they’ve become much too weak to fight back anyway, even if they wanted to try. And one who wants to fight back first of all has to know against what and then has to have the power to do so.56

Eugen finally barks at Krista: ‘Shut your mouth and put some clothes on, you slut!’ Fassbinder’s Eugen is portrayed like his other proletariat workers. Consistent subjects for him, his working men are not glamorized, sympathized with or otherwise idealized. Like his capitalists, these workers cheat, steal and abuse each other. I must reiterate here that Ali and Emmi are two of the nicest, if not the nicest, characters Fassbinder ever put on film. In the evening, the landlord’s son makes an official visit to Emmi’s apartment. As Emmi reaches for a glass to pour her guest a cognac – it is incredible how good-natured Emmi is, so instinctively generous with people, so foolish ultimately – he informs her that she is in violation of her lease. ‘Frau Kurowski’, he says, ‘you haven’t read your lease?’ ‘Of course I have,’ she replies. Fassbinder demonstrates a sensitive ear for the hypocritical speech of everyday life: how people in European societies do not often speak directly, but meander and obfuscate as a supposed form of politeness. After all, if the landlord plans to evict Ali, there is nothing polite about it. Mr Gruber reminds Emmi that she is not allowed to sublet, but it is not until he speaks directly and says ‘Your lodger must move out tomorrow’ that Emmi understands what he is trying to say. Ali is not welcome in the building. Quite spontaneously, she asserts: ‘He’s no lodger. We’re going to get married.’ Satisfied, the landlord’s son and representative departs. Emmi explains the situation to Ali and is surprised and pleased that

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Ali thinks marriage is a good idea. A barroom dare brought them together and the threat of eviction delivers them to matrimony. Like two teenagers, they run off to the Asphalt Bar to celebrate. Ali’s prior sex partners are not pleased by this turn of events. ‘It’s unnatural, plain unnatural’, complains the spurned brunette whose bad motivations brought Ali and Emmi together in the first dance. Barbara Valentin’s character accuses the brunette of jealousy but at the same time tells her not to worry. ‘It can’t last’, she declares. Each subgroup in Munich society has their own interests and investments in the movements of others. At the Asphalt, the young German women bemoan the loss of some easily available ‘Arab’ sexual kicks. ‘Hitler’s favourite restaurant’ Emmi and Ali get married in Munich’s city hall and celebrate with lunch at a special restaurant. ‘Hitler’s favourite restaurant,’ says Emmi. It seem particularly annoying of Fassbinder to write Hitler into so many lines, especially since Emmi – kind, gracious, goodhearted Emmi – is the only person who keeps bringing up Der Führer. She cannot stop talking about him. ‘This is where Hitler used to eat from 1929 to 1933,’ explains Emmi. Fassbinder really rubs it in by having Emmi repeat herself, again: ‘I’ve always wanted to come here. You know Hitler?’ ‘Hitler? Yes.’ It is raining as they approach the front entrance of what appears to be a modest dining establishment whose sign reads ‘Osteria Italiana’, a sight gag on Italy’s Benito Mussolini. This is another insult against Munich and a slyly perverse allegorical critique of Hitler, whom, it is assumed, should have chosen the proper patriotic food and drink, the sausages and beer of the Fatherland. The restaurant’s interior is Bayerische, not ‘Italian’ at all, but they order something French – a French author, Chateaubriand, the favourite of Proust – and the waiter insists they specify, in English, how they prefer their author cooked: ‘English? Or Medium?’ They also order lobster soup and caviar.

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‘Hitler’s favourite restaurant’

The shot frames our married couple too tightly: they are as uncomfortable in this unfamiliar restaurant as they are in their just-purchased wedding clothes. When the waiter disdainfully repeats his query, whether the meat should be prepared ‘English’ or ‘Medium’, he knows his guests do not understand the meaning of either English word. Once again, our couple is in abject isolation from others, socially adrift, an island unto themselves. Empty tables float all around them. With Chateaubriand and English or Medium?, Fassbinder reminds his fellow Germans that whenever they aim to advance themselves socially, they do so in English or French. ‘Quite a family portrait’ The film’s narrative structure is like a cartoon, moving from scene to scene as if from panel to panel. There are no flashbacks. No sense

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that time is not moving according to conventional expectation, i.e. forward. There is no interiority (excepting the signs and symbols embedded into the language and architecture, such as the ‘inside jokes’ available at the Osteria Italiana and elsewhere). Everything in Fear Eats the Soul appears as an outward manifestation. Sometimes, as in the next scene, when Emmi’s children gather in her apartment, the camera remains on the characters for an extended period and the actors sit very still, further exaggerating the cartoonish aspect. Even when the camera begins to move, to circle around and go in close on the faces of Emmi’s children, their expressions remain fixed. They are as stiff as figures in a waxwork museum. The camera here is acting as Emmi, whose dress we glimpse as a triangular blur in the foreground of the opening shot. Her children – her daughter, two sons and son-in-law – are dressed in the most awful and conventional department-store clothes, rendered in the worst

Meeting the family

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Bruno kicks in the television set

synthetic fabrics of the 1970s. They could be going to a funeral. A noose (neckties for the men, a big bow for the daughter) is drawn around each neck. Quite a family portrait. The children querulously demand to know the reason for this occasion. Obviously, this is not a group accustomed to spending time together. There is no love in the room, just bad furniture. Fassbinder is never sure which matters more, an idea or a feeling, and in this scene an equally balanced tension between concept and emotion is keen. The children scream, stare, glare and look down in shame when Emmi informs them that she has married Ali. Then there is stunned silence. Bruno gets up from his seat on the red floral print swivel chair and slowly turns around, takes a few steps and kicks in the television set, smashing the tube. Emmi holds Ali back, and Bruno keeps kicking at the television and then bolts for the door. The smashed television in Fear Eats the Soul is a nice comment on

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the horrible television set the children give their lovesick mother for Christmas in All That Heaven Allows. Alfred says: ‘You shouldn’t have done that mother. Not that. It’s a disgrace. You can forget you have children. I want nothing to do with a whore.’ All the children run out, leaving Emmi and Ali alone, abandoned. Emmi begins to cry. ‘The ghosts of Hitler’ Fassbinder proceeds to stack up the evidence of everyday German racism as ruthlessly as a prosecuting attorney. In the next scene, their local grocer intentionally pretends to be confused by Ali’s attempt to purchase some margarine. ‘Learn German first, then come back!’ he barks at a confused Ali, who does not understand why the grocer keeps giving him lemonade instead of margarine. The ghosts of Hitler and his henchmen live happily in Emmi’s environment, where nobody ever seems to tire of enforcing racial stereotypes (including the popular view that white people are racist). Fassbinder is intentionally ridiculing his countrymen by crystallizing and exaggerating the worst features of provincial attitudes: insecurity, suspicion, lack of style, sophistication or wit. It is a portrait of Munich as a city of mean-spirited simpletons. Ali is guileless. He is repeatedly shown as more sensitive, good-natured and morally upright than the Germans who are so absolutely convinced of their superiority to him. At home, Ali recounts the margarine mishap to Emmi and it makes her angry. He tells her not to fight. ‘Fight no good,’ Ali pleads. But Emmi is resolute. She returns to the grocer to accuse him of prejudice. With his typically shrewd attention to common social vices, Fassbinder hones in here on the fascinating dichotomy, so prevalent in contemporary society, of people who want to aggressively hold onto and actively exercise prejudice – but refuse to admit to having these very prejudices. The grocer, conscious of his deliberate prejudice against Ali (later, he admits it to his wife), stares at Emmi and lies to her face: ‘I won’t let you accuse me of prejudice against foreigners.

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Grocer (Walter Sedlmayr): ‘Learn German first!’

I have nothing against foreigners, not even yours.’ Exasperated, Emmi blurts out an insult reserved for cultures, such as Germany, that have national identities built upon literary accomplishment: ‘He can speak German better than you.’ This accusation provokes the grocer further and he throws Emmi, a regular customer and longtime neighbour, out of his store, screaming: ‘I’m not letting you tell me a black can speak better German than me!’ What, Fassbinder is asking, is the purpose of a language and its extensive historical development in culture if we use it to refuse, not embrace, human interaction and communication? And what is this thing called Germany? Why is it so important to individual identity? In Fassbinder’s Munich, the cultural aspirations of Germany’s nineteenth century are buried under the rubble of the Allied bombings and left suffocating in the dreary mass-produced housing, built so fast and cheaply all over postwar

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Germany. Fassbinder has deliberately forgotten to feature any of his characters reading Goethe, discussing Schöpenhauer or listening to Mahler’s Third Symphony. There is no solace in the great Germanic cultural traditions of Bach, Beethoven or Mozart for him. ‘Bah’, he seems to bark, ‘where did they lead us?’ Fassbinder’s homage to nineteenth-century German culture rests in his embrace of the insights propounded by its (Jewish) critics, not its celebrants: Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. ‘Why am I German?’ Fassbinder demanded to know. This rhetorical question is not simply an enquiry regarding the geography of one’s birth or nationality, but, in the face of World War II, a metaphysical enquiry into shame and guilt. According to nineteenth-century Germanic standards of gentility and civilization, the evil or good of a person exists in Herzenbildung, in the cultivation of the heart. Fassbinder recognised that Herzenbildung is not axiomatic with the cultivation of the mind or the refinement of the senses, not automatic to either readers of great literature or connoisseurs of symphonic music. Like the rebellious tone and tempo of the music he favoured – the rock and roll that announced and defined his generation – Fassbinder found more hypocrisy than civilization in the values of his parents’ and grandparents’ generations. Show me the money Lies, manipulations and mendacities continue to pile up on our newlyweds. Her neighbours, though middle-aged German women like herself, gang up on Emmi again. They tell her the building is ‘dirty’ and that she must clean it. Reference is made, throughout the film, to Ali’s physical state of cleanliness, how often he bathes. When Ali is shown taking a shower, Fassbinder is sure to show his penis. Later, Ali is revealed in full-frontal nudity again, standing before the inviting bed of the owner of the Asphalt Bar. Showing male genitals was one of Fassbinder’s favourite provocations. You have to love him for it. Throughout his career,

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The male nude

this was a consistent irritant to his distributors, who frequently forced him to cut the footage. One of his cinematographers, Dietrich Lohmann, recalled that when a penis appeared in Wildwechsel (1972), it ‘caused a tremendous outcry’.57 Sometimes the use of penile imagery is in the name of realism: a penis will just fall out of a bathrobe or towel when a character gets out of bed. Or, as in Fear Eats the Soul, when a character is taking a shower. In other instances, the display of male nudity is more studied. For instance, the long shots during the bathhouse scene in Fox and His Friends are a worshipful expression of homage to the beauty of the male body, while the close-ups in the same scene look like cheap pornography and are intentionally absurd. Nobody’s nudity is more on display in Fox and His Friends than Fassbinder’s: he is purposely showing himself off. (Indeed, for his part as Fox, he uncharacteristically dieted.) Fassbinder deliberately exposed himself again in Germany

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in Autumn, where he is shown playing with his genitals while screaming political opinions into a telephone receiver. Fassbinder shows us exactly how much money our hero and heroine earn. They have to be at work every morning before 6.30 a.m. and do not get paid very much for it. Emmi, the Aryan and German by birth, does not have a better job than Ali, the Gastarbeiter. In fact, Ali earns a little more money per week than Emmi when he works overtime. This sly little economic fact has a special political weight given that all the German women around Emmi are so determined and ever-ready to patrol and police the Aryan nation, reporting conscientiously and regularly to male power figures. And, unlike the police who get paid, or the landlord’s son who has a stake in the property, these busy women work all day for the nation without receiving any payment or profit for their labours. The film judges these women not just for their moral shortcomings, which are pervasive, but also for their economic and political culpability. One of the things that angered feminists about Fassbinder when his films were in first release was his apparent lack of sympathy for women’s victimization under patriarchy.58 The feminists are correct – he is without sympathy or understanding. As he informed Margit Carstensen in their 1973 conversation, he felt many of the women around him accepted or even courted his abuse and therefore concluded that if most women were in favour of emancipation, it ‘would mean that women are smarter than they actually appear to be’.59 As awful as Fassbinder’s damning words sound, they don’t differ significantly from the conclusions of many radical feminists, including Ti-Grace Atkinson, Shulamith Firestone, Kate Millet, Monique Wittig and others who voiced similar frustrations against their sisters throughout the 1970s. Fassbinder held a position common to many male Marxist-influenced thinkers of his generation: that economic class position is the basic political designation in society. ‘I’m often irritated by all the talk of women’s liberation,’ he complained. ‘The world is not a case of women against men, but of poor against rich, of repressed against repressors.

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And there are just as many repressed men as there are repressed women.’60 One of Emmi’s co-workers, Paula, stops by Emmi’s apartment to ask for a favour. She has a family emergency and needs Emmi to replace her at work. When Ali enters the living room and is introduced to Paula, she refuses to shake Ali’s hand and runs out of the door. Over and over again Emmi is socially and psychologically punished for her intimate involvement with Ali, a ‘Turk’, a Gastarbeiter, an Ausländer, a Schwarze. There is not a single incident that is not believable, not drawn from real life, except perhaps the primary premise: that a woman of Emmi’s background and circumstance could actually marry an Ali. The film’s central premise is in fact its most outlandish scenario. But Brigitte Mira makes her role unquestionably believable. Next, the old widows’ club calls the police because Emmi and Ali are playing Arab music. When the police arrive, they display more humanity and a stronger sense of fairness than any of Emmi’s family, friends, neighbours or co-workers have yet demonstrated. Ironically, the policemen and the landlord’s son are the only agreeable people who come to visit Emmi and Ali. The building harpies express righteous indignation against the two easy-going policemen, whom they attempt to incite with racial inflammations against Arab men. When the police do not cooperate with the racist hysteria, they are themselves subject to pathetic put-downs: ‘Did you see that? Policemen with long hair!’ The cops are sympathetic to Emmi and Ali, but they still have to ask them to turn the music down. Emmi is upset. She knows it is not about the music, she knows they are being unfairly harassed. Loneliness is a lonely place After just a few months of married life to a Gastarbeiter, Emmi, already lonely when she met Ali, has been further ostracised. Her children have disowned her. Her neighbours refuse to say hello to her. Her local grocer kicked her out of his shop. They cold-shoulder

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Alone in public spaces: Emmi and Ali ostracised

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her at work and force her to eat lunch alone on a staircase. She and Ali go out to a beer garden, where they sit stranded in a sea of bright yellow tables and chairs. Once again, they are alone together in an empty, motionless Munich: nobody else is dining in the expansive outdoor garden. ‘All this hatred from everyone,’ Emmi says. ‘Nobody looks me in the eye anymore ... They all have this terrible grin.’ The entire kitchen crew and waiting staff are lined up, like a firing squad, aggressively staring at them, leading her to cry out sobbing, both hands clenched in those of Ali: ‘But this is my man!’ Das ist mein Mann! Then they do a conventional thing, what people in Germany do when they get tired of the tediousness of being policed by and policing each other. They take a trip. When they return, Emmi is welcomed back by the same people whose malicious abuse sent her away. They offer smiling faces and welcoming words and the special Munich greeting: Grüss Gott. ‘Greet God,’ say the grocer and the neighbours. Grüss Gott, an idiomatic greeting native to Bavaria, is a sign of deference, civility, special homage. Children are instructed to greet adults with this phrase, as no doubt Fassbinder himself was taught. Clerks in upmarket shops invoke it to welcome their customers. It connotes submissive respect in the sayer. When the taxi carrying Emmi and Ali arrives at the front of their building, the grocer’s wife sees them and instructs her husband that he must say Grüss Gott to reclaim Emmi’s patronage. He is defensive and annoyed and does not want to say it. He wants to hold on to the idea that he is superior to Emmi, to any woman who would marry an Ausländer. But, like any good capitalist, he gives up his personal beliefs in favour of getting back a customer. ‘In business you have to hide your aversions,’ he confides to his wife, rallying himself. He scurries out of the door and deliberately places himself in Emmi’s path. With forced joviality he chirps, ‘Grüss Gott’. Along with the grocer, none of Emmi’s formerly estranged friends and family appear to be speaking in the name of god or what

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is good when they shower her with their Grüss Gotts. Their greetings are empty, perfidious, completely false. The smiles, the pleasantries, the vain invocation to God are prefaces to an invitation to be used and exploited. The grocer decides he needs her as a customer. In Emmi’s apartment building, her neighbours want access to her extra storage space in the basement. Emmi colludes with this pragmatic reconciliation. She sees an opportunity in their request and asks Ali to help move things around in the cellar. ‘Be nice to her and she’ll be nice to us,’ she tells him. Her son Bruno, who demolished the television set, makes an unannounced appearance: he needs free babysitting from grandma. Emmi assents. This time when Ali says ‘I’m going to shower’, it seems that his bathing is a futile attempt to wash away all the lies and hypocrisies of Munich. Nobody has apologized and nothing has taken place that might suggest that any of Emmi’s formerly antagonistic associates are sorry or repentant. They show no regret for the pain and suffering their hostility and prejudice has caused. Emmi is taken back merely because of her use-value. Although the return from their vacation in Steinsee has brought with it a modicum of social reintegration, it is a phoney appeasement. There is even an undercurrent of betrayal. Emmi’s family and associates turned against her because of Ali, and now, though they have decided to take her back because they want to make use of her, nothing suggests that their feelings for Ali are any less racist. When Bruno offers Ali his hand to shake, Ali goodnaturedly accepts it. But he does not believe in it. Emmi’s good strong coffee brought our couple together on their first night and now her damning words against couscous help to tear them apart. ‘You no make couscous?’ ‘I can’t make couscous, you know that. You should get used to the way things are done in Germany. People in Germany don’t eat couscous.’ ‘Couscous good sometimes.’ ‘I don’t like couscous.’

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He departs for couscous and his Arab buddies. Emmi is left standing alone. When he gets to the Asphalt, it is closed. He goes upstairs, to the apartment where the Barbara Valentin character lives. He sits on the stairwell, hesitating. She has previously invited him to stop by for couscous but it appears, from Ali’s hesitation, that an invitation for couscous is also an invitation for something else. Finally, he knocks on her door. She is friendly, a bit blasé and does not seem particularly surprised to see him. He asks for couscous and she offers him fig brandy. He stands by her bed, waiting for her, for sex. When he returns home drunk, he collapses in front of Emmi’s bedroom door. Emmi looks out, sees him, closes her door and leaves him crumpled up on the floor. Unhappiness regained Now they have arrived at a true Fassbinder marriage, a union of weary unhappiness. The next morning, seated as always in front of the cheap print of frolicking horses, Ali is quiet. Emmi has nothing to say either. When she returns to her cleaning job, she discovers that her fellow Putzfrauen have found a new victim, someone else to ostracise. They have their own Gastarbeiter now, a female one, a white one, a Yugoslavian one. On the very same lonely stairwell where just weeks before Emmi was outcast, Yolanda (Helga Ballhaus) is left to eat her lunch alone. Her friendly smiling face from Herzegovina does not stop them from making her a pariah. When they decide to organise for a promised pay rise, they deliberately exclude her from the process. ‘She’s on a different pay scale,’ one of them says. Like Ali and the other Gastarbeiters, the cleaning women of Munich work under conditions that are unpredictable, badly paid and unstable. But they do not empathise with the immigrant worker and instead pit themselves against the newcomer, the stranger, the foreign-born. There is always somebody new to put down. Even Emmi, the wife of a Gastarbeiter, refuses to offer friendship or solidarity to Yolanda. To reestablish good standing with her co-workers, Emmi must betray Ali, at least a little, at least enough to allow her

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Behind bars: first Emmi, then Yolanda

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Labour relations for working class heroes

fellow Germans to know she has not completely betrayed them. It is unlikely that Emmi is even aware she is doing this. For her, it just seems natural that she must make up with her neighbours, family and co-workers. It just seems natural. Natürlich is a word that appears over and over again in the script, and its continuous reiteration adds to the film’s somnambulist quality. When her fellow Putzfrauen come to her apartment, she introduces them to Ali and they treat him like a dog or an object. ‘He’s a handsome one, Emmi!’ they exclaim. As if he were not in the room. Emmi invites her co-workers to feel the sinewy muscles on Ali’s upper arms. Each woman approaches and strokes the Moroccan’s magnificent flesh with an ‘ooh’ and an ‘ahh’. It was probably something like that when Fassbinder brought ben Salem, the beautiful man he picked up in Paris, to Munich. And all of Fassbinder’s boyfriends – Harry Baer, Peer Raben, Kurt Raab, Volker Spengler and the rest – said ‘Wow’.

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Alienated by this objectification, Ali goes back to the blonde bar owner. ‘He has his moods. A foreign mentality,’ Emmi explains to her co-workers as Ali silently walks out of the door. Later, after her friends have gone home, she cries in the hallway. He does not come home that night. Emmi goes to find him at the auto-repair shop. She tells him she needs him. But he has nothing to say. His co-workers laugh contemptuously in her face as one of them mocks: ‘Your grandmother from Morocco? What does she want?’ Emmi leaves the garage alone, head downcast, rejected and disappointed. Fear Eats the Soul continues its dizzying display of perpetual circles of disappointment and rejection. One night Ali is drunk, playing cards and gambling at the Asphalt. He is losing money. In the men’s room, he slaps his face with both hands, beating himself up in front of the mirror. He runs out of money and asks one of his associates to go to Emmi’s apartment, to get more money for him to gamble. He is in a downward spiral. Emmi enters the bar, still looking for a reunion with Ali. She takes up her old seat, the chair nearest the entrance. When the Barbara Valentin character comes to take her order, Emmi asks her to play ‘The Black Gypsy’, the song that brought our married couple together that first night. Bizarrely (and this is possibly an unintentional coincidence, a production schedule synchronicity), Emmi and Ali are both wearing the same clothes they wore on their wedding day. He comes over to her, as he did on their first night together. This time, he does it of his own accord, not at the prompting of a dare. ‘You dance with me?’ he asks. They take to the dance floor. He confesses: ‘Me sleep with other woman.’ Emmi assures him that is okay, ‘but when we’re together we must be nice to each other’. He tells her: ‘I only love you.’ Then, abruptly, he collapses to the ground, writhing and moaning in pain. Barbara Valentin, the owner of the Asphalt and Ali’s other lover, calls for an ambulance. When we next see Ali, he is in hospital, unconscious, with tubes attached to his arm and head. The doctor (Hark Bohm) tells

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Collapse on the dance floor

Emmi that Ali has a perforated stomach ulcer, that the stress on the foreign workers is too much, that there is no health coverage for them to take a rest cure and that only surgical operations, which are not completely successful, are permitted. The doctor says there is no hope for a full recovery, that Ali will be back in hospital within six months, no matter what. But Emmi insists she can and will save him. The last shot is of our heroine sobbing uncontrollably at Ali’s hospital bed. Happiness is not always fun.

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 Notes 1 Rainer Werner Fassbinder, ‘At Some Point Films Have to Stop Being Films’, interview by Hans Günther Pflaum, in Michael Töteberg and Leo A. Lensing (eds), The Anarchy of the Imagination, (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. 150. Interview first published in Film-Korrespondenz (Cologne), February 1974, pp. 3–6; American reprint based on Töteberg (ed.), Die Anarchie der Phantasie. Gespräche und Interviews (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 1986), pp. 47–52. 2 Thomas Elsaesser, Fassbinder’s Germany: History, Identity, Subject (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996), p. 238. 3 Christian Braad Thomsen, Fassbinder: The Life and Work of a Provocative Genius, trans. Martin Chalmers (London: Faber and Faber, 1997), p. 1. 4 Leo Lansing, Preface, in Töteberg and Lensing (eds), Anarchy of the Imagination, p. xi. 5 Fassbinder, Images the Moviegoer Can Fill with His Own Imagination’, interview by Kraft Wetzel, in Töteberg and Lensing, Anarchy of the Imagination, p. 150. First published in Kino (West Berlin), nos 18–19, 1974, pp. 20–30. 6 James Roy Macbean, ‘The Success and Failure of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’, Sight and Sound, vol. 52 no. 1, Winter 1982–3, pp. 42–8. 7 Bob Cant, in Gay Left, no. 2, as cited by Richard Dyer, ‘Reading Fassbinder’s Sexual Politics’, in Tony Rayns (ed.), Rainer Werner Fassbinder (London: British Film Institute, 1980), p. 54. 8 Caroline Sheldon, ‘Lesbians and film: some thoughts’, in Richard Dyer

(ed.), Gays in Film (London: British Film Institute, 1977), p. 14. 9 Richard Dyer, ‘Reading Fassbinder’s Sexual Politics’, in Rayns (ed.), Rainer Werner Fassbinder, p. 55. 10 Thomsen, Fassbinder: The Life and Work, p. ix. 11 Ibid., p. 7. 12 Fassbinder, ‘At Some Point Films Have to Stop Being Films’, p. 14. 13 Manny Farber and Patricia Patterson, ‘Fassbinder’, Film Comment, November– December 1975; as cited in Dyer, ‘Reading Fassbinder’s Sexual Politics’, p. 63. 14 Tony Rayns, ‘Fassbinder, Form and Syntax’, in Rayns (ed.), Rainer Werner Fassbinder, p. 79. 15 Andy Warhol, The Andy Warhol Diaries, ed. Pat Hackett (New York: Warner Books, 1989), p. 439. 16 Ibid. 17 Robert Katz, Love is Colder than Death: The Life and Times of Rainer Werner Fassbinder (New York: Random House, 1987), p. 8. 18 Warhol, Andy Warhol Diaries, p. 431. 19 Michael Ballhaus, interview with Herbert Gehr, in Juliane Lorenz with Marion Schmid and Herbert Gehr (eds), Chaos as Usual: Conversations About Rainer Werner Fassbinder, trans. Christa Armstrong and Maria Pelikan (London: Applause Books, 1997), p. 104. 20 Ibid., p. 226. 21 Vincent van Gogh, letters from Neunen, December 1883 in Irving Stone with Jean Stone (eds), Dear Theo: The Autobiography of Vincent van Gogh (1937; reprint, London: Penguin, 1995), p. 278.

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22 Susan Sontag, Under the Sign of Saturn (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980), p. 91. 23 Beware of a Holy Whore (1971) is Fassbinder’s autobiographical sex and booze epic on his film-making process. 24 Katz, Love is Colder than Death, p. 114. 25 Ibid., pp. 4–12. 26 Fassbinder, as cited in Rayns, ‘Documentation’, in Rayns (ed.), Rainer Werner Fassbinder, p. 103. 27 Thomas Elsaesser, ‘The Postwar German Cinema’, in Rayns (ed.), Rainer Werner Fassbinder, pp. 1–16. 28 Ibid., p. 15. 29 Douglas Sirk, interview with Jon Halliday, in Halliday (ed.), Sirk on Sirk (New York: Viking Press, 1972), p. 96. 30 See for instance, ‘“Reacting to What you Experience”: Ernst Burkel Talks with Douglas Sirk and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’, in Töteberg and Lensing, Anarchy of the Imagination, pp. 41–4. First published in Süddeutsche Zeitung, 8 March 1979; reprint based on Töteberg (ed.), Die Anarchie der Phantasie, pp. 141–5. 31 Fassbinder, ‘Imitation of Life: on the Films of Douglas Sirk’, ibid, p. 82. First published in Fernsehen und Film (Hannover), February 1971, pp. 8–13; American reprint based on Töteberg (ed.), Film befreien den Kopf. Essays und Arbeitsnotizen (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 1984), pp. 11–24. 32 The vast possibilities for reading homosexuality into Hudson’s Hollywood performances are the subject of Mark Rappaport’s film, Rock Hudson’s Home Movies (1992). 33 Fassbinder, ‘Imitation of Life: On the Films of Douglas Sirk’, in Töteberg and Lensing (eds), Anarchy of the Imagination, p. 79.

34 Fassbinder, as quoted in Laurence Kardish with Juliane Lorenz (eds), Rainer Werner Fassbinder (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1997), p. 55. 35 Brigitte Mira has the title role in Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven (1975), and smaller parts in Fear of Fear, Chinese Roulette and Berlin Alexanderplatz. 36 Fassbinder’s mother was also his bookkeeper and, when he died intestate, became his legal heir. 37 Peter W. Jansen, ‘Life Stories: A Conversation with Rainer Werner Fassbinder’, Südwest 3. First aired 18 March 1978. Included in The BDR Trilogy: The Supplements, Criterion Collection DVD, 2003. 38 Fassbinder, as quoted in Kardish with Lorenz (eds), Rainer Werner Fassbinder, p. 61. 39 Fassbinder, as cited in Rayns, ‘Documentation’, in Rayns (ed.), Rainer Werner Fassbinder, p. 117. 40 Observed by, among others, Lorenz, in ‘Juliane Lorenz with Laurence Kardish’, 32 minutes, included in The BDR Trilogy: The Supplements, Criterion Collection, 2003. 41 Fear Eats the Soul was shot in Munich in September 1973 and Nora in a studio at Saarbrucken earlier that year, in May. Although Ibsen is directly relevant to Fassbinder’s thinking during 1973, it is perhaps worth noting that Fassbinder bears greater resemblance in style and temperament to the other great nineteenth-century Scandinavian dramatist, August Strindberg. 42 Fassbinder, ‘Berlin 1973’, interview with Christian Braad Thomsen, trans. Søren Fischer, in Rayns (ed.), Rainer Werner Fassbinder, p. 84. 43 Henrik Ibsen, as quoted by Eva Le Gallienne, in Six Plays by Henrik Ibsen,

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trans. Le Gallienne (New York: The Modern Library, 1951), p. xv. 44 Fassbinder, ‘Berlin 1973’, interview with Thomsen, trans. Søren Fischer, in Rayns (ed.), Rainer Werner Fassbinder, pp. 84–5. 45 Fassbinder, ‘Frankfurt/Cannes 1975’, interview with Thomsen, trans. Søren Fischer, in Rayns (ed.), Rainer Werner Fassbinder, p. 92. 46 Fassbinder, ‘Berlin 1974’, interview with Thomsen, trans. Søren Fischer, in Rayns (ed.), Rainer Werner Fassbinder, p. 89. 47 Fassbinder, ‘Berlin 1977’, interview with Thomsen, trans. Søren Fischer, in Rayns (ed.), Rainer Werner Fassbinder, p. 95. 48 Elsaesser, Fassbinder’s Germany, p. 281. 49 Bertolt Brecht, The Mother, trans. Lee Baxandall (New York: Grove Press, 1965), n. p. 50 Halliwell’s Film Guide, ed. John Walker (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), p. 386. 51 Katz, Love is Colder than Death, p. 62. 52 Ibid., p. xix. 53 Fassbinder, as cited in Rayns, ‘Documentation’, p. 111. Faustrecht der Freiheit (‘Fist Right That’s Freedom’) is the original German title Fassbinder gave to the film known as Fox in the UK and distributed as Fox and His Friends in the United States.

54 Chris Fujiwara, ‘One Love, Two Oppressions’, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, Criterion DVD liner notes, p. 4. 55 For further explication, see Monique Wittig, The Straight Mind and Other Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992). 56 Fassbinder, Talking about Oppression with Margit Carstensen’, in Eric Rentschler (ed.), West German Film-Makers on Film: Visions and Voices (London: Holmes and Meier, 1988), p. 168. First published as ‘Ein Unterdrückungsgespräach: Vorheführt am Beispiel einer Diskussion zwischen Margit Carstensen und Rainer Werner Fassbinder’, Fernsehspiele Westdeutscher Rundfunk, January–June 1974, pp. 76–82. 57 Dietrich Lohmann, interview with Juliane Lorenz, in Lorenz et al. (eds), Chaos as Usual, p. 86. 58 Fassbinder, ‘Frankfurt/Cannes 1975’, interview with Thomsen, trans. Søren Fischer, in Rayns (ed.), Rainer Werner Fassbinder, pp. 91–3. 59 Fassbinder, ‘Talking about Oppression with Margit Carstensen’, in Rentschler (ed.), West German Film-Makers on Film, p. 171. 60 Fassbinder, ‘Berlin 1973’, interview with Thomsen, trans. Søren Fischer, in Rayns (ed.), Rainer Werner Fassbinder, p. 85

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 Credits Angst essen Seele auf/Fear Eats the Soul West Germany 1974 Director Rainer Werner Fassbinder Producers Michael Fengler Rainer Werner Fassbinder Screenplay by Rainer Werner Fassbinder Director of Photography Jürgen Jürge Editor Thea Eymèsz Art Directors Kurt Raab Rainer Werner Fassbinder Production Companies Tango-Film production Number Five Unit Manager Christian Hohoff Assistant Director Rainer Langhans Camera Assistant Thomas Schwan Lighting Ekkehard Heinrich Stills Photography Peter Gauhe Make-up Helga Kempke Soundtrack Theme ‘Die kleine Liebe’ by Peer Raben;

‘Du schwarzer Zigeuner’ by Karel Vacek Sound Fritz Müller-Scherz CAST Brigitte Mira Emmi Kurowski El Hedi ben Salem Ali Irm Hermann Krista Elma Karlowa Mrs Karges Anita Bucher Mrs Ellis Gusti Kreissl Paula Doris Mathes [ie. Doris Mattes] Mrs Angermeyer, the grocer’s wife Margit Symo Hedwig Katharina Herberg girl in bar Lilo Pempeit Mrs Munchmeyer Peter Gauhe Bruno Marquard Bohm Gruber, landlord’s son Walter Sedlmayr Angermayer, the grocer Hannes Gromball Osteria head waiter Hark Bohm doctor

Rudolf Waldemar Brem bar patron Karl Scheydt Albert Peter Moland garage mechanic Barbara Valentin Asphalt Bar owner uncredited Rainer Werner Fassbinder Eugen, Krista’s husband Helga Ballhaus Yolanda Kurt Raab garage foreman Elisabeth Bertram Frieda Wolfgang Hess dubbed voice of Ali Ingrid Caven 8,320 feet 92 minutes 27 seconds In Colour Shooting September 1973 (15 days) Munich Working Title Alle Türken heißen Ali US title Ali: Fear Eats the Soul Premiere Munich 5 March 1974

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 Bibliography Brecht, Bertolt, The Threepenny Opera, trans, by Desmond Vesey and Eric Bentley (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1964). Dyer, Richard (ed.), Gays and Film (London: British Film Institute, 1977). Elsaesser, Thomas, Fassbinder’s Germany: History, Identity, Subject (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996). Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, Plays, trans, and ed. Denis Calandra (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985). ———, The Anarchy of the Imagination: Interviews, Essays, Notes, trans. Krishna Winston, ed. Michael Töteberg and Leo A. Lensing (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). Fujiwara, Chris, ‘One Love, Two Oppressions’, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (New York: The Criterion Collection, 2003), DVD liner notes. Hayman, Ronald, Fassbinder: Filmmaker (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984). Ibsen, Henrik, Six Plays by Henrik Ibsen, trans, and ed. Eva Le Gallienne (New York: The Modern Library, 1951). Jansen, Peter W., ‘Life Stories: A Conversation with Rainer Werner Fassbinder’, 49 minutes, Südwest 3. First aired 18 March, 1978. Included in The BDR Trilogy: The Supplements, The Criterion Collection, DVD, 2003. Katz, Robert, Love is Colder than Death: The Life and Times of Rainer Werner Fassbinder (New York: Random House, 1987).

Lorenz, Juliane (ed.) with Marion Schmid and Herbert Gehr, trans., Christa Armstrong and Maria Pelikan, Chaos as Usual: Conversations About Rainer Werner Fassbinder (London: Applause Books, 1997). Macbean, James Roy, ‘The Success and Failure of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’, Sight and Sound, Winter 1982–3, vol. 52 no. 1. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, ed. Laurence Kardish in collaboration with Juliane Lorenz (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1997). Rainer Werner Fassbinder, ed. Marion Schmid and Herbert Gehr (Berlin: Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation, 1992). Rainer Werner Fassbinder, ed. Tony Rayns (London: British Film Institute, 1980). Rentschler, Eric (ed.), West German Filmmakers on Film: Visions and Voices (London: Holmes & Meier, 1988). Sirk, Douglas, Sirk on Sirk, ed. Jon Halliday (New York: The Viking Press, 1972). Sontag, Susan, Under the Sign of Saturn (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980). Thomsen, Christian Braad, Fassbinder: The Life and Work of a Provocative Genius, trans. Martin Chalmers (London: Faber and Faber, 1997). Van Gogh, Vincent, Dear Theo: The Autobiography of Vincent van Gogh, ed. Irving Stone with Jean Stone (1937; reprint, London: Penguin, 1995). Warhol, Andy, The Andy Warhol Diaries, ed. Pat Hackett (New York: Warner Books, 1989).

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