Pioneers in Ingolstadt

By the close of 1971, his third year as a filmmaker, Fassbinder had completed a dozen movies. He was so tireless, so determined to make all of life grist for his art, that within months of wrapping the miserable shoot of Whity (71) he had dramatized the experience in Beware of a Holy Whore (71). While his style saw several marked transformations—from the austerely theatrical to the floridly cinematic—his signature themes persisted. As he put it: “My subject is the exploitability of feelings, whoever might be the one exploiting them . . . Whether the state exploits patriotism or whether, in a couple relationship, one partner destroys the other.”

The manipulation of innocence and the corruption of purity are ubiquitous in Fassbinder, and are certainly the engines driving two of his other 1971 efforts, Pioneers in Ingolstadt and The Merchant of Four Seasons. The former, an adaptation of Marieluise Fleisser’s 1928 play, belongs with his Brechtian early work; the latter signals his foray into melodrama as societal critique. Both, however, gaze unblinkingly at the disintegration of the deceived and rejected.

Ingolstadt’s action revolves around the building of a bridge—a symbol of connection that, typical of Fassbinder, yields the opposite result. The “pioneers” are soldiers stationed in town for the duration of the task, who become sources of diversion and subsistence for the local girls. Two figures emerge—Alma (Irm Hermann), a realist who takes money without shame, and Berta (Hanna Schygulla), who pines for true love and attaches herself to Karl (Harry Baer), blind to his callous indifference. Fassbinder underscores their physical and temperamental contrasts. Alma is tall and confident, with languid, half-closed eyes that state her intentions more brazenly than words ever could. Berta is something between holy innocent and willing victim, proclaiming that she wants to suffer for love, ignoring all warnings and chasing a man who’s plainly no good, claiming she’ll be good for him. By design, there is little suspense in the unfolding: Berta’s refusal to accept Karl’s professed apathy brings about her inevitable debasement, while Alma’s practicality sees her remaining psychologically intact by the end, which passes for contentment in a Fassbinder universe.


The Merchant of Four Seasons

The sense of preordained destruction pervades The Merchant of Four Seasons as well, despite one character’s declaration that people endure if they wish to do so. In Fassbinder’s films—as in those of Sirk, his mid-career inspiration—matters are determined by class, race, sex, and society. That a hapless fruit vender like Hans (Hans Hirschmüller) would allow his family to undermine him, and his infirmities to emasculate him, is less a case of capitulation than compliance with fate. Hans, a short, thickly built drunkard with downturned mouth and a growl in which anger and weariness coalesce, is the type of man for whom joy is inherently elusive. A flashback situates him in a garden with his true love, and the lushness of the locale only amplifies his sweaty, hunched discomfort—he looks like Richard Nixon in Paradise.

Hermann and Schygulla are again juxtaposed as his steely, disloyal wife and his beatific sister. You can smell the cigarettes and dread in Hans, yearning for respect and the stable life he knows exceeds his reach; Hirschmüller projects not so much festering rage as imminent erosion. Merchant, like Pioneers, incisively chronicles an unprepossessing soul, degraded and depleted by the hope he dares to harbor. Fassbinder, whose cynicism belies true compassion for his characters, may part company with Casablanca’s Rick on what the problems of little people amount to in this crazy world, but those who open their hearts to such a world are lucky to be rewarded with a hill of beans.