After 20 Years, Fassbinder's Anti-Semitic Controversy Hits the German Stage

Call it the longest opening night delay of all times.  After treading in controversy for 20 years, Rainer Werner Fassbinder's play, "Der Müll, die Stadt und der Tod" will debut in Germany at last. Protests by the Jewish community were the cause of two earlier failed attempts to stage the piece.

Now, however, on Thursday night (October 8) the curtain will rise on the play at Mülheim's Theater an der Ruhr, despite an unchanged heart amongst Germany's Jews.

Michael Rubinstein, managing director of the Jewish Community, calls the piece "Garbage, the City and Death," though he has only read the script. "This play works with anti-Semitic clichés," he tells Spiegel Online, adding that the anti-Semitic elements apparent in the play 20 years ago are still here and still resonate.

For Dieter Graumann, vice-president of Germany's Central Council of Jews, the play is "tasteless." "The play was anti-Semitic and still is anti-Semitic, and that has not changed," he tells Spiegel Online.

For these two, as the voice of many others in the Jewish community, the producers are trying to challenge taboo, but are succeeding only in offending people on a still sensitive topic that unfolded right on German soil. 

The play was written in 1975 and based on a book by German novelist Gerhard Zwerenz.  The production, directed by Robert Ciulli, focuses on a rich Jewish real estate magnate who makes a rich profit by buying and selling property, which, many feel, plays into the age-old stereotype of Jews being mercenaries.  Particularly controversial is the line: "the Jew is sucking us dry, he's drinking our blood and makes us unhappy, because he's Jewish and we are the guilty ones? If he had stayed where he came from or had been gassed, I could sleep better at night."

Back in 1975 when Fassbinder attempted a first opening night, many viewed the play as a rally cry to reinvigorate Nazi sentiment, which led to protesters storming the stage, preventing the show from playing. A second failed attempt occurred in 1998 at the Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin. 

To read the full report in the Spiegel Online, click here.

Fassbinder, who died in 1982, will not witness the staging.  To the end, he claimed that the tirades of the anti-Semitic character did not reflect his own views. He passed away in 1982.

The producers of the piece, which will be shone in conjunction with two other of Fassbinder's works, hold that the play is not anti-semitic but reflect " German reality during that time." All 300 seats for Thursday's showing have been sold.

No protests for Thursday's showing have been organized to date.

Fassbinder was a German movie director, screenwriter and actor. He is one of the most important representatives of the New German Cinema. In a professional career that lasted less than fifteen years, Fassbinder completed 40 feature length films; two television film series; three short films; four video productions; twenty-four stage plays and four radio plays; and 36 acting roles in his own and others' films. He also worked as an actor (film and theater), author, cameraman, composer, designer, editor, producer and theater manager.

 

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