Born in Ingolstadt in 1901 to Anna and Heinrich Fleißer, a smith and hardware store owner, Fleißer was sent to a Catholic convent school in Regensburg for her education, an experience which would later be reflected in her first novel
Ein Zierde für den Verein: Roman vom Rauchen, Sporteln, Lieben und Verkaufen (1931)
. In 1919, she enrolled at the
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, where she studied German literature, philosophy, and theater under
Arthur Kutscher, the founder of theater studies in Germany and an influential critic and historian of literature; during this period, her first time living on her own, she began writing short stories, such as "Meine Zwillingsschwester Olga," which would be her first publication in 1923. It is during her time as a young student in
Munich that Fleißer befriended
Lion Feuchtwanger and, through him,
Bertolt Brecht, with whom she would collaborate on her playwriting and theatrical productions throughout the 1920s. Brecht would subsequently help her throughout the decade to secure publishing opportunities and support for her plays; conversely, Brecht often felt the liberty, without her permission, to revise and take from her work, which caused considerable strain on their relationship as well as Fleißer's reputation. Due to financial difficulties and the pressure of her father, who wanted her to become a teacher, Fleißer returned to Ingolstadt in 1924, where she would remain until moving to
Berlin in 1926. What was a personally fraught time for the young author was artistically rich, as Fleißer wrote her first major play that would ensure her breakthrough in Weimar Germany,
Fegefeuer in Ingolstadt (
Purgatory in Ingolstadt) (1926). Her first success was followed by a second,
Pioniere in Ingolstadt (Pioneers in Ingolstadt) (1929), which scandalized the public through Brecht's unauthorized changes, transforming the piece into an explicitly anti-militaristic and sexually daring satire of
petit bourgeois mores and small-town life. Discussed in many of the major German newspapers of the time, the scandal caused an uproar in her hometown: the mayor published a rebuttal, distancing the city from its now most famous daughter, while Fleißer's father temporarily disowned her. During this tumultuous period, which would prove to be the apex of her fame during her lifetime, Fleißer also published a collection of short stories,
Ein Pfund Orangen (A Pound of Oranges, 1929), and became engaged to a local swimming star in Ingolstadt, Bepp Haindl, which was later called off in 1929. After moving to Berlin, she worked as a freelance journalist and author, publishing a travelogue about her journey to
Andorra with her then fiancé, the arch-conservative journalist and poet
Hellmut Draws-Tychsen. She sunk further into intellectual and social isolation and financial troubles due to her liaison with the notorious conservative, and her subsequent works published in the early 1930s, such as the novel
Ein Zierde für den Verein was met with tepid reviews and sales. This culminated in an attempted suicide in 1932 and her move back to Ingolstadt, where she married her first fiancé, the shop owner Bepp Haindl, who forbid her from writing and demanded that she work in his tobacco shop; her fall into contemporary obscurity was sealed in 1935, when was she partially forbidden to write by the
Nazis due to her leftist political sympathies and innovative modernist style. The 1930s and 1940s were a difficult period for Fleißer, who suffered from mental illness and unhappiness caused by the stresses and deprivations of war and the work demands placed on her by her husband; after the fall of the
Third Reich in 1945, she managed to write little, such as the play
Karl Stuart (1944). It was only from the mid-1950s onwards that Fleißer began her gradual reemergence as a known and celebrated writer. After the death of her husband in 1958, she began writing in earnest again, such as the short story "Avantgarde" (1963) and the play
Der starke Stamm (1966), which premiered at the
Schaubühne in West Berlin. Awarded a literary prize by the
Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts in 1953 and invited to join in 1954, Fleißer was "rediscovered" by a trio of famous young male playwrights and critics,
Rainer Werner Fassbinder,
Martin Sperr, and
Franz Xaver Kroetz (whom she nicknamed her "sons"), who brought her major works of fiction and theater back into the public eye throughout the 1960s and 1970s. For example,
Pioneers in Ingolstadt was adapted as a TV film by Fassbinder in 1971. Upon the publication of her complete works,
Gesammelte Werke (1972), by the renowned
Suhrkamp Verlag, she was awarded the
Bavarian Order of Merit in 1973, before dying on February 2, 1974. ==Work==