6 - Marieluise Fleisser: A Theater of the Body

Summary

Ins Theater drang ich ein als ein frecher Wicht. Ich gehörte da nicht hin, ich zählte ja nicht.

MARIELUISE FLEISSER's SENSE OF HERSELF as a foreign body in the world of theater is documented not only (as the above quotation illustrates) in her fiction, but in a theoretical text she wrote called “Über das dramatische Empfinden bei den Frauen”:

Gewiß haben wir vereinzelte Stücke von Frauen, die aber nicht besonders bekannt und wichtig geworden sind. […] für gewöhnlich bleibt es denn auch bei dem einen Versuch und die Autorin biegt wieder in das Epische aus, weil ihr das mehr liegt.

Fleisser wrote this in 1930: that is, shortly after her second play, Pioniere in Ingolstadt, had (with a good deal of stirring from Brecht) caused an explosion of critical hostility, and just after she had withdrawn her third drama, Der Tiefseefisch (which contains fairly overt criticisms of Brecht's exploitative working methods) from production at Berlin's Theater am Schiffbauerdamm. Fleisser withdrew the play on Brecht's insistence — he had been warned about its content by the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm's dramaturg, Heinrich Fischer, who was present at Fleisser's reading of the piece. After this, she did not try to write another drama for eight years; and she did not permit another performance of Pioniere for forty.

All this makes it less surprising that Fleisser, as a dramatist, should have distanced herself (along with women in general) from the genre of drama in “Über das dramatische Empfinden bei den Frauen.” She does not except herself from the generality of writing women, who — her essay argues — are more naturally drawn to narrative prose: in 1963, she said of herself “das Erzählen liegt mir wohl mehr.” Whether this is a true reflection of her literary strengths, or a notion she imbibed from early twentiethcentury critical theory (which helped critics such as Kurt Pinthus to read her stories as “wertvoller und dichterischer […] als ihre Stücke”), is a question we need to consider separately.