Marieluise Fleißer was one of the most talented female dramatists writing in German in the twentieth century. Such eminent theater critics of the Weimar Republic as Herbert Ihering, Alfred Kerr, and Kurt Pinthus praised her early work. Her two plays of the Weimar period are widely viewed as key sociohistorical literary documents depicting the mentality and behavior that later facilitated Adolf Hitler's election victories in the provinces. She was a collaborator of Bertolt Brecht, who credited her Pioniere in Ingolstadt (Combat Engineers in Ingolstadt; performed, 1928; published in her Gesammelte Werke [Collected Works], 1972) as the play that contributed most to his theory of epic theater. The same play, which was the most scandalous production on the German stage of the 1920s, inspired the career of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the maverick director of New German Cinema. Her plays, along with those of Ödön von Horv...