In spite of all the worthless junk that is shown daily on German commercial TV stations, the German production of TV series has played a revolutionary role in the genesis of the genre in Europe.
In the age of commercialized domestic television programming, the mention of German TV series awakens mental associations of Hollywood-like babes shooting at everything around them, like those we see on RTL and other satellite channels. However, German television history has seen better days. In spite of all the worthless junk that is shown daily on German commercial TV stations, the German production of TV series has played a revolutionary role in the genesis of the genre in Europe. At the time of their emergence, German TV series threatened the dominant British TV company Channel 4, which was the top producer of quality European television programming. The two Germans who had the strongest influence in the creation of German TV series were Edgar Reitz and Reiner Werner Fassbinder. Reitz is the author of the monumental epic saga Heimat, whose third part (which lasts 680 minutes) was shown on this year’s Mostra in Venice (code: Heimat 3: Kronik einer Zeitenwende). The other German is the author of the legendary TV series Berlin Alexanderplatz consisting of thirteen parts and a two-hour-long epilogue. Although Fassbinder’s truest fans would later find him in the darkness of art theatres, at the time of that TV series’ creation, this director was just too radical for the conventional TV standards of that time.
“Why did Berlin disappear from Berlin Alexanderplatz?”, wondered Peter Jelavich in his essay “The City Vanishes”, making an allusion to the original film adaptation of the same Döblin’s novel, by Piel Jutzi, who got rid of Berlin’s local color and moral critique. Fassbinder, on the other hand, in his version of Döblin’s novel, emphasized his hero, Franz Biberkopf’s biggest flaw: the quasi-sexual obsession with the “snake soul” of the psychotic pimp Reinhold. Eva, Lina and Mieze, the girls that Franz meets during his gloomy life, are his angel protectors.
Fassbinder’s approach to the story is surprisingly naturalistic, and his phantasmagoria explodes in the magnificent epilogue in which he presents his own disturbing fantasies about his hero. At this point, the author’s grand intimate finale becomes a time bomb that forces viewers to rethink everything they have seen in previous episodes. Only then do we realize that Fassbinder’s series is not simply a composition about a town. If Jutzi’s bleek adaptation from 1931 can be called “Berlin in absentia”, then what Fassbinder made can freely be renamed to “Berlin Fassbinderplatz”. (Dragan Rubeša)