Marieluise Fleißer

Fleisser, Marieluise (Ingolstadt, 1901-74, Ingolstadt), was educated at a convent school and studied for a time at Munich University. She became acquainted with L. Feuchtwanger, through whom she met B. Brecht, then a young writer in Augsburg. Brecht's insistence on plain language had a decisive influence on her work. Her first play, originally called Die Fußwaschung, was performed, thanks to Brecht's intervention, at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in 1926 under the director's title Fegefeuer in Ingolstadt, which it has retained. The play's fourth version, written 1970 to 1971, was published in 1972, a period that marks the promotion of the new ‘critical’ Volksstück. It is concerned with problems of adolescence in Catholic Ingolstadt, whose provincial atmosphere deeply affected Fleißer's life and work. Her second play, Pioniere in Ingolstadt, described as a comedy, consists of a succession of short scenes in laconic dialogue. It is chiefly concerned with soldiers and sex, having as background to its action the presence of a battalion of bridge-building sappers in Ingolstadt. Revised within a year of its completion in 1928, its Berlin production of 1929 by Brecht, who among other changes transposed the action against Fleißer's wish from 1926 to 1910, caused a public scandal and a rift between her and Brecht, though he promoted the production of a late Volksstück in Bavarian dialect (later also adjusted to High German), Der starke Stamm (1950). Fleißer revised Pioniere in Ingolstadt in 1968; performed in Munich in 1970, it was turned into a film by Rainer Maria Faßbinder in 1971. Fleißer reflects on her personal reaction to the Berlin scandal, which caused her to turn to fiction, in Avantgarde (1963) and in Tiefseefisch (1972), a play begun in 1929-30 and first performed in 1980. Her problems as a woman striving to assert her individuality are also basic to her autobiographical novel Mehlreisende Frieda Geier (1931), which she later revised as Eine Zierde für den Verein (1972). The tragedy Karl Stuart (1946), on the preservation of inner freedom, was started in 1938 when she suffered a mental crisis which for some years disrupted her writing; the hardship and stifling milieu of her married life (1935-58), entered into in the hope that it would shelter her from political persecution, had by now seriously undermined her health. Other titles include the collection of ten stories, Ein Pfund Orangen (1929), Andorranische Abenteuer (1932), and Abenteuer aus dem englischen Garten (1969). The volume Die List (1995), ed. B. Echte with a postscript by M. Bauer, contains ten stories first published in the Magdeburgische Zeitung (1925-7), and autobiographical notes.

Fleißer was compensated for a difficult life by being honoured, in 1956, by the Bavarian Academy of Art and by becoming, in her last years, mentor to a younger generation (including Sperr and Kroetz). More recently the women's movement has shown renewed interest in her work; in 1991 her Ingolstadt plays were produced in London as part of the ‘Women in World Theatre’ season.

In die Enge geht alles. Marieluise Fleißers Gang in die innere Emigration, ed. E. Pfister, appeared in 1984, Gesammelte Werke, ed. G. Rühle, in 3 vols. in 1972, 2nd edn. in 1983, vol. 4 in 1989.