bridge to nowhere
by Douglas Messerli
Rainer
Werner Fassbinder (teleplay, based on a play by Marieluise Fleißer, Rainer Werner
Fassbinder (director) Pioniere in Ingolstadt
(Pioneers in Ingolstadt) / 1971
Television movie
Marieluise
Fleißer, a German playwright of the 1920s,
might be forgotten today were it not for two notable figures of drama,
Bertolt Brecht, who encouraged her to write her second play, after her first, Purgatory in Ingolstadt was performed in
1924—also collaborating with her and directing it in its 1928 premiere in Dresden,
without, evidently, completely taking credit for the work as he did with so
many other female collaborators. The play, set in 1926, was described as a
comedy in 14 scenes, but clearly presented such a dark vision of early pre-Nazi
activities that the work outraged the citizens of her Bavarian community and
was censured by the National Socialists, particularly when it was reproduced at
the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in Berlin in March and April of 1929.
Indeed, the play might have been forgotten
were not for its rediscovery in the 1970s, after Fleißer had attempted to again
revise it, by theater director Peter Stein and playwright Franz Xavier Kroetz.
Fassbinder’s 1971 adaptation of the play for television radically shifts the
time frame of the work, alternating through its costumes, dialogue, and sets
between a kind of pre-World War II small town society and a post-war outpost
wherein the nebulous “pioneers”—obviously reminding everyone in German culture
of the pre-Hitler Jugend groups (akin the Soviet inspired “pioneers”). If these
figures are represented by men instead of adolescent boy-scout-like youths,
they are nonetheless almost as ridiculously innocent and inexperienced as boys,
and what they discover is not something of the future but what exists already
in the past.
The girls of this world, mostly serving
women of the small community, desperate to find love and freedom, are equally
childlike, represented by Berta (Hanna Schygalla) and the far less intelligent
Frieda (Carla Egerer). Similarly, Karl (Korl in the original) (Harry Baer), and
the wealthy industrialist’s son, Fabian (Rudolf Waldemar Brem), if not exactly
innocent, have no idea how to function in the world in which they have
discovered themselves. Set against these figures’ clumsy explorations of love
and search for significance, are those who demonstrate their experience such as
Berta’s friend Alma (Irm Hermann) and Karl’s friend, Max (Günther Kaufmann) or assert
power such as the Pioneer regiment’s Sergeant (Klaus Löwitsch) and Fabian’s
father, Unertl. The battles between these two groups of beings, played out
mostly in a fog of alcohol and sexual desire which erupts from time to time
into overt lust and violence, is the perfect Fassbinder Anschauung conveying, through the petty and insignificant
activities of these backwater types, the larger issues of misogynism, sadism,
sexism, and class consciousness that perverts the whole culture.
To
Ingolstadt the Pioneers have come to build a bridge, but not, as Fassbinder
wryly points out, a grand structure as in David Lean’s Bridge on the River Kwai, not even a sturdy, well- constructed
structure such as the one across which we see characters walking early in the
film, but a small, poorly designed wooden crossing that seems to go nowhere and
to have little purpose, except as a location for the young sex-craved girls to
gather to pick out which of the pioneers most appeals to then. Local
businesses have banded together to provide the lumber (even though they steal
some of it back each night), expressing a grandiose such of largesse without
costing them a cent. 
Unertl and his son Fabian, serving as
stand-ins for the local gentry, make it quite clear why the young maidens of
this village rush into the arms of handsome strangers. Unertl is not only a
misogynist pig, having already gone through a series of wives and mistresses,
but is a crude beast whom even his son cannot abide. Yet Fabian, a slightly
overweight imbecile who might be described as a mamma’s boy, is frightened not
only by his father and their serving woman, Berta, but by nearly everyone in
town. In the end, using Berta simply as a way to obtain a car his father has
promised him if he could get the girl on a date, Fabian proves that his only
capabilities lay in petty acts of revenge against the town’s visitors
(loosening a connecting beam from the bridge from which the petulant, masochistic
Sergeant falls) and planning for the destruction of the bridge by dynamite. The
fact that his acts end in a series of torturous nighttime drills for the young
Pioneers, results in their revenge instead of his, a brutal scene akin to the
extenuated death scene in Fassbinder’s The
American Soldier (see My Year ), except that, instead of representing a
kind of homoerotic dance, the violence here is performed with Judo-like chops,
as the “pioneers” deck Fabian again and again, only to stand him up temporarily before sending him into another
fall. And, in this sense, his beating stands for a kind of absurd resurrection,
For, when they are finished with him, Alma—having been rejected by all the
would-be soldiers—rushes to his side, suggesting she will show him how to make
love, and, accordingly, establish a place for herself in the future society
once the Pioneers abandon the town.
Most of Pioneers in Ingolstadt, however, is presented as a world in stasis,
rather than action, in part because none of the things the girls are truly seeking
will ever be found. Most of these poor working girls, unlike Alma, give
themselves freely in sex in hopes of finding love and, in their dreamlike
fantasies, potential husbands. But, of course, that is impossible, as the
introverted Karl keeps trying to make clear to the purest of the Ingolstadt
women, Berta, perhaps the only virgin in this small outpost. The innocent yet intelligent
Berta, wants its all: love, a husband, and future in which she will be
transported from the world which she now inhabits.
Narcissistic and selfish—a role in which
the handsome Baer seems to specialize—there is still enough kindness and
empathy in Karl that he attempts, again and again, to explain to the
disbelieving girl that he—and, for that matter, the entire male species—is no
good. His specialty, it appears, is fathering unwanted children in all the
towns which the Pioneers have visited, and, accordingly, he is one of the most disillusioned
of all of Fassbinder’s figures, recognizing his position on the military totem
pole, but also realizing the frailty of all ideas of power. He plots and, with
others, actualizes the death of the tyrant Sergeant. And, although he tries
hard to dissociate himself from Berta, in the end he uses her, violating her
virginity at the very moment he is about to leave her behind.
Berta’s first reaction after their sexual intercourse
is so painfully expressive in its understatement that it nearly burns the words
in our ears: “Is that all?” For Berta it is not simply a Peggy Lee-like plaint
for the lack of meaning in life— “Is that all there is?”—but is a desperate
plea for life to offer more than the backside of a departing “Pioneer.” Berta
ends her scene by crying out in a prone position that can only remind one of
Petra Kant’s “bitter tears” of a year later in Fassbinder’s film chronology. 
For Ingolstadt’s desperate women and even
the equally abused military boys, sex is merely a surrogate for something they
know they can never attain, physical and spiritual intercourse that might
transform their lives. In one of the most amazing scenes of this often
melodramatic expression of Fassbinder’s concerns, the characters sit around a
bar in desultory, drunken positions, some figures alone, others in deep
embrace, some reaching out for a simple touch, others retreating in despair
while the camera nervously pans the room—the effect of which, in many respects,
reminds one of Visconti’s gay military orgy in The Damned (which I describe below), filmed just two years before Pioneers. It is almost as if Fassbinder’s
camera were itself attempting to find someone in the room to approach, to hold
onto, or simply to touch, some other being to serve as a bridge, no matter how
short and insignificant, to a better future. Unfortunately, as Berta discovers,
there is only this place, this terrifying now—a hellhole from
which there is no exit. As Alma has already comprehended, it is better to grab
on quick to the empty figures who remain in Ingolstadt after the Pioneers have
gone.
Los Angeles,
February 2, 2015
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