According to Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the mother of the (German) nation was not Inge Meisel, but Brigitte Mira. She was already 64 old and 59 years on stage and in film, when she had her break-trough in Fassbinders "Ali: Fear eats the soul" (1974) for which she got the "Filmband In Gold" in 1974. One year later, she also played the main role in Fassbinder's anti-communist drama "Mother Küsters goes to heaven". Shortly before, in occasion of her 65th birthday, Fassbinder filmed a "show" as it is called, "Like a Bird on a wire", approximately 40 minutes long, and which shows Brigitte Mira telling out of her life, drinking (what she loved), but most of all singing her "couplets", especially in the circle of homosexuals. Amongst the guests we see Kurt Raab who also was responsible for the decoration in this movie.
Brigitte Mira was basically a cabaret singer or "Operet Soubrette", as she called herself, but she appeared through the decades in innumerable short, yet characteristic roles mainly in comedies and Heimatfilms. In the present "show", she likes to present herself as aged "Femme Fatale", coquetting especially with very young men and glamorously stylized like a fairground-lady. F.ex., she asks one man of a homosexual couple about his partner: "Do you still need him?" - Answer: "Yes!!" - Mira: "Ahh, too bad ...!". This may be a side that nobody would have expected from her who had only seen her in the two mentioned major long films under the direction of Fassbinder. In an interview, actually her last one, printed in the year of her death with 95 years in the memorial volume "Das Ganz Normale Chaos/The Quite Normal Chaos" (ed. Juliane Lorenz, Berlin 1995, pp. 324 SS.), she said that Fassbinder was the "perfect charmer", that she had never been treated as courteously as by him and that he was a truly beautiful man.
