Rainer Werner Fassbinder - Early Life

Early Life

Fassbinder was born in Bavaria in the small town of Bad Wörishofen, on May 31, 1945, three weeks after the Americans entered the town and the unconditional surrender of Germany. The aftermath of World War II deeply marked his childhood and the life of his family. Fassbinder, in compliance with his mother's wishes, later altered the date of his birthday to 1946 in order to enhance his status as a cinematic prodigy. It was towards his death that his real age was revealed confronting his passport.

Born into a cultured bourgeois family, Fassbinder had an unconventional childhood about which he would later express grievances in interviews. At three months, he was left with a paternal uncle and aunt in the country, since his parents feared he would not survive the winter with them. The child was a year old when he was returned to his parents.

Fassbinder’s mother, Liselotte Pempeit (1922–93), came from Danzig (now Gdańsk), from which many ethnic Germans had fled following the occupation of Poland by the Soviet Union. As a result, a number of her relatives came to live with them in Munich. From 1946–1951, Fassbinder lived with both of his parents; he was their only child. His father, Helmut Fassbinder, a doctor with a surgery at his apartment in Sendlinger Strasse, near Munich’s red light district, saw his career as the means to indulge his passion for writing poetry. The doctor, who had two sons from a previous marriage, did not take much interest in the child, and neither did his mother, who helped her husband in his medical practice. Prostitutes came to Helmut Fassbinder for the medical check-up they were required to have so his son became used to seeing these women and, "he would go on feeling that there was nothing wrong or abnormal in prostitution." The extended family disbanded in 1951 and the child, age six, was left alone with his mother after his parent's divorce that same year.

Helmut moved to Cologne and Liselotte raised her son as a single parent. To provide for them, she rented out rooms and found employment as a translator, but tuberculosis kept her away for long periods while she recuperated. Rainer was looked after by his mother's tenants and friends, but he became more independent and uncontrollable. Fassbinder spent time in the streets, sometimes playing with other boys, sometimes just watching events around him. He clashed with his mother's younger lover Siggi, who lived with them when Rainer was eight or nine years old. He had a similar difficult relationship with the much older journalist Wolff Eder (c1905-71), who became his stepfather in 1959. Liselotte, who worked as an English- German translator, could not concentrate with her son around her and Fassbinder was often given money to go to the cinema. Later in life, he would claim that he saw a film nearly every day and sometimes as many as three or four. "The cinema was the family life I never had at home."

His time at a boarding school was marred by his repeated escape and he left school before any final examinations. At the age of 15, he moved to Cologne to stay with his father, but they argued frequently. He stayed though for a couple of years while attending night school, and earned a living on small jobs and helping his father, who rented shabby apartments to immigrant workers. At this time, Fassbinder wrote short plays, poems and short stories. Early in his adolescence, Fassbinder identified himself as homosexual.