Marieluise Fleißer


Marieluise Fleißer was a German author and playwright, most commonly associated with the aesthetic movement and style of Neue Sachlichkeit, or New Objectivity.

Biography

Born in Ingolstadt in 1901 to Anna and Heinrich Fleißer, a smith and hardware store owner, Fleißer was sent to a Catholic convent school in Regensburg for her education, an experience which would later be reflected in her first novel Ein Zierde für den Verein: Roman vom Rauchen, Sporteln, Lieben und Verkaufen . In 1919, she enrolled at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, where she studied German literature, philosophy, and theater under Arthur Kutscher, the founder of theater studies in Germany and an influential critic and historian of literature; during this period, her first time living on her own, she began writing short stories, such as "Meine Zwillingsschwester Olga," which would be her first publication in 1923. It is during her time as a young student in Munich that Fleißer befriended Lion Feuchtwanger and, through him, Bertolt Brecht, with whom she would collaborate on her playwriting and theatrical productions throughout the 1920s. Brecht would subsequently help her throughout the decade to secure publishing opportunities and support for her plays; conversely, Brecht often felt the liberty, without her permission, to revise and take from her work, which caused considerable strain on their relationship as well as Fleißer's reputation. Due to financial difficulties and the pressure of her father, who wanted her to become a teacher, Fleißer returned to Ingolstadt in 1924, where she would remain until moving to Berlin in 1926. What was a personally fraught time for the young author was artistically rich, as Fleißer wrote her first major play that would ensure her breakthrough in Weimar Germany, Fegefeuer in Ingolstadt . Her first success was followed by a second, Pioniere in Ingolstadt , which scandalized the public through Brecht's unauthorized changes, transforming the piece into an explicitly anti-militaristic and sexually daring satire of petit bourgeois mores and small-town life. Discussed in many of the major German newspapers of the time, the scandal caused an uproar in her hometown: the mayor published a rebuttal, distancing the city from its now most famous daughter, while Fleißer's father temporarily disowned her.
During this tumultuous period, which would prove to be the apex of her fame during her lifetime, Fleißer also published a collection of short stories, Ein Pfund Orangen, and became engaged to a local swimming star in Ingolstadt, Bepp Haindl, which was later called off in 1929. After moving to Berlin, she worked as a freelance journalist and author, publishing a travelogue about her journey Andorra with her then fiancé, the arch-conservative journalist and poet Hellmut Draws-Tychsen. She sunk further into intellectual and social isolation and financial troubles due to her liaison with the notorious conservative, and her subsequent works published in the early 1930s, such as the novel Ein Zierde für den Verein was met with tepid reviews and sales. This culminated in an attempted suicide in 1932 and her move back to Ingolstadt, where she married her first fiancé, the shop owner Bepp Haindl, who forbid her from writing and demanded that she work in his tobacco shop; her fall into contemporary obscurity was sealed in 1935, when she partially forbidden to write by the Nazis due to her leftist political sympathies and innovative modernist style. The 1930s and 1940s were a difficult period for Fleißer, who suffered from mental illness and unhappiness caused by the stresses and deprivations of war and the work demands placed on her by her husband; after the fall of the Third Reich in 1945, she managed to write little, such as the play Karl Stuart.
It was only from the mid-1950s onwards that Fleißer began her gradual reemergence as a known and celebrated writer. After the death of her husband in 1958, she began writing in earnest again, such as the short story "Avantgarde" and the play Der starke Stamm, which premiered at the Schaubühne in West Berlin. Awarded a literary prize by the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts in 1953 and invited to join in 1954, Fleißer was "rediscovered" by a trio of famous young male playwrights and critics, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Martin Sperr, and Franz Xaver Kroetz, who brought her major works of fiction and theater back into the public eye throughout the 1960s and 1970s. For example, Pioneers in Ingolstadt was adapted as a TV film by Fassbinder in 1971. Upon the publication of her complete works, Gesammelte Werke, by the renowned Suhrkamp Verlag, she was award the Bavarian Order of Merit in 1973, before dying on February 2, 1974.

Work

Fleißer's best-known works are two plays, Purgatory in Ingolstadt and Pioneers in Ingolstadt. The plays, which feature lower-class characters from small town Bavaria, deal with abusive, sometimes violent relationships between men and women. Among literary scholars, the plays are categorized as "critical Volksstücke," a genre that references and engages critically with the conventions of the popular "Volksstück". Like the original "Volksstück," Fleißer's dramas feature regional dialect, lower-class characters, and deal with everyday themes and relationships, but unlike the originals, Fleißer exposes unequal power relationships between men and women.
Bertolt Brecht persuaded the director Moriz Seeler to stage the first play, which Seeler retitled; Fleißer's original title was The Washing of Feet. Brecht then encouraged her to write Pioneers. Premiered in Berlin, the plays caused a scandal, especially in her home town, and were attacked by the Nazis, who had not yet come to power.
Fleißer was rediscovered in the 1970s by a later generation, among them the theatre director Peter Stein and the playwright Franz Xaver Kroetz. Pioneers in Ingolstadt was adapted as a TV film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder in 1971.
The plays were given their London premieres at the Gate Theatre, London, in 1990, directed by Annie Castledine and Stephen Daldry.

Selected works