ht, television writer, and radio writer. He produced and edited films, composed music and wrote songs. By the mid-1970s, he had made nearly 30 features in a variety of genres: gangster films, political satire, screwball comedy, adaptations of classical literature, science fiction, a Western, and a number of domestic melodramas. Fassbinder is closely identified with the New German Cinema, and his 1973 film Fear Eats the Soul brought the New German Cinema to the attention of a wider public outside West Germany (Sandford 63-64).
He was born in 1946 at a small spa in southwestern Bavaria. His father was a doctor and his mother a translator. His childhood was filled with literature and art, but still it was a lonely childhood. His parents divorced in 1951, and the boy stayed with his mother. She left him largely to his own devices, sending him off to the movies whenever possible: "Fassbinder's childhood clearly left its mark on him and his films: the cold, lonely lives of his characters and their desperate longing for love and affection are a reflection of his own early experience"
Fassbinder was educated at a Rudolf Steiner school and then at secondary schools in Augsburg and Munich before leaving school in 1964, after which he took on a number of different jobs, including office work, decorating, and a post in the archives of the Snddeutsche Zeitung. He began attending a private drama school, and in 1967 he joined one of the fringe theater groups in Munich, the action-theater, where he first acted in, then directed, then wrote adaptations of various plays. His first original play was Katzelmacher, which he would later make into his second feature film. Sandford notes that "the action-theater was very much of its time, anarchic, subversive, and critical, reflecting and reacting to the events of the day" (64).
The police closed the theater on an excuse, first claiming faulty electrical cables and then claiming that...