Free Theater of Cruelty by Ian Buruma Page A

In some ways, the concentrated form of the soap opera is closer to theater than to cinema. This can be a virtue, as it is in Fassbinder’s work. Highly stylized, it manages to combine theatricality with intimacy, which perfectly suits the tone of Döblin’s narrative.
    Berlin Alexanderplatz
is also a story that seems perfectly natural to Fassbinder himself. He first read Döblin’s book when he was fourteen, in the grip, as he put it, of “an almost murderous puberty.” Confused about his homosexuality, deprived of his father, who left when Fassbinder was still very young, and generally living in a state of adolescent terror, he read
Berlin Alexanderplatz
not just as a work of art but as a book that could help him deal with his personal anxieties. Because of this, he reduced it, on first reading, to a theme that is certainly there, though perhaps not quite so predominant as Fassbinder made it out to be: the violent, sadomasochistic, but always intimate relationship between Biberkopf and Reinhold. Fassbinder sees a purity in Biberkopf’s love for his friend, a purity that is dangerous, even terrifying, but needs to be cherished despite, or perhaps because of, the deep suffering involved. This reading of the book helped the young Fassbinder cope with his own demons. In his life as much as in his films, love was often mixed with violence: two of his lovers committed suicide.
    Biberkopf, a man in search of love and dignity in a squalid world, was in some ways Fassbinder’s alter ego. There are references to Döblin’s novel in several of Fassbinder’s earlier movies. In his first feature film,
Love Is Colder Than Death
(1969), Fassbinder himself plays a pimp called Franz. He has a prostitute-lover named Johanna (Hanna Schygulla). But his deeper feelings are for a petty gangster named Bruno (Ulli Lommel). The power plays, the jealousies, the cruelty of love, the complex inner lives of marginal figures, all these reflect
Berlin Alexanderplatz
.
    Franz turns up once more in
Gods of the Plague
(1970). Like Biberkopf, this Franz, played by Harry Baer, has various liaisons with women after being released from prison. But again, the most intense relationship is with another man, a violent gangster by the name of “Gorilla” (Günther Kaufmann). In
Fox and His Friends
(1975), oneof Fassbinder’s few treatments of openly gay life, he plays a naive carnival worker named Franz Biberkopf, who wins the lottery and is viciously exploited by relatives, lovers, and friends. The German title,
Faustrecht der Freiheit
(First Right of Freedom), hints more directly at one of the themes that runs through Döblin’s novel too: the struggle for survival of a man who wants to be decent in a dog-eat-dog world.
    Fassbinder might have played Biberkopf in
Berlin Alexanderplatz
, but he chose Günter Lamprecht instead, who gives one of the most memorable performances in the history of film. First of all, he looks the part: large, shambling, like a performing bear, his pudding face a map of confusion, barely contained violence, and childlike innocence. Much of the movie is shot in close-up, registering every emotion. A drunken pimp who hero-worships a thug and beats up his lovers is not at first sight a prepossessing figure, yet Fassbinder, through Lamprecht’s performance, gives an affectionate picture of Biberkopf. The story is brutal, but the telling is full of tenderness. We learn to love this sad loser.
    If Biberkopf is the Job-like character, constantly tested by increasingly savage misfortunes, Reinhold, played beautifully by Gottfried John, is a Satanic figure, a brute, but a fascinating, even seductive brute. John, too, is often filmed in close-up, usually from a low side angle that brings out his sly malice. As is often the case in life, his slight physical disability—a stammer—adds something to his dangerous charm. Reinhold is described in the book as slim and disheveled, a sad-eyed man with a “long yellowish face” who walks