Harry Baer turns 65
RWF’s colleague and actor of many years
Harry Baer was born Harry Zöttl on September 27, 1947 in the town of Biberach. His alias was conferred on him by Fassbinder himself with the telling statement: “A Zöttl will never be a star!”
Although Baer worked with other directors and producers after the Anti-Theater group ceased producing theater and film works, his career is unarguably marked by the continuity of his collaboration with Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Bauer remained one of the Fassbinder troupe’s core members from 1969, when he appeared in KATZELMACHER, until 1982 and Fassbinder’s final film, QUERELLE. From time to time he attempted to forge his own path, working with other filmmakers from the “Munich School” such as Michael Fengler and with the early Filmverlag der Autoren. But in the beginning there was Fassbinder! Baer originally worked with RWF as an actor, but soon took on other roles such as assistant director, studio manager, production manager, and, in the final years of Fassbinder’s life, “artistic associate.”
Harry Baer was introduced to RWF in 1968 by his classmate Rudolf Waldemar Brem, who at the time was already involved in the Action-Theater. While completing his final year of high school, Baer experienced the reorganization of the Action-Theater as the Anti-Theater and in 1969 he played the drums for the group’s production of The Beggar’s Opera. At the end of the same year, he and Fassbinder wrote the play Werewolf, a project that Fassbinder saw as reflecting his idea that a theater ensemble should also be able to “create” collective works.
The “Bear” [sic!] played his first leading role on film as Franz Biberkopf in GODS OF THE PLAGUE (1969). After working for the first time with Werner Schroeter on SALOME in 1971, Bauer went on to play another Franz for Fassbinder in the scandal-tinged film JAIL BAIT (1972). After completing the film he did not work again with Fassbinder for some time. In Hans Jürgen Syberberg’s surrealistic LUDWIG – REQUIEM FOR A VIRGIN KING (1972), Baer played the leading role as both fool and king. In 1979, shortly before beginning an intensive period of work shooting BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ, Baer appeared in Schroeter’s PALERMO ODER WOLFSBURG, which went on to win the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 1980.
Following Fassbinder’s death in June 1982, Harry Baer once again focused on acting, appearing in films by, among others,Wolf Gremm, Peter Keglevic, Mika Kaurismäki, Robert van Ackeren and Jeanine Meerapfel. Looking back on his sixty-fifth birthday, Harry Baer says: “There’s just no getting away from Fassbinder. I worked excessively with him for 14 years. These years decisively shaped me and were in this sense the most important in my life.
Baer has published two books about his time with RWF: in 1982 the biography “I can sleep when I’m dead: The breathless life of Rainer Werner Fassbinder” and in 2001 “The Mother House – Memories of the Deutsch Eiche.”
In 1992 he was a co-initiator of the Fassbinder retrospective in Berlin, which was conceived of by Juiane Lorenz, Fassbinder’s companion and now President of the Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation, together with RWF’s set designer, the Oscar-winner Rolf Zehetbauer.
Harry Baer is a member of the German Film Academy and during the 2000s established regie.de, an internet portal providing a wide range of important information, facts, contacts and news for people working and interested in film. In 2005, his particular services to German film were recognized in his home town when he was awarded the Biberach Film Festival’s honorary prize.
The team at the Fassbinder Foundation in Berlin and New York wish Harry Baer all the very best on his birthday!
Photo left: Harry Baer as Franz in GODS OF THE PLAGUE, 1969 © RWFF
Photo right: Harry Baer with his “Honorary Beaver,” 2005 © Biberach Film Festival