Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945–82), a leading figure in the New German Cinema, plays an important role in this story for two reasons. First, the films of his middle period show how traces of the Hollywood melodrama were incorporated into the European auteur male psychological drama. Second, a number of Fassbinder’s key films attest to his importance in the emergence of queer-themed cinema, even though his contribution in this regard has tended to be overlooked. Fassbinder, like his Italian counterpart, Pier Paolo Pasolini, was strongly motivated by political concerns, affirming, “I don’t make any films which aren’t political.” Accordingly, his films deliver a scathing indictment of class pretensions, divisions, and prejudices, and it is upon this dimension that most scholarship has concentrated. Fassbinder’s films are nevertheless also deeply personal, reflecting his belief that people need “to find their own opportunities for change.” For that to happen, he said, a filmmaker needs “to translate everything into something that relate[s] to himself and his own reality.” This chapter will explore the personal dimension of Fassbinder’s by analyzing three films from his middle period.

Fassbinder’s personality is marked by paradoxes: on one hand, he sought love and respect ceaselessly; on the other, he destroyed the possibility of achieving a lasting relationship by subjecting his lovers to outrageous cruelty. He was also highly self-destructive—a masochist who could be as cruel to himself as he was to others, damaging his body with an excessive cocktail of drugs and alcohol in a way that would ultimately result in his premature death at the age of 37. At the same time as he sank into ever-deeper self-loathing, he became a cult figure for leftist radicals and members of the counterculture who rejoiced in his contestatory politics and his provocative flouting of social norms. During his short career, he made forty-four films in a mere 14 years, not to mention his writing of numerous stage plays, his essays, or his videos. In both his personal and professional life, he was driven by a need to protect himself against fears that had been generated by a traumatizing upbringing. Melodrama was the genre he chose as the vehicle for his most penetrating fictional investigations of the forces that drove him.