Marion Schmid - Chaos as Usual: Conversations About Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1981)

edited by Juliane Lorenz

with Marion Schmid and Herbert Gehr

translated by Christa Armstrong and Maria Pelikan

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in memory of liselotte eder

This book is an attempt to trace and illuminate, through interviews with colleagues, friends, and contemporaries, different perspectives about Rainer Werner Fassbinder. You may find, in the final analysis, that these interviews focus not on Fassbinder, the person, but on what he awakened and invoked in others.

In the first interviews, I found myself defending Rainer against critical observations about his working methods and lifestyle. However, I soon learned to smile at my personal "protectivism." I let go in order to take stock and assemble a clear picture of the man and his work. Ten years after his death, I found myself asking "What was it that made us swarm and buzz around this "sorcerer"? What was it that frightened some and repelled others, but fascinated all of us? What distinguished him from other artists and what remains of the things he achieved when no one else could? Is he a "myth" or did he just dare what none of us had the courage to attempt? Did he use people, or was he being used more than a man of his caliber could tolerate? A highly sensitive person who always approached life with enormous curiosity, did he finally give too much of himself?

In the course of my investigation, I became haunted by intensely personal memories, experienced by someone who had been confronted, at a very young age, with the death of a companion. These are feelings which even a lifetime cannot suppress. Much as I try, I will never overcome the memory of that early morning in June, 1982, when I found Rainer dead in our apartment. That day something ended, and not only for the history of German cinema. A driving force, a host of fantasies, skills, and talents, was no longer accessible, no longer open to attacks and exploitation. Nothing was the way it had been.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder left behind him a literary and cinematic oeuvre which will take a unique place in the history of European film and in the culture of the twentieth century. It is an oeuvre which evolved as the expression of an era, between 1966 and 1982, in a country which was then another Germany and which no longer exists.

I would like to thank all those who participated in these interviews for their willingness to reflect on their memories of Rainer. I thank the editor, Marion Schmid, for her critical detachment in working on the texts. I thank Tatjana and Andreas Peterson for their help with the transcripts. Above all, I thank the publishers in Germany and the United States, especially Glenn Young, who received this large volume of interviews with great curiosity and encouragement. My special thanks also to my agent, Maria Pelikan.

-Y. L. New York/Berlin

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Dietrich Lohmann

Rio das Mortes (1970)

Ursula Stratz (1969)

Fassbinder

Margit Carstensen

Irm Hermann

Berlin Film Festival (1972)

Gunther Kaufmann

Hanna Schygulla

Harry Baer

Peer Raben

Kurt Raab

Harry Baer

Coffeehouse (1970)

Margit Carstensen

Margit Carstensen

Fassbinder

Berlin Film Festival (1972)

Fassbinder

Margit Carstensen

Martha (1973)

Karlheinz Bohm

Irm Hermann

The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972)

Brigitte Mira

Fassbinder

German Film Prize [Bundesfilmpreis] for Ali:Fear Eats the Soul (1973)