what happened to Fassbinder’s leading actress after his death

On December 25, Hanna Schygulla, film and theater actress, singer, main star and face of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s cinema, will celebrate her 80th birthday. Together with Fassbinder, she very early and rapidly achieved dizzying success – and after his death, she suddenly found herself faced with the need to create a completely new, unplanned life for herself. Former triumphs could easily have turned into a curse, but they did not. Hanna Schygulla turned out to be stronger than her fame and smarter than her success – that’s why today they belong to her, and not vice versa.

Text: Olga Fedyanina

No, in the sixties and seventies they did not look like people who would one day celebrate their 80th birthday. They are a clan, that group of people around Rainer Werner Fassbinder that formed in 1966-1967 and existed until June 10, 1982, that is, until the day their leader and guru was found dead. Fassbinder was 37, he looked a solid 60, death was caused by an overdose of everything that could be overdosed on. At this end there was “its own system” – for 16 years the clan lived in a state of permanent excess, loss of the sense of physical time and reality. Only under the conditions of this ongoing obsession was it possible to produce those 40-odd films that make up the filmography of Rainer Werner Fassbinder and remain to this day the platinum fund of post-war world cinema.

The female part of the clan consisted of four permanent figures – Hanna Shigulla, Margit Carstensen, Ingrid Kaven, Irm Herman – and not very numerous occasional and invited ones. Shigulla was, as they say, more important than the others in this quartet.

They met Fassbinder at a private acting school; RVF himself stayed there for two years, and Shigulla for several weeks. A couple of years later, returning home one evening, she found a note on the front door: “Will you play Antigone? Premiere in two days” – even then a mixture of provocation and seduction was his element (by the way, this was not even his production, he only assisted his future permanent composer Peer Raben). She played. It was then that Shigulla’s role was determined once and for all. The role – not in a specific, but in the most general sense of the word – as a place in Fassbinder’s artistic system.

The most conspicuous and flaunted property of this artistic system is its extremely aggressive anti-bourgeoisism. Everything bourgeois – normal, living according to the way of life and within one’s means, according to the law and by order – was fascist by default for the RVF, causing rage and melancholy. And also panic. It was the panic of a young nonconformist, an outsider who at any moment could become prey for a pack – family, work, street. But, besides this, it was not at all so demonstrative that it was also the panic of a young nonconformist who was forced to recognize in himself the traits of belonging to the same pack.

Whoever Hanna Schygulla played in Fassbinder’s work, she played a projection of this melancholy and this panic. The German dream and the German nightmare. A white-skinned, blue-eyed beast, in which simultaneously lives the demon of the sixties and a demon much more ancient and dangerous.

In early films, it is sometimes even difficult to say what, in fact, is her special place in the plot – just a blonde walking arm in arm with the hero along a city street. But in this capacity, she is obligatory and irreplaceable in RVF films – with her “bed” lazy look, with her almost sleepy sensuality, with her very bare legs carelessly exposed from under her miniskirt. And with a feeling of some hidden strength, the ability to make lightning-fast and merciless gestures and actions.

Fassbinder’s Schygulla is always both Lolita and Brünnhilde at the same time.

And her main international triumphs, Lili Marlene and Maria Brown, are two triumphs of the will: the will to self-denial and the will to live. Both are born from deeply national, mythological matter, as fascinating as it is terrifying.

Of course, they all dreamed of Hollywood. However, RVF instinctively sensed that the peculiar power of his films lies precisely in the fact that they remain German cosplay, maintaining the distance at which Hollywood is a dream and not a production reality. It was not for nothing that in Hollywood itself he revered Douglas Sirk so much, whose melodramas almost parodically embodied the “dream factory.” Fassbinder knew his place in the history of cinema – the place of a brilliant European provincial, Shigulla followed strictly the same course: cosplay – yes, transformation – no. She was terribly similar to Hollywood pin-up divas, but exactly “similar” – with mental quotation marks, with a Brechtian V-effect. Born in 1943 and 1945, both were children of surrender, and they did not renounce this surrender, they were in a sense its voice. An attempt to unconditionally join the ranks of the winners would mean giving up this voice.

The derogatory “know your place” is actually an outstanding talent and the secret of success: if you shift the emphasis to “know”.

Shigulla knew—and knows—her place like no one else.

Evidence of this is the forty-odd years that have passed since that very June 10, 1982, when the clan overnight turned into a community of orphan heirs. And when, in addition to the practical struggle for heritage, memory, rights, rentals and everything else, it was necessary to enter some unknown second circle. They had no plan for the game “after” – neither together nor apart. By the way, most of the clan turned out, against all expectations, to be quite viable and professionally wealthy.

Hanna Schygulla’s second round turned out to be paradoxical. She did something that would be unbearable for almost any person in a similar case.

Shigulla did not present her new self to the world of cinema, now free and independent. No “getting out of the shadow of the great”, no “starting again”. Hanna Schygulla took her Rainer Werner Fassbinder into her next life without trying to shake off his influence or his fame. Knowingly agreeing that interest in her is, first of all, interest in him. That almost any conversation with a journalist from now on and forever will begin and end with questions about him – she, indeed, is still able to devote an hour-long interview to a story about her relationship with the RVF and their joint work: always lively and interesting, always with with picturesque details, never with indifference or irritation. She continued to act extensively and successfully with average, good, excellent and outstanding directors: from Godard to Wajda, from Skola to Sokurov and Akin – also knowingly agreeing that they needed not (only) herself, but also that myth, the halo that Fassbinder created for her.

And what repetition Togo success and that possession will not happen again. That recognition will now be expressed in dignified state awards and generalized festival prizes “for merit,” and that these merits will always be understood first and foremost those. That her main independent achievement will be the creation of chamber chanson programs – for example, on Brecht’s poems – programs that are indeed very talented and smart, continuing the best traditions of European cabaret. And also – the reputation of a friendly, professional, reliable and absolutely decent colleague. Good man.

Today this can only be considered a successful marketing strategy, but for Hanna Schygulla it was just a very natural movement, the development of talent – not an acting one, but a human one. A living talent that does not allow the great past to destroy the ongoing present, no matter how long it lasts – at least 40, at least 80, at least 120 years.

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