“Brinkmann. brinkmann. Who is “Brinkmann anyway? Rolf Dieter Brinkmann poses this question about three-quarters of the way through Harald Bergmann’s film Brinkmanns Zorn (Brinkmann’s Rage). The German author, poet, essayist, and multimedia artist Brinkmann, the subject and in a sense coauthor of Bergmann’s genre-defying film, was an idiosyncratic figure in the West German literary scene of the 1960s and early 1970s before his untimely death in 1975. His work spans numerous genres, movements, and medial categories: from early short stories often aligned with New Realism, to pop- and beat-inspired collage poetry of the mid-1960s, and following his disillusioned retreat from West German literary circles, the move toward avant-garde filmic, sonic, and poetic experiments during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Critics and scholars have cultivated Brinkmann’s persona into an image of the rebel of the literary establishment, whose death has even been described as “à la Andy Warhol.” To an extent, this image-making impulse emerged from Brinkmann’s own performative posturing during his lifetime: Brinkmann scholarship celebrates the countless examples of his irreverent behavior, from a run-in with celebrated literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki to his recurring disruption of institutionally sponsored public readings in West Germany and America. The literary documentarian Bergmann takes as his starting point the era of Brinkmann’s increasing skepticism toward language in the late 1960s. Bergmann was initially prompted by an interest to preserve Brinkmann’s audiovisual medial estate—the Super 8 films and sound reels—from chemical decay by transferring the fragile originals to digital format; he thereupon embarked on the film project Brinkmanns Zorn with the intent of making Brinkmann’s multimedia works accessible to a wider public. In so doing, he also wished to bring to the fore a careful artistic consideration of Brinkmann’s own formal principles.

The theatrical release of the 2006 film pairs Brinkmann’s voice taped in 1973 with the writer-actor Eckhard Rhode’s reenactment of what is heard. Brinkmann’s own answer to the question posed above—“ein Fetzen,” here referencing both a material and a vocal scrap—together with the visually imaginative staging of the auditory scene exposes how self, material, and process are inextricably linked in this film.