Marieluise Fleisser

• Born: November 23, 1901
• Birthplace: Ingolstadt, Germany
• Died: October 10, 1974
• Place of death: Ingolstadt, West Germany

Other Literary Forms

In addition to her plays, Marieluise Fleisser wrote a novel and more than thirty short stories as well as literary essays and autobiographical articles. Most of these writings are included in volumes 2 and 3 of the Gesammelte Werke (1972), edited by Günther Rühle. The only omission of consequence is a key essay on the dramatist Heinrich von Kleist, reprinted in Schriftsteller über Kleist (1976; writers on Kleist), edited by Peter Goldammer.

Achievements

Until five years before her death in 1974, Marieluise Fleisser was considered to be a minor writer of the Weimar Republic, worthy of honorable mention in a footnote embellishing the biography of Bertolt Brecht, probably the most formidable German dramatist and director of the twentieth century. From 1924 until her break with him in 1929, Fleisser succumbed totally to the spell cast by his genius and served, off and on, as his lover, his confidante, and his collaborator. Brecht directed her second play, Pioniere in Ingolstadt (combat engineers in Ingolstadt), in such a way as to precipitate Germany’s biggest theatrical scandal between the wars and to secure for both Fleisser and himself a prominent place in the history of literary censorship. The ensuing furor over the play was the first clear indication Germans were given of the ugly policy toward culture that the Nazis would institute when they came to power. Pioniere in Ingolstadt also holds the distinction of being the only drama authored by someone other than Brecht to have played an important part in the development of the epic theater. Apart from the depiction of a character based on Brecht in Lion Feuchtwanger’s novel Erfolg (1930; Success, 1930), the only literary portrait of him during the Weimar period is in Fleisser’s third play, Der Tiefseefisch (the deep-sea fish), an ironic exposé of Brecht’s working techniques, including the crafty manipulation of his assistants. Both this play and Fleisser’s heavily autobiographical story “Avantgarde” (1963; “Avant-Garde”) remain the sole critical accounts of the private side of Brecht by a member of his inner circle and anticipate the more detailed revelations in the biographical studies of Klaus Völker (Bertolt Brecht: Eine Biographie, 1976) and James K. Lyon (Brecht in America, 1980).

In her last years, Fleisser was able to move out from under Brecht’s shadow and become one of the most celebrated writers of the 1970’s in Germany. There were three reasons for this. In the late 1960’s, a number of young Bavarian playwrights began taking an unsparing look at life in the provinces against the background of a highly industrialized and capitalized West Germany. They took as their model two rather obscure dramatists of the late Weimar period, the Austrian-Hungarian Ödön von Horváth and Fleisser, who were credited with the simultaneous independent discovery of the politically and socially oriented Volksstück, or folk play. This literary form deviated sharply from the uncritical celebrations of earthy peasant or small-town life that had characterized the genre heretofore and that had reached their high point in Carl Zuckmayer’s Der fröliche Weinberg (1925; the merry vineyard), one of the most popular theatrical successes of the Weimar Republic. The three leading practitioners of the new critical realism, Franz Xaver Kroetz, Martin Sperr, and the late Rainer Werner Fassbinder, have explicitly acknowledged their indebtedness to Fleisser. Fassbinder went so far as to say that he decided to become a writer only after he had read Pioniere in Ingolstadt. The “boom” in the production of Fleisser’s plays initiated by these playwrights did not show signs of abating until the early 1980’s. In turn, the rediscovery of Fleisser was in large measure responsible for their own breakthrough.

Fleisser has also acquired a reputation as a major force in feminist literature. Unlike most of the leading German women writers who emancipated themselves through the act of writing, Fleisser’s depiction of what she was wont to describe as the central thread tying together all her works—the relations (or better, the lack of relations) between men and women—stems from a real-life failure to free herself from the strictures imposed by a male-oriented world. In four of her five plays, and in her best short stories (especially the ones written in the middle 1920’s), her emphasis is on the feminine search for release from loneliness and insecurity and for equal partnership based on the mutual recognition of personality. The quest is forever frustrated by the innate “motherliness” of the female, which renders her vulnerable to the brutality inherent in the male of the species. Fleisser’s greatest strength here is a naïve style that is based on a concrete relationship to reality and obviates even the hint of a preachment. Another strong point is a remarkable sense of fairness, a capacity to see the world through the eyes of her male antagonists. Nowhere is this done with greater effectiveness than in her only novel, Mehlreisende Frieda Geier: Roman vom Rauchen, Sporteln, Lieben, und Verkaufen (1931; Frieda Geier, traveling saleswoman in flour: a novel about smoking, sporting, loving, and selling), which deals with the unsettling intrusion of a (for the moment) financially independent woman into the patriarchal world of a German town.

Probably Fleisser’s most lasting literary achievement is the first play she wrote, Fegefeuer in Ingolstadt (purgatory in Ingolstadt), long forgotten and then finally revived in four highly individualistic stagings shortly before her death. It has come to be regarded by many commentators as one of the most fascinating, enigmatic, and prophetic plays of the century, and certainly the best play by a German woman. Written before Brecht’s literary influence made itself felt, the drama treats a tragically timeless topic: the warping of the human spirit through a loveless ideology. In its depiction of the spiritual provincialism of small-town pseudo-Christianity, the play foreshadows the frightening racial provincialism of the Nazis. Interestingly enough, the theme of cultural alienation is also central to the work, which launched the critico-realistic folk theater, Martin Sperr’s Jagdszenen aus Niederbayern (1966; hunting scenes from Lower Bavaria), a devastating look at Fascistic attitudes in the Germany of the Currency Reform of 1948.

Perhaps to justify to some extent their part in the underestimation of Fleisser’s stature, which began with the burning of her books by the Nazis and continued for almost forty years, some observers of the literary scene have warned of the danger of overestimating her importance. It is a warning that, for now at least, can go unheeded.

Biography

For Marieluise Fleisser, born on November 23, 1901, in the Lower Bavarian city of Ingolstadt, both biology and the place of her birth became her destiny. Three men would play a major and sometimes deleterious role in her life. The first has been described as a genius, the second as a screwball, and the third as a clod. What is certain is that all of them were male chauvinists of the first rank. Her native town had a venerable ecclesiastical tradition and enjoyed its reputation as the number-one military city of Bavaria before the Treaty of Versailles compelled the sorely resented evacuation of the garrison of the five thousand combat engineers located there. Fleisser would write two plays about Ingolstadt, one of which, using the military ambience, was to make her overnight the most notorious and maligned woman in the Weimar Republic, and the other of which, exploiting the provincial Catholicism of the city, was to secure a reputation as a minor classic of the German stage almost half a century after she completed it and not long before her death.

Fleisser’s father, a stolid ironmonger and jewelry maker who ran a hardware business in town, recognized her talents and set his heart on her becoming a high school teacher. She was the only one of his four daughters encouraged to enter the gymnasium, or academic high school. Unfortunately, coeducational gymnasiums were still quite rare in Germany, and Fleisser had to attend the convent school in Regensburg, some two hours away by train. For five years, from 1914 to 1919, she received a prim and proper education in the patriarchal mold, which left her ill-equipped to stand on her own two feet and compete in a man’s world. On graduation, she matriculated at the University of Munich and began studying drama and “theatrical science” under the innovative and influential Professor Arthur Kutscher. At a carnival party, she met the well-known novelist and dramatist Feuchtwanger, who gave her some solid avuncular advice on how to write: not in the shopworn expressionist manner, but in the up-and-coming style of neorealism. She destroyed everything she had written and began anew. Through Feuchtwanger, she was introduced to the plays of Brecht and eventually, in 1924, to Brecht himself.

Hurled into the world of the Munich Boheme, Fleisser experienced a profound cultural shock, the literary outcome of which was her first play, Fegefeuer in Ingolstadt. Through connections, Brecht and Feuchtwanger were able to get Fleisser’s short fiction published in newspapers. She was beginning to make a name for herself. At the same time, she fell totally under the spell of Brecht’s genius, becoming both his companion and his literary collaborator. In 1926, Brecht arranged for a matinee performance of Fegefeuer in Ingolstadt. Although the reviews were mixed, what counted was the fact that the two most influential Berlin critics, arch-rivals who rarely agreed on anything, praised Fleisser as a fledgling dramatist of tremendous potential.

Fleisser’s next play was written on assignment from Brecht. Practically dictating the plot, he dispatched her to Ingolstadt to observe at first hand the temporary return of the combat engineers to the town and to record in dramatic fashion the “human” effects of this invasion on the populace. Brecht was pleased with the epic structure, the naïvely realistic style, and the sociological bias of the new play, all of which corresponded to his own experiments in the direction of an anti-Aristotelian theater. He had been uncomfortable with the seemingly murky metaphysics of Fleisser’s first drama. With the more down-to-earth Pioniere in Ingolstadt, he had a play into which he could sink his director’s teeth. At its premiere in Dresden in 1928, a staging with which Brecht had nothing to do, the reception had been lukewarm. Brecht arranged for a Berlin opening at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, where his word was law because the sensational run of Die Dreigroschenoper (pr. 1928; The Threepenny Opera, 1949) had made it the most celebrated theater in the German capital. He wanted to ensure the play’s success and at the same time conduct a “sociological experiment” that would expose, as he saw it, the intolerance and philistinism lurking beneath the veneer of liberalism and enlightenment of the typical bourgeois theatergoer. To achieve this, the recently converted Communist playwright-director exaggerated the fairly tepid antimilitarism of the original and injected a number of sensational sexual elements.

The play no longer seemed to belong to Fleisser; she even stayed away from the final rehearsals. Brecht reveled in the ensuing national scandal, but Fleisser bore the brunt of vicious criticism from nationalist circles as well as from her fellow townspeople in Ingolstadt. For writing the lowest sort of “Jewish-Bolshevist-gutter-trash,” she was accused of betraying and perverting her German womanhood. Fleisser broke with Brecht. He had made her one of several mistresses in his harem, he had demanded the surrender of her talents to his genius as one of a number of “collaborators,” and he had callously brought about her separation from family and friends through public disgrace (her libel suit against the mayor of Ingolstadt for defamation of character, which she finally won, dragged on for three years).

In her isolation and defenselessness, Fleisser sought love and a sense of security from a writer who was Brecht’s diametric opposite in every respect except one. Hellmuth Draws-Tychsen was a one-woman-at-a-time man, a very unsuccessful playwright, a mystic poet of little talent, a hater of the big city and a lover of nature, and an arch-conservative. Like Brecht, however, he had a knack for exploiting women. He became engaged to Fleisser because he thought her reputation as an important playwright could add some luster to his lackluster career and because he took it for granted that she would support him and his relatives financially. Some of the whims and neuroticisms she had to endure are recorded in her third play, Der Tiefseefisch, which contrasts the rival literary cliques centered on Draws-Tychsen and Brecht. Fleisser had been unable to follow Brecht into Marxism; with the advent to power of the Nazis, she was unwilling to write the kind of thing that would be accepted by a state-controlled press that regarded her as tainted by her former leftist connections (Brecht had been one of the first to flee Germany and to have his books burned). A woman who could not earn his keep was of no use to Draws-Tychsen; separation ensued, but not before Fleisser attempted suicide.

Fleisser returned to her hometown, at best shunned by her neighbors, at worst threatened and reviled. In 1935, when she married Joseph Haindl, a former sweetheart, the fiction of her only novel, Mehlreisende Frieda Geier, was twisted into a grim reality. In the novel, the hero, like Haindl the owner of a tobacco business and a local athletic celebrity, falls in love with an “emancipated” businesswoman. She refuses to marry him because he insists that she spend the rest of her life behind the counter of his store. The marriage meant the practical end of Fleisser’s literary career. Her husband, well-intentioned but an incorrigible philistine, insisted that she devote all of her time to both household and business. In 1938, she suffered a nervous breakdown and spent three months in a sanatorium.

Luckily for Fleisser, the doctor in charge of the hospital was an understanding and compassionate man (among other things, he was harboring Jews) who made it clear to her husband that she could not tolerate the strains of business life. In 1943, however, she was pressed into national service for nearly a year despite her delicate health. In the research section of a local armaments plant, she was never allowed to forget that she had once authored a scurrilously unpatriotic play. By the time her husband was able to secure a medical discharge for her, she had already ruined her eyesight. At the end of the war, she was falsely accused of blackmarketing in tobacco and jailed by the victorious Americans. Although she was released a short time after her arrest, her husband’s store of tobacco, with which he hoped to start up the business again after the war, was confiscated. He blamed his wife for the loss and, until his death in 1958, their life together was not very pleasant, or for that matter, easy.

Haindl’s deteriorating health made it necessary to find a business partner, but this move led to bankruptcy. In 1955, in an act of desperation, an anguished Fleisser appealed to Brecht in East Berlin for help. They had resumed relations in 1950, when Fleisser visited the renowned playwright during rehearsals for the West German premiere of Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (pr. 1941; Mother Courage and Her Children, 1948) in Munich. He had, shortly thereafter, arranged for the premiere of her most recent play, Der starke Stamm (of sturdy stock), a Bavarian comedy of folk manners that she had somehow managed to write in the last months of the war. Now Brecht was able to offer her a “sinecure” in East Germany, provided, of course, that she work within a dramatists’ collective that he had established under the aegis of the Academy of Arts. In the end, Fleisser rejected the offer. She could not bring herself to leave her ailing and fairly helpless husband, and her reconversion to Catholicism, she believed, would have led to ideological unpleasantness in a Communist country.

Five days after her husband’s death, Fleisser suffered a near-fatal heart attack that put her in the hospital for three months. It took another year to liquidate the business. She was now “free” to write for the first time in almost thirty years. Having been out of the mainstream of literary events for so long, she was artistically depleted. Instead of trying to catch up, Fleisser delved into her own past and in the last decade of life came up with four stories that rivaled in quality if not in quantity the short fiction she had turned out in the middle and later 1920’s under Brecht’s inspiration: “Avant-Garde,” a revealing insight into the character of the early Brecht; “Die im Dunkeln” (1965; those in the darkness), based on the events surrounding her mental breakdown; “Eine ganz gewöhnliche Vorhölle” (1972; a very ordinary limbo), concerning her life as a forced laborer; and “Der Rauch” (1964; smoke), which recounts her last days under Adolf Hitler and her first under the Americans.

Toward the end of the 1960’s, Fleisser began revising some of her prewar works, concentrating on clarifications of language and style and emphasizing more strongly those aspects that anticipated a Fascist takeover in Germany. A number of factors combined to bring about her rediscovery: the cultural predominance of the New Left, the sudden interest in the socioeconomics of Fascism and in the literature and culture of the Weimar Republic, the displacement of the Theater of the Absurd and the documentary theater of Rolf Hochhuth and Peter Weiss by a group of playwrights who emphasized the political life of the provinces, and the hunt for antecedents by these same writers, which led initially to the rediscovery of the long-forgotten Austrian-Hungarian folk-dramatist Horváth and then to his German counterpart, Fleisser. The Fleisser “boom” commenced in 1968 with a Rainer Werner Fassbinder collage based on Pioniere in Ingolstadt and entitled Zum Beispiel Ingolstadt (for example, Ingolstadt). It reached its apex three years later, with the publication of her collected works by one of German’s most prestigious publishing houses and the brilliant Berlin staging of the original version of Fegefeuer in Ingolstadt by Peter Stein. Before her death some thirteen months later, Fleisser was being discussed by critics as the peer of Horváth and the early Brecht.

Analysis

Marieluise Fleisser observed on a number of occasions that it was impossible for her to create out of thin air and on demand. Nearly everything she wrote was based on a combination of personal experience and observation of her immediate surroundings. In other words, she was subject to the impulses and urges of an extremely autobiographical writer. There is no significant development in her work as a dramatist; there is, however, a definite difference in literary approach—and arguably in quality—between her first play and the other four.

What accounts for this dichotomy in Fleisser’s career both as a playwright and as a writer of prose fiction is, in a word, Brecht. Not long before her death, she told an interviewer that he had destroyed something in her. To be convinced of this, she said, one had simply to compare the earlier Fegefeuer in Ingolstadt with the later Pioniere in Ingolstadt. Her first play was written in secret, free of the influence of Brecht’s theorizing and of his overwhelming and often overbearing personality. For Fleisser, the writing of Fegefeuer in Ingolstadt was an existential necessity, born of the mental anguish caused by the sudden clash of opposite worlds. One was the confining, rigid, and narrowly moralistic world of a Gretchen, reared in the provinces and educated by sheltering nuns. The other world was the wide-open, liberating, and neopagan world of the big city of the Roaring Twenties, where Gretchen encountered Mephisto (Feuchtwanger), who in turn introduced her to the genius of Faust (the works of Brecht; later, after the completion of her play, to the man himself).

Brecht was more impressed by Fleisser’s talent than by her play. When he succeeded in having it staged, he did everything he could to downgrade the religious atmosphere, which Fleisser herself believed was one of the elements on which the life of the play depended. Brecht much preferred Pioniere in Ingolstadt, which he had practically commissioned Fleisser to write. When the scandal provoked by Brecht’s staging of the play in Berlin in 1929 erupted, Fleisser finally faced up to the fact that if she were to save her writer’s soul, she would have to make a clean break with him. She was constitutionally opposed to his insistence that an author should sacrifice his or her uniqueness to the collective production of socially significant literature. In cutting herself off from Brecht, Fleisser hoped to regain her independence as a writer, but she could not cut herself off from his influence. In this regard, she gained much, but she lost even more. After Brecht, one finds her autobiographical bent reinforced by a sharper sense of naturalness or naïveté. There is also a greater openness to the sociological side of human existence. These elements account for much of the strength of her one novel. Their presence in her last play, Der starke Stamm, helps explain why, after resuming relations with Fleisser in 1950, Brecht went out of his way to secure a world premiere. As for the deficit side of her relations with Brecht, something which Günther Rühle, the editor of her collected works, calls her “original substance” was “broken.” Gone was the impulse or perhaps the ability to capture the world beyond the senses in fantasies and symbols, to come to grips with the abstractions of religion and myth, to make concrete the irrational realm of the psyche—in other words, to write something as fascinatingly elusive and shattering as her first play. Only in two haunting short stories, written four years after World War II, was Fleisser able to put her “original” self together again: “Das Pferd und die Jungfer” (1952; the horse and the spinster) and “Er hätte besser alles verschlafen” (1963; better if he had slept through it all).

Fegenfeuer in Ingolstadt

Fleisser’s first play, Fegenfuer in Ingolstadt, is a milieu study of a Catholic town in the Germany of the early 1920’s, and, at the same time, an intuitive portrayal of certain realities that made possible Hitler’s great election victories in the provinces. It focuses on a small band of high school students who are the exemplars of the milieu at large. Actually, this group within a group can be described in terms of a pack or a gang, for it is characterized by mean-spiritedness and narrow-mindedness. Its members reflect the ugliness of life in a small town that, to borrow the words of the West German theater critic Benjamin Henrichs, is caught between a clerical past and a Fascistic future. The young people of Fleisser’s play are trapped in their own vicious world of hatred and envy, of spying and extortion, of humiliation and oppression, of excruciating loneliness and emptiness that cries out for a redeemer. This redeemer can only be somebody who will appeal to the baser side of their nature.

The type of Christianity practiced by these young people (and, behind the scenes, their elders) is actually a perversion of religion because it excludes its most essential component—love. The negative Catholicism of the play puts its emphasis on a harsh God eager to pounce on sinners, on rigid commandments, stern moral principles, and endless prohibitions. In the process, self-esteem is torn down and the personality deformed; the major concern is with one’s own sins and salvation rather than the liberation of the neighbor from oppression. The central sacrament of this negative Catholicism is penance; the central sin is impurity. All morality tends to become equated with sexual morality; as a result, the social, political, and economic aspects of life are excluded from the moral sphere or relegated to its outer fringes. The religion of the milieu fosters a spirit of exclusivity that makes it easy to look inward and hard to look outward. Unwilling to reach out to the “otherness” of the neighbor, the milieu concentrates almost exclusively on its own survival and on parochial issues, on questions of dogma and morality connected with its myopic view of the world.

In her tersest description of the plot content of Fegenfeuer in Ingolstadt, Fleisser said simply that it is “a play about the law of the herd and about those forcefully excluded from it.” Postwar studies have confirmed the existence of this “law of the herd,” or Catholicism of negation, and its disastrous consequences. Scholars such as Carl Amery, Guenther Lewy, and Gordon Zahn have demonstrated that the religion of the milieu brought on “that moral collapse of German Catholicism which made possible the successful realization of the policies of National Socialism” (Amery). Many Catholics welcomed Hitler as a staunch ally in the fight against indecency in general and pornography and homosexuality in particular, while exploiting this kinship as an excuse to overlook the immorality of his ideology and the criminality of his politics. On “house” issues, such as euthanasia, sterilization, and the removal of crucifixes from the schools, milieu Catholicism bravely stood up to and bested Hitler. On the issue of the “excluded neighbor,” the Church suffered its greatest moral defeat: There was never a public utterance of protest against the incarceration of gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, socialists, and pacifists, or against the extermination of the Jews.

In anticipating the failure of the Church to respond actively to Christ’s summons to love God in and through one’s neighbor, Fleisser’s play becomes one of the most remarkably prophetic literary documents of the century. Equally remarkable is the way in which she chose to approach her subject matter. The so-called reality of everyday life in Ingolstadt is combined with a spiritual dimension that in no way betrays the world of the senses. This intertwining of the psychosocial and metaphysical is complemented by a highly stylized form of dialogue unique in its fascinating and untranslatable mixture of High German, Bavarian dialect, and slang spoken by youngsters who talk past one another, who at times sound like their grandfathers, and who are not permitted by Fleisser to distinguish between important and unimportant words.

At the heart of the play is a struggle between the forces of good and evil in which the former are overwhelmed. The human capacity for love is embodied in a Christ figure who is driven to insanity. Fleisser’s point is made startlingly clear: Not even Jesus Christ would stand a chance against the hellishness that pervades Ingolstadt. An atmosphere of terror and fright, based on the fear of Hell and the Devil and relentlessly sustained throughout the four acts of the play, serves as the backdrop for a hierarchy of evildoers. At its helm is the terrestrial counterpart of Satan, a certain Dr. Hähnle. Engaged in conducting scientific experiments on people, he is reminiscent of the infamous doctor of Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck (wr. 1836, pb. 1879; English translation, 1927). Fleisser created her character without having read a line of Büchner, yet both doctors are a frightening portent of Dr. Joseph Mengele and Auschwitz, of the first massive application in history of science and technology to genocide.

Directly below Dr. Hähnle in the hierarchy of evil are his two assistants, Gervase and Protase, correlatives of the fallen spirits the Devil assigns to individual humans to offset the influence of their guardian angels. They seem almost nonhuman, if not antihuman, in their ability to dart in and out of the play at will, always appearing out of nowhere to do their dirty work for the doctor, which consists mostly in spying out the sins and weaknesses of others. They are a major factor in creating an ambience that smacks of the police state with its system of block wardens and neighborhood denunciations, even within the bosom of one’s own family. They introduce themselves as bloodless humans—which means not only that they associate themselves with the spirit world but also, and more important, that they see themselves as direct antagonists of the Christ figure, Roelle, and his spiritual twin, Olga, as well as of the Gospel of Love that these two try so very hard to promote.

The point is sharply illustrated in the last act, when the audience learns that Protase “happened” to be a disinterested (bloodless) spectator during Olga’s attempt at suicide by drowning in the Danube. Roelle, on the other hand, overcomes his morbid fear of water and risks his life in a successful effort to rescue the girl. The inaction of Protase and the action of Roelle represent, respectively, the negation and affirmation of the supreme test of neighborliness as set up by Christ shortly before his death on the Cross on behalf of all humankind: “This is my commandment: love one another, as I have loved you. A man can have no greater love than to lay down his life for his friends.” Fleisser borrowed the names of her human devils from Saint Gervase and Saint Protase, early martyrs celebrated for their fraternal love for each other and for the Christ in whose name they laid down their lives. Because in Fleisser’s topsy-turvy world the pious are really the wicked, the saints can readily serve as examples of how the Christians of Ingolstadt hate, rather than love, one another. These Christians, populating the bottom level of the hierarchy, constitute the pack or gang. When their leader Crusius, as the last gang-member to appear onstage, explains and excuses his past injustices to Roelle as an experiment, the audience is abruptly brought back to the top level of the hierarchy. It becomes very easy to visualize Crusius as an SS doctor in a concentration camp some ten or fifteen years hence.

The forces of evil in Fleisser’s play are straightforward and relentless. The forces of good are marked by ambiguity and equivocation, for their arch-representative, Roelle, has been fashioned into a Christ figure defiled by the stench of his environment. One of the most complex monsters ever to appear on a German stage, Roelle becomes a liar, a thief, and a blackmailer in a world in which the best are made the worst. Robbed of his self-esteem and suffering from a tremendous inferiority complex, Fleisser’s hero tries to reclaim his dignity in sadomasochistic ways. At times he evinces a desire to be punished for the sins that are weighing on his scrupulous conscience. At other times, there is the urge to lash out at those around him: hence the act of cruelty perpetrated on a dog by sticking its eyes full of needles as an outlet for the agony in Roelle’s soul; hence, too, his willingness to humiliate in public the girl he loves after he has been humiliated by her. His religious mania is psychologically connected with his attempts at self-assertion. By becoming a holy man, he hopes to solve his chief problems: inability to win the affections of Olga because of a warped and twisted sexuality, and a need for recognition. As a religious leader, he can win the love of Olga on a sublimated level (he in fact dubs her his Saint John, the disciple whom Jesus loved the most), and he can secure the reverence and respect of the common herd.

There is, however, much more to Roelle than can be provided by an analysis à la Freud. Fleisser’s main concern is not with her hero’s inability to have normal sex and the problems attendant on this. Her focus is, rather, on the metaphysical aspects of Roelle’s capacity and need to love. As one dimension of human love, sex is subsumed in charity. This is something Herbert Ihering, one of the most perspicacious theater critics of the Weimar Republic, sensed when he observed that the decisive element in the play is the fact that “behind all the bigotry lie the roots of a very deep piety, behind the urge to dissemble lies the urge to truth, and . . . within these fettered human beings there is clearly a spiritual potential for creative liberation.” The deepest piety is love of God and neighbor, a total love that liberates one from narrowness and provincialism. Roelle’s desire to perfect and spread this love is central to his role as a Christ figure, as is evident from the symbolism most obviously tied in with his outsider status. Everybody makes fun of his bloated neck, which he can stretch a good distance in wormlike fashion as he aspires to reach a higher and better world (at one point his neck is called “spiritual”). His hydrophobia, too, is notorious. Roelle must overcome his horror of water if he is to be liberated.

Fleisser makes it very clear that she is using water as a symbol of healthy sexual contact with a woman. At the moment when he is about to be stripped and bathed and shortly before his relationship with Olga will suffer a grievous breakdown (in a spiritual as well as a physical sense), Roelle is told by one of his teenage tormentors, in a play on Genesis 3:15: “And let there be enmity between you and the water.” More important, however, water is also a sign of the ultimate spiritual (and therefore human) redemption, as attested by the frequently cited words of Jesus to Nicodemus: “I tell you most solemnly, unless a man is born through water and the spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.” Roelle enters this kingdom for an all-too-brief period of time when he overcomes his dread of water and rescues Olga from the deep. However deformed his religiosity, however mixed his motives, it is his most Christlike action. Ironically, it takes place just before his destruction by the establishment.

It seems clear that Roelle is a fictionalized transfiguration of Jesus. Events as set down in the New Testament prefigure the action of the play, through not in chronological sequence. The correspondences between Jesus and Roelle can be divided into two groups, the first of which relates to the person and mission of Christ and the second of which relates to analogues of His Passion and death. Some additional items that do not fall into either category are also readily associated with a literary Christ figure: the fact that the original title of the play, “Die Fusswaschung” (the washing of feet), is based on an occurrence in the Gospel of John; the fact that Roelle has physical characteristics that set him apart (a bloated neck, previously discussed, and epilepsy—the latter an exploitation by Fleisser of the venerable belief that divine truth and madness are somehow linked); and the fact that the halo, the arch-symbol of transfiguration, is conferred on her hero. As for the correspondences, those relating to the characteristics and mission of Christ are far more numerous than those concerning His Passion and death (and also far too numerous to mention here).

From a structural standpoint, however, the analogues to the Passion, which are vital for the establishment of Roelle as a modern-day savior, dominate the play. The second act, during which the hero is getting ready to suffer and die, is modeled on events in the Garden of Gethsemane. Act 3, the setting of which is a wine party in the home of Olga’s father, is Roelle’s Last Supper, the last time in life he will be together with his teenage friends and followers. The act culminates in the foot-washing scene from which the play derived its original title. It is significant that Fleisser found her inspiration in John’s account of the Last Supper, rather than those of the Synoptics. Her focal point is not the institution of the Eucharist, but rather Christ’s message of the love of God through love for the neighbor, concretely dramatized in the washing of his disciples’ feet. This act of humility and service is transmuted into an act of spiteful humiliation, as a terror-stricken Roelle is stripped naked and washed by his would-be friends, highlighting the central theme of communal lovelessness.

The final scene relates to the events surrounding the Crucifixion. Among other things, Roelle is betrayed by a thief (Crusius) just as Christ was (by Judas). He is also accused of being a thief; Christ himself was crucified between two robbers. At the end, Roelle’s sense of abandonment assumes Christ-like dimensions, and his destruction—whether by derangement alone or coupled with suicide (the text permits either interpretation)—is an acceptable modern equivalent of a no longer fashionable death by crucifixion, especially when the anguish that precedes it is taken into account. Roelle’s final words and actions are a recapitulation of the three incidents of the Passion on which the second, third, and fourth acts are largely modeled. As Christ did at Gethsemane, so, too, Roelle takes on the burden of humankind’s sins. He consumes the piece of paper on which he was wont to jot down the sins committed since his last good confession. Significantly, Roelle’s memory-aid includes not only his own transgressions but also a list of the seven capital sins, the source of all and every wrongdoing in the world. The slip of paper is at the same time transformed into the Eucharist, the sacrament instututed at the Last Supper, the consumption of which confers eternal life: “Anyone who eats this bread will live forever, and the bread that I shall give is my flesh, for the life of the world.” Unfortunately, the actions and intentions of Roelle are those of a lunatic. In this fact lies Roelle’s glory—he has given his “flesh” in the form of his conscious life—as well as his great defeat. In the real world, Ingolstadt sought and found its redeemer on a different plane of existence some nine years after Fleisser’s play was written.

There are those who contend that with the clear exception of Dantons Tod (pb. 1835; Danton’s Death, 1927) by George Büchner, no first play in the history of German drama has been more provocative, more prognostic, and ultimately more powerful than Purgatory in Ingolstadt.

Pioniere in Ingolstadt

Of the four plays written after her personal encounter with Brecht, Pioniere in Ingolstadt is probably Fleisser’s best. Set in a representative provincial city of the 1920’s, it depicts the effects of a hierarchically structured society on the lives of ordinary people. The catalyst is the sudden appearance in Ingolstadt of a company of combat engineers assigned to build a bridge over a tributary of the Danube. In a series of loosely connected scenes, Fleisser establishes a pecking order, at the bottom of which are servant girls seeking emancipation from a dreary present and an even drabber future and soldiers seeking release from the disciplinary rigors of their profession. Officers put pressure on NCO’s, and sergeants made sadistic by the system take it out on the enlisted men; in turn, the soldiers, trained to be aggressive and at the same time to obey, vent their frustrations on the hapless female of the moment. Both the soldiers and the servant girls are also victims of the civilian world, the former as cheap labor for the city, the latter as objects of financial and sexual exploitation by their at best whimsical, and at worst tyrannical, employers.

The epic structure of the play is held together by the love stories of two maids. Alma takes the realistic low road in a society in which everything has its price and in which, under prevailing conditions (the shortage of men after World War I), women are at a distinct disadvantage. She sells her body for social gain and ultimately latches on to a solid burgher. Berta embarks on the romantic high road of “true” but blinding love (“I am not like any of the other girls”), only to sacrifice her treasured virginity to a loveless prince charming, the soldier Korl (“I am like all the other soldiers”). When at the urging of Brecht’s widow, Helen Weigel, the play was revised in 1967-1968, Fleisser made considerable changes, almost doubling its length, in an attempt to reinforce the antimilitary and anticapitalistic tendencies. That the dialogue between Korl and Anna was left practically untouched is a clear indication that Fleisser regarded their relationship as the heart and soul of her play. She was no doubt right, because, as Henrichs aptly pointed out after seeing the world premiere of the revised version in 1970, the story of Korl and Anna is more genuine, more bitter, and more unsentimental than any of the love relationships created by her arch-rival, Horváth. Whereas the latter invariably sided with his female protagonists, Fleisser could penetrate the world of the male as well. She was able to show that on the objective level, both Korl and Anna are doomed to remain strangers to each other, not because of their personal “philosophies of life” (his belief in the wickedness of humankind, her conviction that the human being is essentially decent), but because they are the ignorant victims of the prevailing social system.

A second element of the play that still fascinates after more than half a century is Fleisser’s ability to create in the simplest language possible stage models of irreducible dimensions that concretely define abstractions such as poverty and oppression. Ironically, however, the postwar revisions in the direction of greater social relevance in the spirit of Brecht have served only to compound the problem of the play’s historicity. The consistently mixed reception accorded the various revivals since 1971 may in large measure be attributable to the fact that the play is too closely tied to its era. The social realities Fleisser uses to illustrate her ideological biases are no longer very topical in a country in which house servants are at a premium and soldiers can clamor for a trade union to represent their interests.

Der Tiefseefisch

In Fleisser’s next play, Der Tiefseefisch, there is a drop in dramatic effectiveness. Der Tiefseefisch was written in the main shortly after the break with Brecht in 1929; a fourth act was added in 1972. What little plot there is concerns the efforts of two rival literary cliques to retain or regain, respectively, the loyalty and services of a prominent woman writer named Gesine (actually Fleisser in real life). One clique is led by a poet called Laurenz, closely modeled on the writer Draws-Tychsen, the egomaniacal oddball of little artistic talent whose protection and affection Fleisser felt she urgently needed after leaving Brecht. The other clique is dictatorially run by a certain Tütü (Brecht). The only real “action” takes place offstage, when a literary evening featuring the reading of Gesine’s works is sabotaged by the release of a swarm of white mice.

The first two acts concentrate on the personal relationship between Gesine and Laurenz. The price of his love is the total subordination of soul, talents, and earning power to his self-proclaimed genius. Because he supposedly has mystical qualities that enable him to penetrate regions forever barred to ordinary mortals (he compares himself to the deep-sea fish that is privy to the most profound mysteries—hence the title of the play), and because such qualities are the stuff of poets of the highest rank, of geniuses normally forced to go unrecognized in their own lifetime, everybody, and especially Gesine, owes him a living. Unfortunately, it is never made quite clear by Fleisser why Laurenz is able to exert so much power over her heroine. Despite herself, Fleisser was really convinced at the time that Draws-Tychsen was the foremost lyric poet of his day, a conviction that any audience has to take on faith. What it sees, however, is an obnoxious and selfish neurotic whose male chauvinism taxes credulity.

The third act, the dramaturgical excuse for which is Tütü’s efforts to get Laurenz to join his literary group and in this way to regain control over Gesine, is actually a devastatingly satiric exposé of the inner operations of the “Brecht Circle.” Tütü’s “writer factory” represents the application of rationalized or “American” methods of production to the realm of aesthetics in order to turn out socially relevant works. The producer is nothing, the end-product everything. Tütü runs his factory along military lines. Echelon “A” comprises the more talented coworkers, who are on occasion allowed to produce something in their own right, as long as it conforms to collectivist guidelines. (Fleisser was in this group.) Echelon “B” is staffed by the not-so-gifted, mostly females, whose only reason for existence is to accommodate Echelon “A” and who, after being thoroughly exploited and debilitated, can be discarded with impunity. (Super-secretarial collaborators of Brecht in this category included Elisabeth Hauptmann, Margarete Steffen, and Ruth Berlau.) The third act is thus a settling of accounts with Brecht, who successfully applied pressure to prevent the one and only performance of the play planned in Fleisser’s lifetime.

Unfortunately, Fleisser’s exposé created an unbridgeable dichotomy in the dramatic structure of the play, compounded some forty years later when she added a fourth act that resumed the Gesine-Laurenz relationship in an unsatisfactory attempt to provide a denouement. Somehow, Gesine finds the strength to leave her tyrannical lover at the moment of her greatest dependence and abasement, for the Nazis have suddenly come to power (although there is no mention of them in the first three acts), and only her connection with the ultra-rightist Laurenz can save her from her leftist past. The price she must pay for this security is the writing of works that will earn enough to support Laurenz and will be to the liking of the Nazis; thus, she must prostitute her artistic soul. The three elements that make the play historically interesting—the insights into Fleisser’s life, the Brecht circle, and the life of the Berlin intelligentsia during the last days of Weimar—also give it the lack of cohesiveness that discouraged any and all attempts at staging it until 1980. Surprisingly, some five months after its dismal world premiere in Vienna, an astute production successfully mounted in Berlin by Thomas Reichert suggested previously hidden possibilities. The director downgraded the last two acts and concentrated on making psychologically plausible the tragedy of two totally incompatible people who desperately need each other’s love.

At the time of her death, Fleisser was making plans to expand Der Tiefseefisch into an autobiographical account starting with her entry into the world of Brecht and the Roaring Twenties and ending with her total disappearance from the public eye in the Nazi era as the wife of a small-town tobacconist. The play was to be rechristened “Ehe in Ingolstadt” (marriage in Ingolstadt), and the last act was to show a Gesine cut off both by decree of the Nazis and by order of her business-minded husband from the world of art that had given her life its meaning. Literally the prisoner of a government and a city that could not let her forget that she had besmirched the honor of Germany and her fellow townspeople, she would nevertheless refuse to conform to the system and would somehow manage to endure to the end.

Karl Stuart

In fact, Fleisser’s perseverance as a human being and an artist was closely connected with the play that followed Der Tiefseefisch. Karl Stuart was the only play she would bring to conclusion under the Nazis. In 1935, a contemporary portrait of Charles I of England, the first king in modern times to be executed by order of a legislative body, caught her eye because of the extremely melancholy look on the face of the monarch. Haunted by the “saddest picture” she had ever seen, she began a study of the luckless king, and by 1938 she was engaged in writing a play about him. The task, which took seven years, became for Fleisser an act of existential necessity, for she identified her quiet disavowal of the system with the king’s refusal to sell his royal soul to Oliver Cromwell in exchange for his life. At the end of the play, a battered but unbowed Charles ascends the scaffold, the symbol of an indestructible inner freedom.

Karl Stuart holds a unique position in Fleisser’s oeuvre because it is her only play that is not strictly autobiographical. Further, its uniqueness also accounts for the critical consensus that it is her weakest play. In attempting a historical tragedy, Fleisser was out of her element. She was unfamiliar with the politics and customs of the British, and the elevated language her nobles speak is at best wooden and stilted, in sharp contrast to the marvelously stylized and practically untranslatable Bavarian that characterizes her best dramas. The play is also ultraconventional in structure. In Karl Stuart, Fleisser stuck more or less meticulously to the techniques of playwriting elaborated by Gustav Freytag in a “classically popular” handbook already dated when it appeared in 1863. Her dramaturgy here was a far cry from the heady epic experimentation of Pioniere in Ingolstadt. Perhaps the clearest indication that the isolated artist in her was frantically reaching out to Brecht is the fact that there is a startling resemblance between the relation of Charles to Lord Strafford and the king to Gaveston in Leben Eduards des Zweiten von England (pr., pb. 1924; Edward II, 1926), the play by Brecht (and Feuchtwanger), which happened to be the first great theatrical experience of Fleisser’s life. In both works, the downfall of the king is precipitated by stubborn loyalty to a highly unpopular favorite. Unfortunately, further comparison with Brecht’s play reveals the extent of the deleterious effect on her artistry wrought by the Nazi years. Karl Stuart is devoid of the erotic passion, the depth, sparkle, movement, and tension that mark Edward II. What has to count in the last analysis is not that Fleisser wrote a weak play but that she wrote a play at all, a personal document affirming her link to the civilized community.

Der starke Stamm

With Karl Stuart, Fleisser had sought refuge in a past that was unfamiliar to her. On its completion in the last and worst year of the war, the playwright sought sustenance by turning to her familial roots. It was, she stated later, “an act of sheer self-defence, an act of self-assertion in the interests of survival.” If Karl Stuart had enabled her to survive artistically, the writing of her next play, Der starke Stamm, was an act of physical and mental survival, a game of life “that the imagination plays with uncles and fathers and sons, and with a womanliness that will never die out.” Destined to become Fleisser’s most popular work, Der starke Stamm celebrates the irrepressible life cycle of the “little man” (the first act opens with a funeral and the last closes with the approaching birth of a baby legitimatized through an October-June wedding). The male protagonist, Leonhard Bitterwolf, a saddlemaker in a small Bavarian town, is modeled on Fleisser’s grandfather and father, who between them wore out five wives. Unlike the idealized figures of run-of-the-mill folk plays, the characters are depicted with unsparing realism, as lusty, greedy, malicious, yet very human beings who must cope in a world where money usually takes precedence over love and happy endings are a pipe dream.

The theme of greed versus love was reinforced by Fleisser five years after the war in a way that gave the play contemporary relevance. As a result of a major revision probably inspired by Brecht (he and Fleisser resumed relations in 1950), Der starke Stamm became the first play to depict the effects on provincial Germany of the “economic miracle” rendered possible by currency reform and American aid. In her criticism of an encroaching capitalism that reduces morality and friendship to a question of who owns how much, Fleisser thus anticipated by some fifteen years the emergence (or reemergence, if one takes into account the Weimar plays of Fleisser and Horváth) of the sociocritical folk play. The play itself exerted a considerable direct influence on Martin Sperr, who was one of the most talented of the socially conscious young playwrights of the postwar era.

From a dramaturgical standpoint, Der starke Stamm holds up well—first, because Fleisser succeeded in balancing her comic and satiric intentions, so that the spectator is neither put off nor taken in completely by the characters. He or she can enjoy, so to speak, the best of both worlds. (Unfortunately, a number of directors have been unable to transfer Fleisser’s delicate balancing act to the stage.) Further, in the person of Balbina Buhleller, the long-widowed sister-in-law of Bitterwolf, Fleisser fashioned one of the richest female roles in the postwar German theater. The struggle to compete as a woman alone in a universe controlled, if not constructed, by the male of the species has made her hard, bitter, and tough without destroying her delicious sense of humor or repressing her vitality. In her pursuit of security and the good life on the premise that unless one rises one will surely sink, she suffers one defeat after another (losing out to a rapacious maid in her quest for Bitterwolf’s hand; going bankrupt when her slot-machine business—a reflection of the American influence on the German economy—folds; being disinherited by a capricious rich uncle). At play’s end, an undaunted Balbina is more than willing to renounce her (unprofitable) venture into the pornographic picture-postcard business so that she can cash in on the pious excitement generated by the reputed appearance of the Virgin Mary in a village far away from any public transportation. Some critics have seen fit to put Balbina in the company of the two most finely wrought (and most sturdy) female protagonists of the modern German stage, Frau Wolf of Gerhart Hauptmann’s Der Biberpelz (pr., pb. 1893; The Beaver Coat, 1912) and the eponymous heroine of Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children. If it is true that, as Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, enduring is everything, then this tribute to Fleisser’s craftsmanship becomes at the same time a strong nod to her humanity, for Balbina’s irrepressible nature is also the playwright’s.

Bibliography

Hoffmeister, Donna L. The Theater of Confinement: Language and Survival in the Milieu Plays of Marieluise Fleisser and Franz Xaver Kroetz. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1983. Hoffmeister compares and contrasts the dramatic works of Fleisser and Franz Xaver Kroetz. She pays special attention to the language used by the two authors.

Joeres, Ruth-Ellen B. “Records of Survival: The Autobiographical Writings of Marieluise Fleisser and Marie Luise Kaschnitz.” In Faith of a (Woman) Writer, edited by Alice Kessler-Harris Joeres and William McBrien. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1988. This essay examines the autobiographical tendencies exhibited by Fleisser and Marie Luise Kaschnitz in their writings.

Kord, Susanne. “Fading Out: Invisible Women in Marieluise Fleisser’s Early Dramas.” In Women in German Yearbook: Feminist Studies and German Culture, edited by Jeanette Clausen and Helen Cafferty. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1989. An examination of the role of women in Fleisser’s early plays.

Ley, Ralph. “Beyond 1984: Provocation and Prognosis in Marieluise Fleisser’s Purgatory in Ingolstadt.” Modern Drama 31 (September, 1988): 340-351. Ley examines the political overtones in Fleisser’s Purgatory in Ingolstadt.

Ley, Ralph. “Liberation from Brecht: Marieluise Fleisser in Her Own Right.” Modern Language Studies 16 (Spring, 1986): 54-61. Ley discusses the relationship between Bertolt Brecht and Fleisser and her writing when separated from Brecht.

Ley, Ralph. “Outsidership and Irredemption in the Twentieth Century: Marieluise Fleisser’s Play Fegefeuer in Ingolstadt.” University of Dayton Review 19 (Summer, 1988): 3-41. Ley looks at the role of the outsider, a role that Fleisser would later play, in her drama Fegefeuer in Ingolstadt.