Dreams with open eyes

Juliane Lorenz (left) and Hanna Schygulla in the stables

"It was like dreaming with open eyes," said Hanna Schygulla remembers her time with Rainer Werner Fassbinder. An evening at the Munich Royal Stables in the weekend, "Cooper - still alive" was the era of anti-teater reflected.

The evening was part of a weekend, which dealt with the artist, who died 30 years ago. The actress Hanna Schygulla and Irm Hermann, both co-founders of Fassbinder antiteater, Juliane Lorenz, editor of many of Fassbinder's films and life partner to death of the director, film scholar Michael Töteberg and Claudia Blank, director of the German Theatre Museum in Munich, discussed on Saturday evening about the radical theater work the director.

It all begins in 1967 in the Munich Müllerstraße in Action Theatre. There, now housing a video arcade in the late 1960s avant-garde theater is here at home, a contrast to the great stages of the city. This does Fassbinder his first role in "Antigone," here he has for the first time as co-director of Büchner's "Leonce and Lena". Have read "All children of the world would" Leonce and Lena "by Georg Büchner: The feature is initially less than enthusiastic. You should only do not always public. This piece is beautiful, "blasphemes the Sueddeutsche Zeitung.

In this piece, a woman enters the stage of the theater Actions that will be later on Fassbinder muse Hanna Schygulla. She then studied philology in the ninth semester at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University. But the study does not fill it out, so she takes acting classes at night, where he met Cooper, is fascinated by him, the man who walks around in a leather jacket and Goethe admired. Very physical making the theater was the exact opposite to the constant analysis of the studies that she was sorry. Also Irm Herrmann tells how much she had impressed the first encounter with Fassbinder: For several hours he reads to her from a novel. You, the first civil works as a secretary comes over him into acting.

In June 1968, must include the action-theater due to financial difficulties. A little later, Cooper founded the group with his antiteater. Staged plays like Goethe's "Iphigenie en Tauride" will, Handke's "cries for help" and "Preparadise Sorry Now" by the master himself some time rehearsing the troops in the back room of the Wicked Witch pub in Schwabing. But the host throws out the troops. Lucrative customers is paramount. But even that does not paralyze the playfulness of the force. One guest in the workroom of the Chamber of games with "Anarchy in Bavaria." Cooper is at the Bremer Theater, considered then as the most innovative theater of the Federal Republic, brought, brings "The Coffeehouse" by Goldoni on stage. But at some point reaches the theater no longer Fassbinder: 1969 celebrates his first feature film "Love Is Colder Than Death" debut. The underground scene has arrived on the movie screen.