Its title a Bavarian slang pejorative for “foreign worker,” Fassbinder's second film is a chilling portrait of latent bourgeois fascism, focused on “group identity, its insularity, and its paranoid hostility to outsiders,” David Wilson wrote in Sight and Sound. “A Munich apartment block houses several interchangeable couples, all of them bored, listless, and totally self-engrossed. The threat to their complacency comes from a ‘Katzelmacher,' a Greek immigrant who rents a room in the block. The newcomer, played by Fassbinder himself with an impishly deadpan innocence, is both an object of curiosity to the group and the catalyst for their previously suppressed internal dissension, of which in the end of course he is the victim.”