Marieluise Fleißer (; 23 November 1901, Ingolstadt – 2 February 1974, Ingolstadt) was a German writer and playwright, most commonly associated with the aesthetic movement and style of Neue Sachlichkeit, or New Objectivity. Biography 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 in Munich, 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