Marieluise Fleißer, an underrated author, is virtually unknown in the English-speaking countries. Fleißer achieved sudden prominence in the 1920s and suffered an equally sudden silencing when the Third Reich banned her books and forbade her to write, except for a few articles and stories in newspapers and magazines. Fleißer's struggle after World War II to regain the status she had enjoyed for a short time during the Weimar period was largely unsuccessful, and it was only toward the end of her life. from 1968 to her death in 1974, that she experienced a renaissance of sorts. During this period she revised many of her works for new productions of her plays and for the 1972 three-volume edition of her collected works.

Fleißer's name is closely associated with Ingolstadt, her hometown on the Danube north of Munich. It is a Catholic town with an...