The garbage, the city and death

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Garbage, the City and Death is a controversial play by Rainer Werner Fassbinder , written in 1975. The film adaptation by Daniel Schmid under the title Shadows of the Angels (1976) was in competition for the Palme d'Or at the 1976 Cannes Film Festival .

Fassbinder used motifs from the 1973 novel The Earth is as uninhabitable as the moon by Gerhard Zwerenz . For this novel, Fassbinder had initially worked out a complete script ; the film project for Zwerenz's novel did not materialize.

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The street prostitute Roma B. (in the film Lily Brest , played by Ingrid Caven ) is regularly abused by her pimp Franz B. (in the film Raoul , played by Fassbinder himself) because she is unsuccessful in her trade. The girl is too delicate for the demands of the suitors . Because the pimp keeps sending her to the street, she got sick.

One day she is hired by a real estate speculator who describes himself as the rich Jew (portrayed by Klaus Löwitsch ). He does not expect sexual services from her, but only that she listens to him. He pays them generously for this; she becomes rich herself, but at the same time lonely: the other stick girls turn away from her just like Raoul, who becomes homosexual .

The speculator uses them to get revenge; He wants to get to her father Müller through Lily - who also sings as a transvestite in a bar. The rich Jew blames Müller for the death of his parents. When confronted by the daughter, the father turns out to be the prototype of the staunch National Socialist technocratic murderer who remains convinced of the correctness of his actions.

Lily is desperate about this situation; At her request, the real estate agent kills her, her former pimp Raoul is held responsible for her death.

The action takes place in the gloomy atmosphere of a ramshackle, rotten city, where politicians and real estate speculators work each other's pockets in the redevelopment, supported by the corrupt police chief (portrayed by Boy Gobert ).

Performance history

Fassbinder planned to stage the play as his last work at the Frankfurt TAT , but could not implement the project because the legal entity did not approve the fee for a performer. The plant was opened in the 1970s and 1980s, e.g. B. by Joachim Fest , Ignatz Bubis , Salomon Korn , understood as part of the political conflict in the so-called Frankfurt house-to-house warfare and Fassbinder was accused of anti-Semitism . Some believed that they could recognize Ignatz Bubis in the figure of the Jewish real estate speculator, who was involved as an investor in the disputes over the redevelopment of Frankfurt's West End in the early 1970s . In fact, Fassbinder Bubis did not know what was clarified at the latest during the trials for co-authorship of Gerhard Zwerenz.

In January 1979 the piece was shown in an amateur performance authorized by Fassbinder himself on the studio stage of the Ruhr University in Bochum. The public performance was announced and reviewed in the local press.

For the "Frankfurt Feste 1984" the Alte Oper Frankfurt planned the premiere in the shell of the underground station in front of the Alte Oper. A year later, the newly appointed director of the Frankfurt theater, Günther Rühle, planned the world premiere, directed by Dietrich Hilsdorf, for October 31, 1985, against which violent protests developed. On the day of the premiere, around 1,000 people demonstrated in front of the theater against the premiere. Inside, about 30 members v. a. the Jewish community set the stage and unfolded the banner "subsidized anti-Semitism". A repeat rehearsal in front of around 200 critics and employees of the theater on November 4th was later rated as a premiere by the publisher. On October 31, 2015, the 30th anniversary of the stage occupation, there was a staged reading of the play as part of the symposium "The garbage, the city and the scandal". Most of the cast were the actors who should have premiered the drama in 1985. At the symposium, the question of whether the play was anti-Semitic was re-discussed with representatives of the stage occupants.

In 1987 "The Trash, the City and Death" was staged in New York City . About half of the premiere audience were German journalists. In the same year a production followed in Copenhagen , since then the work has been performed repeatedly in other European countries and in the USA.

In November 1998 the remarkable Italian premiere took place at Milan's Teatro dell'Elfo. The directing team Elio De Capitani and Ferdinando Bruni made sure during the rehearsals that the Jewish community would not raise any objections. The Milanese chief rabbi Giovanni Laras abstained before the premiere of a judgment, and not only the left-wing democratic faction in the Jewish community, represented by Stefano Levi Della Torre, but also “traditional, religious Judaism” saw “Fassbinder's intentions cautiously positive”. With its successful production (24 sold out performances), the theater demonstrated that the play was by no means intended to be anti-Semitic.

In early 1999 there was a performance in Tel Aviv directed by Yoram Löwenstein.

The German premiere finally took place on October 1, 2009 in the Theater an der Ruhr in Mülheim an der Ruhr . Even before the premiere, the Central Council of Jews in Germany and the Duisburg / Mülheim Jewish Community asked theater director Roberto Ciulli to cancel the play. The theater should forego the performance out of "respect for the few survivors of the Holocaust and the millions of dead". Ciulli failed in the attempt to give the work an "educational objective that exposes and thus combats anti-Semitism," comment the General Secretary of the Central Council, Stephan Kramer and Jacques Marx, the chairman of the Jewish community in Duisburg / Mülheim. The theater, on the other hand, saw the staging as an attempt to “establish conscious and unconscious anti-Semitism as a fact of the Federal Republic of Germany”.

reception

According to Martin Gubser, there are elements of literary anti-Semitism in the play . Apparently Fassbinder wanted to allude to Ignatz Bubis and with the unsympathetically drawn figure he complied with the common anti-Semitic cliché of the Jewish capitalist.

Despite the imprecise term, often used in polemical contexts, Joachim Fest assumed a current case of " left fascism ". It is now possible to write pieces with a Jewish negative figure; This literarily worthless piece, which does not do without pornographic elements, portrays the “rich Jews” merely as murderers and deceivers, so that it is “cheap agitation inspired by vulgar clichés”. For Fest, however, the play's anti-Semitism was less an outgrowth of resentment than a tactic and part of “radical fate”.

Hellmuth Karasek considered the representation of Fest to be polemical and contradicted his interpretation. After reading the play, little remains of a planned, left-wing anti-Semitism.

literature

Primary literature

  • Rainer Werner Fassbinder: The garbage, the city and death / Just a slice of bread. Two pieces . Publishing house of the authors, Frankfurt a. M. 1998, ISBN 3-88661-206-6
  • The directorship of the Schauspiel Frankfurt self-published two documentaries on the controversy surrounding the planned performance in 1985:
    • Cooper without end. A documentation on the occasion of the world premiere of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's play 'Der Müll, die Stadt und der Tod Frankfurt 1985
    • The Fassbinder case. Documentation of the dispute over 'The Garbage, the City and Death', Frankfurt 1987

Secondary literature

  • Janusz Bodek: The Fassbinder Controversies: Origin and Effect of a Literary Text. On the continuity and change of some manifestations of everyday anti-Semitism in Germany after 1945, its artistic consecration and its public staging. Frankfurt 1991, ISBN 3-631-43729-3
  • Janusz Bodek: A web of guilt and revenge? The controversies surrounding Fassbinder's The Garbage, the City and Death . In: Stefan Braese, Holger Gehle, Doron Kiesel (eds.): German post-war literature and the Holocaust , pp. 351–385, Frankfurt a. a. 1998, ISBN 3-593-36092-6
  • Janusz Bodek: Fassbinder is not Shakespeare, Shylock is not a survivor of the Holocaust. Controversies about "The Garbage, the City and Death" . In: Klaus-Michael Bogdal, Klaus Holz, Matthias N. Lorenz (eds.): Literary anti-Semitism after Auschwitz . Metzler Verlag, Stuttgart 2007, ISBN 3-476-02240-4 , pp. 179-205.
  • Janusz Bodek: Fassbinder controversy . In: Torben Fischer, Matthias N. Lorenz (Hrsg.): Lexicon of "coping with the past" in Germany. The history of debates and discourse under National Socialism after 1945 . [transcript], Bielefeld 2007, ISBN 3-89942-773-4 , pp. 230-232.
  • Reiner Diederich, Peter Menne (ed.): The garbage, the city and the scandal. Fassbinder and anti-Semitism today. Nomen, Frankfurt 2015, ISBN 978-3-939816-26-3 .
  • Wanja Hargens: “The garbage, the city and death”: Rainer Werner Fassbinder and a piece of contemporary German history. Metropol, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-938690-81-9 .
  • Manfred Hermes: Germany is hysterical. Fassbinder, Alexanderplatz. b_books Verlag, Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-933557-75-9 .
  • Elisabeth Kiderlen (Ed.): German-Jewish normality ... Fassbinder's explosives . PflasterStrand pamphlet, Frankfurt 1985, ISBN 3-924873-01-1 .
  • Martin Kraus: Two pieces of scandal in the context of anti-Semitism: Thomas Bernhards Heldenplatz and Rainer Werner Fassbinder's The Garbage, the City and Death . University of Waterloo , Waterloo 2009.
  • Andrei S. Markovits ; Beth Simone Noveck : 1985: Rainer Werner Fassbinder's play "Garbage, the City and Death", produced in Frankfurt, marks a key year of remembrance in Germany . In: Sander L. Gilman , Jack Zipes (Ed.): Yale companion to Jewish writing and thought in German culture 1096-1996. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1997, pp. 805-811
  • Peter Menne: “The trash, the city and death”: an anti-Semitic play or a play about anti-Semitism? , in: The trash, the city and the scandal. Fassbinder and anti-Semitism today. Nomen, Frankfurt 2015, ISBN 978-3-939816-26-3 , pp. 17-36
  • Peter Menne: "The dramatization of a novel." A comparative study to Gerhard Zwerenz: "The earth is uninhabitable like the moon" and Rainer Werner Fassbinder: "The garbage, the city and death" , Alibri Verlag, Aschaffenburg, 2016, ISBN 978-3-86569-730-1
  • Deborah Vietor-Engländer : “The Jew knows his trade”. Why Rainer Werner Fassbinder's “The Garbage, the City and Death” should not be performed in Germany. Misinterpretations, misunderstandings and controversies about this play. In: Pól Ó Dochartaigh (Ed.): Jews in German Literature since 1945. German-Jewish Literature? Amsterdam 2000 pp. 537-548

Articles in newspapers

Web links

to the film :

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ fassbinderfoundation.de
  2. ^ Filmzentrale.com and Chronicle of Events , in: Diederich / Menne: Der Müll, die Stadt und der Scandal , p. 153
  3. ↑ Vera Hierholzer: Ignatz Bubis. Tabular curriculum vitae in the LeMO ( DHM and HdG )
  4. ↑ Claus Gellersen: Now a check from the 'Stern'. Fassbinder and (k) an end / pain and suffering for Bubis , in: Frankfurter Rundschau , No. 258 of Nov. 6, 1987, p. 14
  5. ↑ Chronicle of the Events , in: Diederich / Menne: Der Müll, die Stadt und der Scandal , p. 156
  6. ↑ Review in the Ruhr-Nachrichten, No. 20, Jan. 24, 1979: "Happened on three levels of play. Studiobühne showed Fassbinder's play 'Der Müll, die Stadt und der Tod'", Announcements and the like. a. in Bochumer Anzeiger of Jan. 22, 1979 and in BSZ of Jan. 16, 1979
  7. ^ Chronicle of the events , in: Diederich / Menne: Der Müll, die Stadt und der Scandal , pp. 157–160
  8. ↑ http://hpd.de/artikel/12393?nopaging=1
  9. ↑ Jörg von Uthmann: waste exports on Lower Broadway. Fassbinder's play went on stage in New York, almost unnoticed, in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, No. 91, April 18, 1987, p. 27
  10. ↑ fassbinderfoundation.de
  11. ↑ Dietmar Polaczek: The scandal did not take place in Theater heute , January 1999
  12. ↑ hagalil.com
  13. ↑ Dismissal of the Fassbinder piece required . DerWesten.de, accessed September 17, 2009
  14. ↑ Fassbinder's “Der Müll, die Stadt und der Tod” celebrates its German premiere. Focus , October 1, 2009, accessed on October 1, 2009.
  15. ↑ Martin Gubser: Literary anti-Semitism, studies on Gustav Freytag and other bourgeois writers of the 19th century . Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 1998, p. 84
  16. ↑ Joachim Fest: About Rainer Werner Fassbinder's play "The Garbage, the City and Death", rich Jew from the left . In: Fleeting Size, Collected Essays on Literature and Art . Rowohlt, Hamburg 2008, p. 246
  17. ^ Hellmuth Karasek : Shylock in Frankfurt . In: Der Spiegel . No. 15 , 1976 ( online ).