Ingolstädter Stücke

Fegefeuer in Ingolstadt (Purgatory in Ingolstadt) was Fleißer’s first completed play, given a single performance by Brecht’s youth company in Berlin in 1926, then lost in the back of a drawer until she was persuaded to rework it for a new production in Wuppertal in 1971.

The central characters are two teenagers, Roelle, a misfit bullied by his classmates, and Olga, who is pregnant but whose boyfriend feels he’s exhausted his responsibilities by sending her with an inadequate sum of money to a back-street abortionist who turns out to have given up business. In proper Brechtian style, there’s no real sequence of action, we get an apparently random series of scenes between different combinations of characters, some naturalistic show more and others not. There’s a lot of more-or-less biblical (or Dante?) imagery going on, and the play’s climatic moment is when we are at a fair, looking on from backstage, behind a wagon, whilst Roelle, urged on by a couple of surreal barkers, is supposed to be testifying to a hostile crowd about his encounters with angels. It doesn’t get much more Brechtian than that, does it? But of course, this is Ingolstadt, and that also means that at least one character has to end up in the Danube…

Pioniere in Ingolstadt (Sappers in Ingolstadt) was premiered in Dresden in 1928, with a revised version being produced by Brecht’s company in Berlin the following year. Fleißer revised it again for a new production in Munich in 1970. The play was very controversial, even in Weimar Berlin, because of its explicit sexual content, and the Brecht version had to be cut substantially to satisfy the censors.

The story takes as its starting point the arrival of a North German sapper regiment in Ingolstadt to build a bridge across an arm of the Danube as a training exercise (something that actually happened in 1926). Since the town has never had a garrison — and we’re in the middle of the post-WWI man-shortage — the local girls are very excited by the arrival of all those soldiers. But this isn’t a Jane Austen story: what they are looking for is the opportunity for some straightforward non-binding sexual fun. And it’s not long before the maidservants Alma and Berta have snagged themselves some choice men in uniform. But things are complicated by a bullying sergeant, and by the young men of the local swimming club, who seize the opportunity to steal some wood from the bridge site to repair their crumbling jetty. Fleißer doesn’t take any prisoners, and nothing and no-one comes out of the exercise entirely intact, least of all the notion that there is such a thing as provincial respectability. show less