Rainer Werner Fassbinder
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50 free Rainer Werner Fassbinder trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder worked as if he knew time was short. In little more than a decade he wrote, directed and often acted in dozens of features and television dramas, turning Hollywood melodrama into a sharp portrait of post-war West Germany and its outsiders: guest workers, lonely wives, hustlers and dreamers. This quiz walks through the Fassbinder movies people still look for, including Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, The Marriage of Maria Braun, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, Fox and His Friends, Berlin Alexanderplatz and Querelle. Expect questions on plots and characters, the regular actors and crew around him, the directors and writers he borrowed from, the prizes and the scandals. It suits repertory regulars and film students, but the early rounds are friendly to anyone who has seen one or two of the films. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you will leave with a watchlist.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which make of sports car did Fassbinder buy four times in a single year for his lover, the actor Günther Kaufmann?
Lamborghini
Lamborghini was the gift each time, and Kaufmann wrecked one and sold the others. Fassbinder kept casting him anyway, in 14 films.
Q 02Fassbinder's The Marriage of Maria Braun ends on the day West Germany beats Hungary to win which 1954 trophy?
The World Cup
The World Cup final of 1954 is being played as Maria's home blows up in a gas explosion. The film, Fassbinder's greatest success, treats her rise as a parable of West Germany's boom.
Q 03Lilo Pempeit, cast by Fassbinder in Effi Briest and many of his other films, was which relative of the director?
His mother
His mother, a translator, took the first of her many small parts in a 1967 short. After his death she set up the foundation that looks after his films.
Q 04Which cinematographer shot Fassbinder's The Marriage of Maria Braun before filming Goodfellas for Martin Scorsese?
Michael Ballhaus
Michael Ballhaus first worked with Fassbinder on the western Whity. His own small castle later served as the country estate in one of their films together.
Q 05Fassbinder's television special Like a Bird on a Wire borrows its title from a song by which Canadian singer-songwriter?
Leonard Cohen
Leonard Cohen's song closes the programme, a forty-minute cabaret of ballads from the 1940s and 1950s. Fassbinder had already filled an earlier film with tracks from Cohen's first album.
Q 06Fassbinder said he hoped his films would add up to what, with some as cellars, others as walls or windows?
A house
A house was his image for a body of work that passed forty films in about fifteen years. He often finished four or five a year by skipping rehearsals and keeping the first take.
Q 07Which Fassbinder film about a singer in Nazi Germany takes its title from the wartime song that makes her famous?
Lili Marleen
Lili Marleen is the song that turns the heroine into the darling of the armed forces. Fassbinder shot the big-budget international production in English.
Q 08Which British playwright wrote the script of Despair, Fassbinder's first English-language film, from a Nabokov novel?
Tom Stoppard
Tom Stoppard wrote it for what was then Fassbinder's most expensive film, at $2.6 million. His earlier films had each cost under $300,000.
Q 09In Fassbinder's Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, the cleaning lady Emmi marries a much younger guest worker from which country?
Morocco
Morocco is Ali's homeland in the film, where he is played by El Hedi ben Salem, Fassbinder's partner at the time. Fassbinder planned the quick, low-budget shoot as an exercise between two bigger productions.
Q 10Which top prize of the Berlin Film Festival did Fassbinder finally win in 1982, a few months before his death?
Golden Bear
The Golden Bear had eluded him in 1979, when he expected it for his biggest hit and saw his lead actress honoured instead. His winner was a drama about a fading, drug-dependent film star.
Q 11Fassbinder, Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders were leading directors of which film movement of the 1960s and 1970s?
New German Cinema
New German Cinema grew from young directors' rejection of the commercial West German film industry. Fassbinder's death in 1982 is often treated as the end of the movement.
Q 12Fassbinder grew up, led his experimental theatre troupe and died at the age of 37 in which German city?
Munich
Munich was home from infancy, though he was born in the small town of Bad Wörishofen. He is buried in the city's Bogenhausen cemetery.
Q 13In Fassbinder's The Merchant of Four Seasons, what does the former Foreign Legionnaire Hans sell on his street rounds?
Fruit
Q 21What is the profession of the title character in Fassbinder's all-female drama The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant?
Fashion designer
Fashion designer Petra never leaves her apartment in the film, which has no men in it at all. Fassbinder adapted it from his own stage play.
Q 22Fassbinder shot his western Whity in which country, on locations built for the films of Sergio Leone?
Spain
Spain's Almería region hosted a shoot that was traumatic for cast and crew. The film became his biggest flop and went all but unseen until the 1990s.
Q 23Which novelist wrote the 1929 book that Fassbinder turned into his 14-part television epic Berlin Alexanderplatz?
Alfred Döblin
Fruit gives the film its title, the French expression for a street seller of fresh produce. It was Fassbinder's first commercial success at home.
Q 14Which actress, a Fassbinder regular since their drama-school days, won Berlin's best actress prize as Maria Braun?
Hanna Schygulla
Hanna Schygulla got the part only after talks with Romy Schneider broke down. It ended a rift of several years that had opened on the set of an earlier costume drama.
Q 15In Fox and His Friends, how does the out-of-work carnival performer played by Fassbinder himself suddenly become rich?
Wins the lottery
Fox wins the lottery, taking 500,000 marks that his elegant new lover then drains away. Fassbinder dedicated the film to his own partner, Armin Meier.
Q 16Ali: Fear Eats the Soul won Fassbinder the international critics' prize at which film festival in 1974?
Cannes
Cannes also gave the film its Ecumenical Jury prize. Shot on a very low budget, it became Fassbinder's first international success.
Q 17Fassbinder's static, stylised early films drew on the alienation effect devised by which German playwright?
Bertolt Brecht
Bertolt Brecht's theories shaped the austere, minimalist style of his first ten films. Audiences found them too demanding, and wider success came only once he turned to melodrama.
Q 18Which French New Wave director, whose star Anna Karina later acted for Fassbinder, strongly influenced his early films?
Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard's influence was strongest on the austere films of 1969 to 1971. A leading New York critic later ranked Fassbinder as the most original filmmaker to emerge since the Frenchman.
Q 19In Rio das Mortes, Fassbinder plays a leather-jacketed youth as the heroine dances to a jukebox hit by which singer?
Elvis Presley
Elvis Presley's Jailhouse Rock plays on the jukebox in a scene that has nothing to do with the plot. It is the best-remembered moment of a slight comedy about a treasure hunt in Peru.
Q 20Which Hamburg-born director of Hollywood melodramas such as Imitation of Life became Fassbinder's model after 1971?
Douglas Sirk
Douglas Sirk showed him that small people and their emotions could be big on screen. Fassbinder turned to the émigré's work during an eight-month break from filming.
Alfred Döblin's novel was a book Fassbinder first read at 14 and said helped him survive puberty. His adaptation runs to about 15 hours.
Q 24In Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz, what does the ex-convict hero lose after his best friend Reinhold turns on him?
An arm
An arm is the price of the friendship, and Reinhold later murders the hero's girlfriend as well. Fassbinder set the bond between the two men against the rising tide of Nazism.
Q 25Fassbinder's Lola loosely adapts the Heinrich Mann novel that Josef von Sternberg had filmed in 1930 under which title?
The Blue Angel
The Blue Angel moves to post-war West Germany in his version, where an upright building commissioner falls for the mistress of a corrupt developer. It belongs to his BRD Trilogy.
Q 26Fassbinder died in 1982 beside his notes for a planned film about which Polish-German revolutionary socialist?
Rosa Luxemburg
Rosa Luxemburg was to be the subject, and the notes lay next to him when his partner found him. He had gone to bed to read with the television on.
Q 27In Katzelmacher, Fassbinder plays the immigrant worker who unsettles an idle clique, a newcomer from which country?
Greece
Greece is home to Jorgos, whose arrival stirs curiosity in the women and hostility in the men. Fassbinder expanded the film from his own forty-minute play.
Q 28Which two-part television film about a computer-simulated reality was Fassbinder's only venture into science fiction?
World on a Wire
World on a Wire was shot on 16 mm during a pause in another production. Its artificial people, who long to reach real life, anticipated Blade Runner.
Q 29Fassbinder spent two years filming Effi Briest, a tale of a ruined Prussian marriage by which 19th-century novelist?
Theodor Fontane
Theodor Fontane's own words supply the dialogue and the narration, which Fassbinder read himself. He called it his dream film and gave it 58 shooting days, against his usual nine to twenty.
Q 30Which 1955 Hollywood melodrama, where a television set is a key symbol, inspired Fassbinder's Ali: Fear Eats the Soul?
All That Heaven Allows
All That Heaven Allows is echoed most openly when the heroine's son kicks in her television on learning of the marriage. Critics hailed Fassbinder's version as one of the best films of 1974.