Germany in Autumn

Rainer Werner Fassbinder (May 31, 1945 – June 10, 1982) was born into a cultured bourgeois family in the small Bavarian spa town Bad Wörishofen. Raised by his mother as an only child, the boy had only sporadic contact with his father, a doctor, after the divorce of his parents when he was five. Educated at a Rudolf Steiner elementary school and subsequently in Munich and Augsburg, the city of Bert Brecht, he left school before passing any final examinations. A cinema addict (“five times a week, often three films a day”) from a very early age, not least because his mother needed peace and quiet for her work as a translator, “the cinema was the family life I never had at home.”

Fassbinder made his first short films at the age of twenty, persuading a male lover to finance them in exchange for leading roles. He also applied for a place at the Berlin Film School (dffb), but was refused. He acted in both his early films: DER STADTSTREICHER (The City Tramp), which also featured Irm Hermann (later often used in character roles); and DAS KLEINE CHAOS (The Little Chaos). In the latter, his mother – under the name of Lilo Pempeit – played the first of many parts in her son’s films. Only after these amateur directing-scripting-acting efforts did ­Fass­binder take lessons with a professional acting studio, where he met Hanna Schygulla, his most important actress, who thanks to him became an international star. It was through Schygulla that Fassbinder turned his interest to the theatre.

In 1967 Fassbinder joined the Munich action-theater. He directed, acted in, and adapted anti-establishment plays for a tightly knit group of young professionals, among them Peer Raben and Kurt Raab, who along with Schygulla and Hermann, became the most important members of his cinematic stock company. Jean-Marie Straub directed the action-theater in an eight-minute version of Bruckner’s Krankheit der Jugend , using part of this stage pro­duction in his short film DER BRÄUTIGAM, DIE KOMÖDIANTIN UND DER ZUHÄLTER (1968), with Fassbinder as the pimp. In 1968 Fassbinder directed the first play written by himself, Katzelmacher , a twenty-minute highly choreographed encounter between Bavarian villagers and a foreign worker from Greece, who with scarcely a word of German, becomes the object of intense racial, sexual, and political hatred among the men, while exerting a strangely troubling fascination on the women. A few weeks later, in May 1968, the Action theater was disbanded after its theatre was wrecked by one of its founders, jealous of Fassbinder’s growing power within the group. It promptly reformed under Fassbinder’s command as the antiteater, which pursued an equally radical and frequently provocative production policy.

The years from 1969 to 1976 were Fassbinder’s most prodigious and prolific period. An outstanding career in the theatre (productions in Munich, Bremen, Bochum, Nurnberg, Berlin, Hamburg and Frankfurt, where for two years he ran the “Theater am Turm” with Kurt Raab and Roland Petri) was a mere backdrop for a seeming­ly unstoppable outpouring of films, tv film, adaptations, and even a TV variety show (in honour of Brigitte Mira). During the same period, he also did radio plays and took on roles in other director’s films, among them the title part in Volker Schlöndorff’s Brecht adaptation BAAL. By 1976 Fassbinder had become an international star. Prizes at major film festivals, premieres and retrospectives in Paris, New York, Los Angeles, and a first critical study on his work appearing in London had made him a familiar name among cinephiles and campus audiences the world over. He rented a house in Paris and could be seen in gay bars in New York, earning him cult hero status but also a controversial reputation in and out of his films. Art house circuits avidly took up his films: because he had so many to his credit by the time he was ‘discovered’ with FEAR EATS THE SOUL, the rerelease of his earlier films, together with the steady stream of new work, made his extraordinary productivity seem even more phenomenal. (…)

His flamboyant and at the same time seedy life-style, his openly displayed and well advertised homosexuality, and at the same time life and love to women, the scandals, public outrages and bouts of self-pity ensured that in Germany itself Fassbinder was permanently in the news, making calculatedly provocative remarks in interviews, which nonetheless were usually shrewd and to the point. His work often received mixed notices from the national critics, many of whom only began to take Fassbinder seriously after the foreign press had hailed him as a genius.

In 1972 Fassbinder began his collaboration with a highly experienced and successful producer at West Germany’s most prestigious television network, Peter Märtesheimer of WDR. Under Märtesheimer’s influence, Fassbinder turned with even more determination to recognizably German subject matter. Together they made, among others, the television series EIGHT HOURS DO NOT MAKE A DAY, and in 1978 cowrote THE MARRIAGE OF MARIA BRAUN , Fassbinder’s commercially most profitable film and the first in his post-war German trilogy (the other two were LOLA and VERONIKA VOSS). For many foreign critics, his crowning achievement was the 14-part television adaptation of Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz , much maligned by the domestic press. Although for VERONIKA VOSS Fassbinder received the Golden Bear at the 1982 Berlin Film Festival, a much-coveted Oscar nomination eluded him. As had often been noted, Fassbinder was the engine and motor (the “heart” in Wolfram Schütte’s words) of the New German Cinema. His sudden death from a vicious combination of drugs and sleeping pills in June 1982 symbolically marked the end of the most exciting and experimental period the German cinema had known since the 1920s. —Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation

Alexander Kluge (born 14 February 1932, Halberstadt, Saxony-Anhalt) is a noted film director and author.

After growing up during the Second World War, he studied law, history and music at the universities of Marburg and Frankfurt am Main, receiving his doctorate in law in 1956. While studying in Frankfurt, Kluge befriended the philosopher Theodor Adorno, who had returned to Germany and was teaching at the Institute for Social Research, or Frankfurt School. Kluge served as a legal counsel for the Institute, and began writing his earliest stories during this period. At Adorno’s suggestion, he also began to investigate filmmaking, and in 1958, Adorno introduced him to German filmmaker Fritz Lang.

Kluge directed his first film in 1960, Brutalität im Stein (Brutality in Stone), a 12-minute, black and white, lyrical montage work which, against the German commercial (Papa’s Kino) cinematic amnesia of the prior decade, inaugurated an exploration of the Nazi past. The film premiered in 1961 at what would become the premiere showcase for the new generation of German filmmakers, the Oberhausen Festival. Kluge was one of 27 signatories to the Oberhausen Manifesto of 1962, which marked the launch of the New German Cinema. That same year, with filmmakers Edgar Reitz and Detlev Schleiermacher, Kluge established the Ulm Institut für Filmgestaltung, to promote the critical and aesthetic practices of Young German Film and the New German Cinema.

He has gone on to direct a number of important films, which have an inherent critique of commercial cinema and television through the creation of a counter-public sphere and their deployment of experimental forms, including montage. They include Yesterday Girl (1966), an adaptation of Kluge’s story “Anita G.”; Die Artisten in der Zirkuskuppel: ratlos (Artists under the Big Top: Perplexed) (1968); and The Assault of the Present on the Rest of Time (1985).

Kluge is also one of the major German fiction writers of the late 20th century and an important social critic. His fictional works, which tend toward the short story form, are significant for their formal experimentation and insistently critical thematics. Constituting a form of analytical fiction, they utilize techniques of narrative disruption, mixed genres, interpolation of non-literary texts and documents, and perspectival shifts. The texts frequently employ a flat, ironic tone. One frequent effect approximates what Viktor Shklovsky and the Russian Formalists identified as defamiliarization or ostranenie. Kluge has used several of the stories as the bases for his films.

His awards include the Italian Literature Prize Isola d’Elba in 1967, and almost every major German-language literary prize, including the Heinrich von Kleist Prize in 1985 and the Heinrich-Böll-Preis in 1993. In 2003, he received Germany’s highest literary award, the Georg-Büchner-Preis.

Kluge’s major work of social criticism is Öffentlichkeit und Erfahrung. Zur Organisationsanalyse von bürgerlicher und proletarischer Öffentlichkeit, co-written with Oskar Negt and originally published in 1972. It has been translated into English as Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere. He has also published numerous texts on literary, film and television criticism, and received the Hanns-Joachim-Friedrich Prize for TV Journalism in 2001. —Wikipedia

Edgar Reitz was born on the 1st of November 1932 in Morbach, a small town in the German Hunsrück Mountains. There his father Robert owned a small clockmakers shop, and his grandfather Johann Reitz worked as a Blacksmith in Morbach-Hundheim. Edgar Reitz has two younger siblings. His sister Heli, and his brother Guido who assumed his fathers trade and took over the Clock Shop.

During the time he attended school in Simmern, Reitz had already started acting and stage-managing in a theater subsidized by his German teacher Karl Windhäuser. After earning his Abitur (a diploma required to qualify for university entrance in Germany), he moved in 1952, motivated by Windhäuser, to Munich to study German language, literature, journalism, dramatics, and art history. During this time he was already sporadically publishing poems and narrations, and was a co-editor of a literary journal. He was fully engaged with the avant-garde of music, arts, literature and film, and in 1953 he was one of the founders of the Studentisches Zimmertheater (Small Student Theater), from which in 1954 the Studiobühne an der Universität München emanated. However most of all Edgar was fascinated by cinema and its technical side, and became a member of a film seminar, where film classics were analyzed and discussed. In other European countries, like in France or Poland, people attended film schools at that time to become filmmakers, but Reitz was learning to make films by actually making them. After his first attempts in 1953 he started opening doors to the professional world of filmmaking by working as a cameraman’s assistant, editor’s assistant, or production assistant. He started making his first own short films in 1958. In 1962 he joined the Oberhausener Gruppe around Alexander Kluge. At the Short Film Days of 1962 they published the Oberhausener Manifest and declared the Old German Film as dead, promoting the Young German Film. In the period 1962-1965 Reitz was working as the chief of the agency for development and experimentation at the Munich Insel-Film. Together with Kluge and others in 1963, he founded the first German film school, the Institut für Filmgestaltung at the HfG Ulm, where he taught direction and camera theory until it was closed in 1968.

In 1965/66 Reitz worked as cameraman for Alexander Kluge’s Abschied von Gestern (Yesterday Girl), in 1966 he produced his first own feature film Mahlzeiten (Lust for Love) which in 1967 was awarded as the best debut feature at the Venice film Festival. For that film the camerawork was done by Thomas Mauch, who 36 years later filmed the first four parts of Heimat 3. Abschied von Gestern and Mahlzeiten belong to the films, which influenced the Young German Film very intensely. In May and June of 1968 Reitz conducted a series of lectures in filming theory and practice at a Munich secondary school. This project was documented with the Film Filmstunde (Lesson in Film). In 1971 he initiated the Kneipenkino (Pub Cinema), where visitors themselves were able to put together a program from 23 Kübelkind-Geschichten (Stories of the Dumpster-Child).

In 1971 Edgar Reitz founded the Edgar Reitz Filmproduktions GmbH (ERFilm) in Munich, his own film production company, which since then produces not only his own projects, but also those films of other well-known directors. In the 70’s and 80’s they produced lots of documentaries, feature films and television plays, and were honored with numerous awards. Contemporaneously Reitz published many books and articles dealing with film-theory and film-aesthetics, but also narrations, essays, lyric poetry, and literal versions of his films.

After the flop of his most expensive film in 1968, Der Schneider von Ulm (The taylor from Ulm), Reitz turned away from feature film and his state-aided standards. He retired on the island Sylt in the north of Germany. There, after being poorly impressed by the American TV series Holocaust he developed his ideas for his most successful project, Heimat. With Heimat Reitz returned to his own homeland, the Hunsrück, and while working on the script for Heimat, released the documentary Geschichten aus den Hunsrückdörfern (Stories from the Hunsrück villages), which describes people’s life in the Hunsrück in an inimitable manner. After the release of Heimat in 1984, he immediately started working on Die Zweite Heimat – The Chronicle of a Youth, which internationally received even more attention than Heimat, but in Germany did not obtain that much acceptance.

In 1995 Reitz, among others, founded the European Institute of Cinema Karlsruhe (EIKK), and was appointed to a professorship at the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe.

Heimat 3 – Chronik einer Zeitenwende was made in 2002-2004 despite being troubled by serious encroachments in Reitz’s artistic liberty from the financing tax supported broadcasting companies. In 2006 he combined previously unreleased scenes from all parts of the trilogy for Heimat Fragmente – Die Frauen, a philosophical discourse about memory.

Edgar Reitz lives in Munich and is married with Salome Kammer since 1995. Together with his son Christian he founded the company Reitz & Reitz Medien. —heimat123.de