Buying Brass, Scrapping Iron: Brecht’s Messingkauf and Fassbinder’s Acht Stunden sind kein Tag

This article investigates Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1972 television series Acht Stunden sind kein Tag and its relationship to the bourgeois genre of the “family series” through the theoretical lens of Bertolt Brecht’s Messingkauf. Rather than tracing the general influence that Brecht had on Fassbinder, the author argues that the central metaphor of the brass purchase, which Brecht used to illustrate the appropriation and repurposing of artistic means of production, provides insight into the political aesthetics of Fassbinder’s attempt to use the popular TV format of the family series for utopian ideological ends. Brecht’s theoretical fragment, which Fassbinder most likely never read, provides an analytical tool for understanding mass media formats and illuminates both the possibilities and limitations of Fassbinder’s ambition to infiltrate and influence bourgeois households via the West German public broadcasting system.