Pea Fröhlich turns seventy
Theater scholar, educator, psychologist and author
Behind every strong person stands another strong person who perhaps makes everything possible in the first place. Wouldn’t it be nice if a series of such relationships could become a human chain?
Today we would like to warmly wish Professor Pea Fröhlich a very happy birthday. It was Pea Fröhlich who, together with her husband, the former WDR commissioning producer and producer for Bavaria Film, Munich, Peter Märthesheimer (1937-2004), wrote the scripts for the outstanding and successful films that form RWF’s BRD Trilogy:
THE MARRIAGE OF MARIA BRAUN (1978)
LOLA (1981)
VERONIKA VOSS (1982)
It is to such strong and dramatic female figures as well as the stories of ordinary people that Pea Fröhlich has brought a genuinely literary sensibility. It is exemplified by her short story collection published in 1990 entitled “Marie steigt aus dem Fenster” (Marie Climbs Out the Window –published by Ullstein Verlag as part of the series “Frauen in der Literatur”) and already three years earlier by her collection “Zwei Frauen auf dem Weg zum Bäcker” (Two Women on the Way to the Baker’s). Apart from her employment as a scholar and professor in Munich, she published books in the field of theater studies and education, remained a collaborator as script writer for movies and TV-films with Peter Märthesheimer after Fassbinder’s death, and also published several novels, one of them is „Die Liebe zu den fahrenden Zügen” (A Love for bounding trains).
And then there is the BLOCH television- series, starting from 2002 onwards, starring the wonderful Dieter Pfaff (1947-2013) as a psychiatrist and psychotherapist. The idea for the character and the concept for what was in part a collaborative production between the german broadcasters SWR and WDR came from Peter Märthesheimer und Pea Fröhlich.
More information
The filmography of Pea Fröhlich and Peter Märthesheimer can be found at filmportal.de