This was the first Fassbinder's films to get any kind of remotely mainstream distribution. It finds the autuer in an interesting transitional phase from the Bresson-by-way-of-Straub/Huillet aesthetic of his earliest films to the Sirkian melodrama of what is considered his "mature" style.
This movie is also a fascinating, rare depiction of life under the Nazis before the beginning of WWII and the horrors we most associate with the Reich. Here, the Nazi "Pioneers" are almost like New Deal-style government sponsored work crews, improving the national infrastructure. But the film repeatedly implies that the march to war and slaughter were not merely the result of orders from above but also of the overboiling ids of men injected with nationalist and militarist fantasies who had no way of fully working out their violent/sexual impulses in their own cultural milieu.
Review of Pioneers in Ingolstadt
