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Rediscovering "Berlin Alexanderplatz"

Berlinale Pays Homage to Fassbinder's Forgotten 15-Hour Classic

By Cameron Abadi in Berlin

It flopped as a German TV mini-series in the 1980s, but now Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 15-hour adaptation of "Berlin Alexanderplatz" has been restored to its orginal glory and is finally getting the recognition it deserves.

When the lights went up in Berlin's Volksbühne Theater at 3:20 a.m. on Monday morning, there were a lot of tired faces and not a few people sprawled in the aisles. No wonder -- the dedicated filmgoers had been there since 10 a.m. the previous morning, watching a 15-hour film adaptation of the novel "Berlin Alexanderplatz." Over 450 all-tickets had been sold for the unique event, a highlight of the Berlinale, Berlin's annual international film festival.

The audience, which ranged from teenage punks to heavyset men in jogging suits to elderly couples, managed to struggle to their feet to give a standing ovation in absentia to the film's late director, the legendary German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder, before filing into the lounge area of the east Berlin theater to accept a complimentary glass of champagne.

The film got a very different reception when it was first shown in 1980, as a mini-series on German television, flopping with critics and viewers alike. The Berlinale screening of the painstakingly restored 15-hour epic is something of a rehabilitation for the film, which has been rarely shown since its disappointing debut.

Of the hundreds of films being shown at this year's Berlinale, festival director Dieter Kosslick has reserved his most effusive praise for "Berlin Alexanderplatz," declaring the movie "a sure classic and a distinct honor to have at the festival." By prominently screening the movie for the first time in Germany since it aired on national television in the early 1980s, Kosslick has given his fellow Germans a second chance to honor the masterpiece, and to posthumously recognize its creator.

Descent into chaos

With "Berlin Alexanderplatz," Rainer Werner Fassbinder realized his lifelong dream to film an adaptation of Alfred Doeblin's acclaimed 1929 modernist novel of the same name. The story follows the misadventures of Franz Biberkopf after his release from prison into the chaos of Weimar Republic-era Berlin. Over the course of the 14-part mini-series, Biberkopf feverishly zig-zags between lives of crime and honesty, until he finally, in a fit of despair, gives up on love, friendship and the world and is incarcerated in a psychiatric institution -- a departure from the happy ending of the novel.

The movie was finished after a year of furious work in the hothouse atmosphere -- replete with long days and heavy drinking -- for which Fassbinder was notorious. But, despite the director's great personal investment in the project, the film's original run on the German small screen was shaky. Critics at the time were quick to dismiss the project with its unprecedented 13 million deutsche mark price tag, while many viewers complained that the film was -- literally -- too dark. The film has kept a low profile in the country ever since.

Juliana Lorenz, president of the Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation and initiator of the re-mastering, told SPIEGEL ONLINE in an interview that Fassbinder had long been held responsible for technical problems that were not his fault. "The technology in the television studios just wasn't adequate at the time," she says. In addition, she points out that most people in Germany at that time still had black and white television sets, which meant the color movie looked too dark on the small screen: "Of course they couldn't tell what was happening."

Lukewarm reception

Fassbinder's movie owes its reputation as a masterpiece to enthusiastic receptions in other countries, above all to an extended run in the early 1980s in the United States. "People in New York said it was the best thing that they had ever seen," says the 77-year-old actor Gunter Lamprecht, who played the lead role of sad sack Franz Biberkopf. "After the lukewarm reviews in Germany, I was thinking 'Maybe I should just stay here.'"

Lorenz, for her part, says she's never been surprised by the cool reception in Germany, suggesting that Europeans often hesitate to embrace artists from their own country. "If you go to Sweden, and you try telling them about their great director Ingmar Bergmann, they'll say, 'Yeah, he's OK, but...' That's how Germans responded to Fassbinder."

Fassbinder's reputation has also suffered from the politicization of his work. By the time of his death in 1982 at the age of 37, he had become a symbol of the leftist cultural and political upheavals of the 1970s. "When the country settled into the long, conservative period in the 80s and 90s with Helmut Kohl, the New German Cinema movement came to an end and Fassbinder was totally forgotten," Lorenz says.

And so, while the director has received major retrospectives in the 1990s in the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, he has remained largely a cult figure in Germany in recent years, remembered for challenging authority, living dangerously and dying young. But, according to Lamprecht, Fassbinder can and should be serving as a greater inspiration for younger filmmakers: "He was spontaneous, never predictable, full of energy -- and you could tell that he invested all of his talent in the finished product."

Getting the red-carpet treatment, finally

The Berlinale has certainly made an effort to clear up the ambiguous German relationship to Fassbinder. At the red-carpet premiere on Friday night, where the first two parts of the series were shown, Germany's Culture Minister Bernd Neumann proclaimed, "Rainer Werner Fassbinder is one of the most important German artists ever." At the conclusion of the event, a collection of actors and producers of "Berlin Alexanderplatz" assembled on stage, and the audience gave an extended series of standing ovations.

Though the Berlinale is only the first leg of a planned world-wide distribution of the newly re-mastered "Berlin Alexanderplatz", Lorenz says that this sort of reception makes Berlin the most meaningful stop of the tour: "This is where Fassbinder deserves to be best known," she says.

Important as it is, though, to restore Fassbinder's reputation, it has involved the slow process of correcting decades' worth of accumulated misperceptions. "The worst thing," Lorenz says, "has been having to tell people that this new version, and not the low-quality cut they saw on black-and-white television in the 1980s, is the authentic film."

Lorenz wryly jokes, though, that perhaps today's German audience will have an easier time identifying with the storyline and the personal and economic troubles of its protagonist: "Back in the 1980s, no one had unemployment problems like the ones faced by Franz Biberkopf."