Corinna Coulmas and Saul Friedländer
1. The historical context
For the Germans of the Federal Republic, the problem of integrating the memory of the Nazi era within collective self-perception remains an open and recurrently acute issue. Since the beginning of the eighties, a series of public debates have taken place, which seem to indicate a significant transformation of German collective memory as far as Nazism is concerned. Two contradictory tendencies, neither of which seems to indicate what representation of the Nazi era will be in Germany when the passage of time will have completed the transfer of this epoch from individual to collective memory, have emerged in the process of this transformation. These tendencies show its paradoxical dynamics, but not yet its result. On the one hand, a "yearning for normality" is perceptible at all levels of West German society, especially within the younger generation, and there is a wish to draw a ”Schlussstrich”, a "final line" over the constant recollection of Nazism....
...On the other hand, the past has returned more intensely than ever
during the recent debates, and the very tendency implied by the
"yearning for normality" to deny its absolute specificity has created,
within some limited but influential circles, a new awareness of its
uniqueness. Thus, the Bitburg ceremony was supposed to be the
expression of some kind of general reconciliation with history. In
fact, it was to unleash passionate statements from all sides of the
Federal Republic about the significance of the Nazi past for present
German identity; statements which had a “trigger action” for all the
further debates. Then came the Fassbinder affair which this article
will deal with. A controversy about the building of historical museums
in Berlin and Bonn and of a war memorial for the dead of the Second
World War, also in Bonn, took place at the same time. Finally, the
”Historikerstreit” crystallised most of the current opinions on an
academic level, with the effect that the fronts are clearer now, that
the issue is recognized to be a vital one for German self-understanding
and, that Auschwitz, as a common metaphor for the whole of this past,
seems to be more present than ever.
From another point of view, what has become apparent through all
these controversies, seems to be the need for a new national identity
in West Germany. It is shared by all political tendencies, as the
search started on the left, in the late seventies, and was then taken
over by the conservative liberal wing, after the ”Wende”
of 1982. For such a new identity, the reworking of the significance for
German history as a whole of what was accepted until now to be the
major event of the Nazi era, i.e. the extermination of the Jews, is
essential, because, since the end of the war, Auschwitz has become a
reference not only for State criminality, but for evil as such in all
western societies. Much of the reworking on the symbolic level is
generally done by the arts, and that is why, of all recent debates, the
Fassbinder affair was perhaps the most interesting one. The controversy
arose from a theatre play which was considered, by its author and by
its critics, as a work of art, be it a poor one, and it involved a much
broader spectrum of West German society than, for instance, the ”Historikerstreit”.
As our analysis will show, it dealt with a whole set of intertwined
issues, ranging from the problem of freedom of art to that of moral
responsibility in history. It took place at the same time on an
abstract, theoretical level, where the argument tended to be
philosophical; on a practical level, where it implied action and
reaction; and on the level of its political exploitation, where both
were used as a weapon for other ends. Its chronology goes right back to
the seventies and gives an insight into the evolution of the position
of the different age groups toward the Nazi past, especially that of
the older generation and that of the rebellious sons of the sixties to which Fassbinder belonged. Thus, on the one hand, the
Fassbinder affair is one of memory, of the relationship of generations
and the sense of moral responsibilities; on the other hand, it is a
political affair. For this reason, in each case a manifest discourse
covers various latent meanings: our attention will be directed to both,
but more specifically to the latent level than to the manifest one,
which we will but describe.
The social groups directly or indirectly involved in the affair
were manifold and represent, on an official level, the major spokesmen
of German society:
- First of all, the political circles: the city administration of
Frankfurt with its conservative (CDU) mayor Walter Wallmann, since June
1986 first Federal Minister of the Environment ”Umweltminister” in Bonn, then Prime Minister (”Ministerpräsident”)of the federal "Land" of Hesse; the cultural deputy (”Kulturdezernent”)
Hilmar Hoffmann (SPD); the City Parliament, where the Fassbinder affair
was discussed; and all political parties which took up a position on
the question;
- the press, that adopted the affair to fight its own war;
- the Churches, using it to settle their own accounts with the past;
- the banks and the big businesses whose speculations in the Frankfurt quarter of the ”Westend” were one of the major issues of the controversy;
- the Law, as the affair was brought to the Frankfurt Office of the District Attorney (”Staatsanwaltschaft Frankfurt”);
- the publishers, one important publishing house having withdrawn
Fassbinder's play from the market, a smaller one having taken it over;
- the world of the theatre;
- the German Jewish Community;
- Jewish and non-Jewish intellectuals taking positions in the controversy.
No other affair in post-war Germany involved such a wide range of
social groups in a question directly linked to the core of Nazi
ideology, i.e. the problem of anti-Semitism. It implied constant
references to the Shoah and its meaning for present day Germany. The
way this catastrophe was perceived by the different groups and
individuals shows a definite breakdown of what might be considered a general consensus about the moral responsibility of the
Germans, even by the generations too young to have taken part in it,
which had determined the political climate in the Federal Republic
since 1945. It is now being replaced by a new discourse about Nazism
which we will try to elaborate as the latent meaning of some of the
manifest statements. Since the Fassbinder affair, this discourse has been openly defined on the intellectual scene, especially during the ”Historikerstreit”,
but, as will be seen, it has been present within deeper layers of West
German society for a long time. The affair shows its gradual unfolding,
and that gives it its peculiar significance. It shows that a community of values is breaking down, and a new mode of
perception of the past is changing the landscape of German memory.
2. Fiction and reality: Fassbinder's play and the speculations in the "Westend"
From the beginning to the mid-seventies, real-estate speculations changed the ”Westend”
of Frankfurt from a residential district to commercial quarter. Having
been one of the few remaining beautiful districts of the city, which a
wild and not always lawful urbanism had transformed into one of the
coldest and most uninhabitable towns of the Federal Republic, these
speculations generated a good deal of public opposition. There were some
Jews active in the real estate business, but the attention which they
drew upon themselves was disproportionate to their number. The German
enterprises, who had the major part in the speculations, profited from
the fact that they could pursue their activities unimpeded, as most of
the opposition was directed against the Jewish speculators. The matter
was broadly discussed in the local press, and already then, parallels
were drawn that should have indicated that something essential was
changing in
German society. 1
People were insisting on the fact that the Jews, who used to live in the ”Westend” before the war, were now demolishing it.
"At that time, people in the tramway who were passing by the
excavators and the building sites at the Bockenheimer Landstrasse would
grumble ‘The Jews are back again!’, and at the fences one could read
some anti-Semitic slogans. Names like Buchmann, Selmi and Bubis became
famous. When fire broke out in the Selmi skyscraper at the Platz der
Republik, people were looking and rejoicing that the house of the Jew
was burning." 2
Selmi was not a Jew; he was Iranian. But Ignatz Bubis is Jewish,
and in 1985 he was even the chairman of the Jewish Community of
Frankfurt and one of the protagonist of the Fassbinder affair. Although
he possessed only a single house in the Westend,
already in the seventies his name was known by everybody, because his
house was squatted by a group of leftwing students headed by Daniel
Cohn-Bendit. In a discussion with Bubis, organized by the
weekly ”Der Spiegel”, the "Red Dany" admitted:
"You really had no luck to possess the house that was squatted by
the group that was politically the most active of all. Your house
provoked the fiercest discussions..."
Ignatz Bubis was to become the prototype for a character called "the Rich Jew" in Fassbinder's play ”Garbage, the City and Death” (Der Müll, die Stadt und der Tod).
This play, which was at the origin of the whole affair, was written by
Fassbinder in 1975, and was never performed before the film director's
death in 1982, at the age of 36, of alcohol and drug abuse. The author
had drawn his inspiration from Gerhard Zwerenz's novel ”The Earth is as uninhabitable as the Moon” (Die Erde ist unbewohnbar wie der Mond) published in 1973, one year after his first book about the Frankfurt real-estate speculations, ”Report from the Countryside” (Bericht aus dem Landesinneren). Zwerenz was also, together with Fassbinder, the co-author of the script for the subsequent film on the same subject, ”Der Schatten der Engel” (The Shadow of the Angel),
director Daniel Schmid, first shown in 1976 with Fassbinder playing one
of the main parts, the role of the homosexual, Fassbinder being the new
victim, the victim of the victim, i.e. the victim of the Jew. It is
worth while analysing the position of the two men, Zwerenz and
Fassbinder, who are both representative of significant ideological
currents for two German generations.
Gerhard Zwerenz belongs to the generation whose men had been
soldiers during the Second World War. He was an opponent of the Nazi
regime and a deserter. In his vision, the only pertinent opposition in
life is the political one between right and left. He is a pacifist, a
socialist, a moralist, an intellectual, the typically German version of
what was called in the sixties "ein alter Sozi", a mixture of humanism and ideological blindness. In his view, left anti-Semitism is impossible, a contradictio in objecto.
He has the firm belief that he and his peers are the last fighters for
equality and brotherhood, and because of this immune to any kind of
anti-Jewish prejudice, that are to him a
prerogative of the Right:
"The reason why I was so hurt by the reproach of anti-Semitism formulated by the ”FAZ” 3 is that it insinuates, that we are suffering from the same incurable
mental defect which the German Nationalists were born with. Alright,
comrades, you may insult us, but not by attributing us your own
unfathomable stupidities." 4
Zwerenz does not seem to be aware of the fact that, in his novel,
he himself conveys a very ambiguous image of the Jew, full of age old
clichés: his Jew is rich, vigorous, unscrupulous, lascivious and, of
course, melancholic because he is a stranger on earth, nah va nad in Hebrew. As he is meant to be a type as much as a character, he is called Abraham, "whom we all descend from”. 5
Zwerenz describes how he had first intended to write a novel about a
German speculator, but, not being convinced by his own character,
eventually turned to a Jewish one:
"In the beginning, the first hundred pages of the "Earth-novel”
dealt with a little social democrat who develops into a great
speculator. (..) But this man was only pale and boring, contrary to the
real-estate jugglers of Frankfurt, to whom I responded with confused
and mixed reactions: their impudent "Manchester"-capitalism provoked my
anti-capitalistic wrath, their energy and their subtlety fascinated me,
and their past as persecutees of the Third Reich brought them near to
me; as a deserter, had I not endured the same kind of dangers?"
This kind of amalgam is typical of the total lack of understanding
for the specificity of the Jewish situation under the Nazis, which
characterizes many leftwing German intellectuals. The fate of a
deserter is the same in every war: if caught, he is shot. This has
really nothing to do with the systematic annihilation of Jews in the
gas chambers. Zwerenz continues with an even more astonishing parallel:
"Oh, as human beings they were like brothers to me, and when one got
to know them, they proved to be colorful characters with much
imagination in their hearts and even more dreams in their heads. I had
the same feeling towards them as towards the old, mighty communists of
the GDR, who had been in penitentiaries and concentration camps and
drew from this fact the legitimation never to be victims again. Thus
the ones who had been incarcerated were now incarcerating; who had been
oppressed and persecuted were now persecuting. My real-estate sharks
from Frankfurt had many similarities with the Eastern comrades. The
only difference was that they did not look for protection in bare,
direct power, but in money and capital. Being divided between
admiration and social disapprobation, I found my way out by writing a
book, which had a thousand characters, but the main part was held by
Abraham, the vigorous, invincible speculator. We all descend from
Abraham, and I could not do the favor to my left friends of presenting
a book with crystal-clear class oppositions. Abraham became a human
being as you and I, but stronger, and more colorful, more vulnerable
and more
energetic. And also more lascivious, more melancholic,
more tender and with more imagination." 6
Everybody who has any familiarity with the arsenal of anti-Jewish
clichés in Western imagination will recognize them here. The point is
that Zwerenz draws upon them at the very moment he tries to be
impartial, original, and free of social prejudice. This is true of a
whole generation of German leftwing intellectuals who admit the Jews as
long as they are free of all Jewish "particularism".
"When I recall the last decades, I can remember many Jewish
intellectuals, but none of them belonged to a Jewish community, they
all felt like strangers towards this institution, it was even one of
their principles in life to become emancipated from it. With friends we
were used to not caring for matters of faith, origin and tradition. We
simply forgot them. To be a Jew or not was as unimportant to us as any
other question of faith. Maybe we did not understand that the type of
our
Jewish intellectual friends from the Weimar era was dying out." 7
In this, Zwerenz is totally right. Unfortunately, for his milieu
and generation, this Jewish type is the only one they understand,
because it is the only one they know. Any kind of Jewish specificity is
to blame in their view, and that is why they become critical even if
one talks about a specifically Jewish death:
"We are used to provoking rich and mighty non-Jews in that way. But
we don't like to ask questions of a rich Jew, because Germany has
become guilty of the Jews because of the murder of six million of them.
But we
simply forget, that Nazi Germany also killed twenty million Soviet citizens, not to mention other suffering peoples."
The ideology of Zwerenz's point of view is particularly clear in
this statement. Although he was an opponent to the Nazi regime, he does
not seem to understand that the Jews were not just victims among other
victims in the Hitler era, but that their annihilation was at the very
core of the Nazi ideology, something indispensable for the regime's
self-perception and for our
understanding of it. Zwerenz views Nazism in terms of fascism only,
i.e. an ideology that fits into the categories of right and left. The
idea that the Shoah was "some radical evil, previously unknown to us" 8 is not acceptable to him. For him Auschwitz is just a tougher version
of other concentration camps, it is a by-product, not the essence of
the regime 9 .
According to his own definition, Fassbinder's position is less
innocent, far more ambiguous, made of fascination and resentment. His
generation does not even know the type of the Weimar Jewish
intellectual; it does not know any Jews at all.
"Perhaps I am playing with fire," Fassbinder told ”Newsweek” in 1976, "but
Jews should be more discussed in Germany. So little is known about them
here that many in my generation can only guess about them. This
ignorant guessing is just as wrong as open hostility. Using the old
cliché of a money-grubbing Jew as a shock effect is a good way to set
off a discussion particularly over a hushed-up subject like this." 10
What kind of discussion should originate from the above-mentioned
cliché is difficult to imagine in postwar Germany. Fassbinder's
resentment must be quite profound if the only alternative concerning a
possible attitude towards the Jews he seems to imagine is that of ignorant guessing and open hostility. The following statement gives an idea of the psychological roots of
his position:
"Theater plays are always spontaneous reactions to some kind of
reality and this play is a spontaneous reaction to a reality I was
confronted with in Frankfurt. I think that the constant putting under
taboo of Jews, which exists in Germany since 1945, can produce
anti-Jewish reactions, especially among young people who have no direct
experiences with Jews. When I met a Jew as a child, I was always told
behind the hand: ’This is a Jew, behave yourself, be kind.’ With some
variations this continued till I was twenty-eight and wrote this play." 11
Fassbinder, who was the "enfant terrible" among the young German
film directors, did not like to be told to behave himself. In order to
counter accusations of anti-Semitism which the play created, Fassbinder
wrote an open letter in 1976:
"He (the Rich Jew) only carries out the plans conceived by others,
but the realization of which one leaves, consequently, to somebody who
seems untouchable because he is under taboo. The place where this can
be observed in reality is Frankfurt-upon-Main. The thing itself is
nothing but a repetition on another level of the conditions of the 18th
century, when only Jews were authorized to make financial transactions
and these transactions, (that constituted the only possibility for the
Jews to survive) eventually provided arguments against them, for use by
those who had forced the Jews to do the job, and who were their real
enemies. The same thing here: the City has the pretended necessary
dirty work done by a tabooized Jew, which is particularly infamous; for
Jews are under taboo since 1945, and that will lead to reactions. I
think everybody agrees that taboos give rise to fear of the dark and
mysterious thing that is put under a taboo, which finally provokes
hostility. To put it another way: those who are against a clarification
of these facts are the true anti-Semites, the ones whose motives should
be examined more closely. (...) Of course there are anti-Semites in
this play. Unfortunately, they exist not only in the play, but also,
for instance, in Frankfurt. I think it is unnecessary to say that these
people do not reflect the author's opinion, whose attitude towards
minorities should be clear from his previous works. But the hysterical
voices in the discussion about this play confirm my fear of a new
anti-Semitism, out of which I wrote this play."
Whether it was really the fear of a new anti-Semitism that motivated Fassbinder to write Garbage, the City and Death
becomes doubtful if one examines the play thoroughly. Is this rich Jew,
who does not even have a name; this unscrupulous, potent stranger who
kills the prostitute he loves and talks in a totally artificial
language about life and loneliness really a “reflection of reality”? In long and, for a businessman, rather hazy tirades, he
explains that “the system” or “the city is responsible for everything”.
"I buy up old houses in this city, tear them down, build new ones
and sell them at a good profit. The city protects me. They have to. I'm
Jewish." (..) "It mustbe indifferent to me if children cry, if the old
and
decrepit suffer. I must not care."
As Ignatz Bubis put it ten years later in the controversy, the
strangulation of prostitutes was not among his habits. As for the ”reflection of reality”,
the same doubts arise when examining theother characters of the play:
the beautiful, tubercular whore Roma B., who rises from the pavement of
her profession to the top by becoming the Jew's kept woman, rich now,
but unhappy, and with a vocation to be a saint. As she explains in a
monologue to God, she wants "to sacrifice herself, on behalf of the City that needs
victims in order to feel alive." Similarly her pimp, becoming
homosexual out of despair, because Roma gave herself to the Jew, and
eventually being murdered with the consent of the President of the
Police in order to cover the Jew's crime (the pitiful strangulation of
the prostitute - on her demand). There are also the old and the new
Nazi: the old one is Roma's father, who works
as a singing transvestite in a nightclub. Her mother is a cripple in a
wheel chair, undressed on the stage by her husband who wants to
disguise himself as a woman. The new Nazi is Hans von Gluck, one of
Roma's customers and perhaps the personification of Fassbinder's "fear
of a new anti-Semitism":
"He sucks us dry, the Jew. He drinks our blood and puts us in the
wrong because he is a Jew and we bear the guilt. (...) If he had
remained where he came from or if they had gassed him, I could sleep
better now. They forgot to gas him. That's not a joke. That's how it
thinks in me."
In German, ”es denkt in mir” is as alarming and absurd as it is in English. Does Fassbinder mean that two thousand years of anti-Semitism “think” within / or by the means of Hans von Gluck? And where else can “it” think like this? Is this really a way to show a young German public, that “has no direct experiences with Jews”, the dangers of new anti-Semitism?
The message of the play is not clear. The critics talked of
violence and expressionism, and of fantasies of apocalyptic
destruction. There were not many who really tried to claim a high
artistic value, which would have been difficult to maintain. But quite
a number pretended that it was not anti-Semitic, and this is an
important point to stress, because it shows what happens to
anti-Semitism when there are no Jews any more: the small German Jewish
community has no impact whatsoever on the life of the Federal Republic.
Ten years after ”Garbage ...”was written, when the Fassbinder affair was at its peak in November 1985, there was only one paper, the ”Süddeutsche Zeitung”,
where the analysis of the prejudices the play conveyed went beyond the
quotation of some anti-Jewish sentences and showed a real understanding
of the phenomenon. It is certainly not by chance that the author of the
article is Jewish.
"The question is not one of intention, but of function - more
exactly, we should ask: what kind of role plays the anonymous
(archetypal?) “rich Jew”? What qualities is he supposed to have? What
kind of associations and resentments provoke the sentences the author
has put into the mouth of his characters? (...) There are three
elements present all over the play: stereotype, demonisation and
defamation. (...) (Fassbinder's Jew) shows a frightening potency just
in the classical fields of anti-Semitic demonology. The prostitute Roma
can report on his ”extraordinary” sexuality. (...) His deadly sin is
not what he does, but what he is. (..) It is difficult to find a
“better” defamation of the Jew than being ”existentially guilty." 12
Those who maintain - and there is no doubt of their sincerity -
that Fassbinder's play is not anti-Semitic show that they have become
so unfamiliar with the phenomenon that they do not even recognize it
any more; which does not mean that they are free from prejudice. As we
are going to see more clearly during the process of our analysis,
anti-Semitism in Germany today has
become in great part subconscious, especially when it comes from the
Left. We shall insist on this point because it is not easy to grasp:
sometimes good intentions disguise ugly feelings.
When Fassbinder wrote his play, he was the director of the Frankfurt theater TAT (Theater am Turm). A discussion about ”Garbage...”
arose in the ensemble that divided the cast and finally led to its
dissolution; Fassbinder withdrew from the theater and devoted himself
to the script of ”The Shadow of the Angel”; clearly it was not
the subject he had lost interest in! Zwerenz proved his good intentions
by trying to mitigate the impression of Fassbinder's "Rich Jew" by
calling him "Rich poor Jew":
"When the rehearsals started at the TAT, I suggested to the
directing RWF to correct his name into "rich poor Jew", for even the
richest Jew is a poor Jew because of the persecutions under the Third
Reich. But my suggestion was lost in the chaos where the Fassbinder
group of the TAT got lost too." 13
Zwerenz fails to notice that his suggestion is not exactly an
amelioration. His Jew is no more of a person than Fassbinder's; he also
has no name, he is a type. But the association of poor and rich is even
worse than the old cliché of the rich Jew, because it gives a weird
idea of what persecutees of the Third
Reich looked like and what they had become. This lack of sensibility is
not to be mistaken for conscious anti-Semitism. It is an inability to perceive the problem, inability which has its roots more in an abstract, ideological shape of mind than in inherited convictions.
3. The affair: first round
The same thing cannot be said of Joachim Fest, author of the
well-known Hitler biography published in 1973, and instigator of the
whole affair as far as its political character is concerned. Fest's
book, and even more so the film that had been made of it with his
collaboration, had been widely criticized for being too sympathetic to
its hero. Out of the several hundred pages of his book, only four had
been devoted to the extermination of the Jews, and this under the Nazi
designation "Final Solution", without quotation marks. Fassbinder's
play was a welcomeopportunity for Fest to reconfirm his (previous)
image of a conservative German with a sense for historical responsibilities. In the daily ”FAZ” (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung),
the coeditor of which he had become some time before, he wrote two
articles about the problem of left anti-Semitism that caught a lot of
attention. The political definition of the problem and the
aggressiveness of his tone were to determine the character of the whole affair in its first as well as in its second “round”. It is not
without interest to note that ten years later, during the ”Historikerstreit”,
Fest was to defend the apologetic tendencies of Ernst Nolte. Without
doubt, anti-Semitism from the Right seems to be much more bearable to
him than anti-Semitism from the Left. In his first article about
”Garbage, the City and Death”, called "Reicher Jude von links" ("Rich Jew from the Left"), he stated:
"Whatever shape left fascism may have had in our society, up to now
it has been more or less free from anti-Semitic feelings. It was only
the anti-Israeli policy of the Soviet Union, unscrupulously mobilizing
anti-Semitic emotions, that gave the Left in the Federal Republic the
feeling that anti-Semitism is an element of World Revolution and has
nothing to do with the Jew hatred of the Third Reich. That allows Left
anti-Semitism a good conscience. Besides, the anti-Semitism of
Fassbinder's play seems to be more a matter of tactic and radical chic
than one of resentment. Maybe one of the motives for it is the fact,
that for a long time now the Left no longer has a suggestive
antagonistic image (Feindbild). But it needs the figure of a concrete
enemy in order to compensate the by now well proven feeble appeal of
its own ideology. For the first time, this is again the "Rich Jew".
Another reason may finally be seen in the desire of the younger
generation to show itself unembarrassed in front of the whole world,
not to recognize any taboos, to face the horror cynically. In the
hangman's house the sons like to speak casually of the rope." 14
In the same article Fest warned Suhrkamp, one of West Germany's
biggest publishing houses, no to compromise itself by sponsoring a play
like this. Speedily Suhrkamp withdrew the play from the market. At the
same time, the ”Filmförderungsanstalt” 15 refused to grant a credit to Fassbinder's and Zwerenz's script of ”The Shadow of the Angels”.
When the film came out in Paris, many well-known critics, among them
the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, celebrated its somber aesthetics and
expressionistic desolation and denied that it was anti-Semitic.
From 1976 to 1985, seven attempts were made to stage Fassbinder's play: two in the city supported ”Städtischen Schaupiel”
repertory theater of Frankfurt directed by Peter Palitzsch, and another
one with Palitzsch as stage manager; one by Wilfried Minsk, one by
Johannes Schaaf and one by Adolf Dresen. In 1984, Ulrich Schwab, the
director of the "Alten Oper" in Frankfurt lost his job in another
attempt to perform the play. In every case, it was blocked by the city authorities to avoid an anti-Semitic slant. If one takes into account the fact that the artistic value of ”Garbage...”
is admittedly not extraordinary, the determination of so many stage
directors to put the play on stage is quite astonishing. Did they enjoy
the idea of the scandal the play would provoke? Did they hope to fill their theaters? Or were they
really convinced by the text, by its aesthetics and by the message it
conveyed? Fassbinder's aesthetics are not to everybody’s taste, but
appeal to and fascinate a broad and often cultivated public across the
boards. There is no reason to think that the directors who recommended
the play were not impressed by it. Consequently, the problem is not one
of aesthetical judgment but one of content.
This content is not harmless. ”Garbage, the City and Death”
was the first West German play since World War Two to present a
negative portrait of a Jew and to talk of the Holocaust in a detached
manner, by showing on a German stage an anti-Semite who claims that one
forgot to gas this Jew. Since the end of the War, the extermination of
the Jews of Europe by the Nazis had been perceived by the Germans of the Federal Republic as a major catastrophe
that compromised their identity in the past and in the present. In
Western imagination, it had become the prototype of Evil. It was
weighed as something unprecedented, not so much in the sense of the not
yet seen or known, but because it escapes the normal moral categories
inherent to our society. The “systematic production of corpses”
that was, according to Hannah Arendt, the very core of the system, is
the transgression of a taboo for which we have no conceptual framework.
The Shoah "became the unpunishable, unforgivable absolute evil which could no
longer be understood and explained by the evil motives of
self-interest, greed, covetousness, resentment, lust for power, and
cowardice; and which therefore anger could not revenge, love could not
endure, friendship could not forgive." 16
Thus, its significance is not only historical, but also symbolical: it is a subject one cannot be neutral about, a theme that cannot be represented
in any haphazard way. This means that the subject itself seems to
impose limits on aesthetsation. These limits had never been clearly
defined, but for a long time they were respected in a kind of silent
consensus. By treating his subject the way he did, Fassbinder was, for the first time since the war, going
beyond these limits. The slow unfolding of the affair – ten years
between the time it was written and the theater scandal in Frankfurt -
shows that this was by no means accepted as something natural by the
intellectual opinion of the Federal Republic, or as something that had
to happen any way, and the strong reactions it provoked proved that the
problem touched deep layers of public consciousness. But the fact that there were so many attempts to stage the play and that in 1985, ”Garbage...”
found so many advocates, indicates that, during this decade, important
changes were taking place in Germany as far as the perception of the
past is concerned.
4. The Fassbinder affair in Frankfurt
In 1985, Günther Rühle, who had been the editor of the cultural
section of the ”FAZ” and consequently one of Fest's closest
collaborators, was named manager of Frankfurt's city supported
repertory theaters. During the previous flare-up of the affair in 1984,
when it had already become the subject of all German newspapers, Rühle
had judged ”Garbage...”
as a play without any artistic value. But in April 1985, his intention
became known to open the season precisely with Fassbinder's play. His
argument, that remained identical during the whole affair, was that he
was opposed to any censorship of art. The ”FAZ” was the first paper to
react:
"Only an ignoramus can reproach the city of Frankfurt of censorship.
Our former colleague Günther Rühle should know that nobody called for
censorship, neither the city of Frankfurt nor anybody else. The city is
not opposed to the fact that Fassbinder's play is performed here. But
for good reasons many are opposed to the idea that public funds should
finance its performance. If Frankfurt is a liberal city, this is mainly
due to its Jews, who have been banished and murdered. The main
character in Fassbinder's play is the anonymous "Rich Jew"; this does
not designate a single bad Jew, it is the "Rich Jew" as a type, an old
figure of anti-Semitic agitation. Not to spend any tax money on this is
the least the city of Frankfurt should do for its Jewish citizens." 17
This opinion was repeatedly expressed by single individuals of
almost all political groups, and by independent intellectuals. The
above quotation gives a good idea of the theoretical level of the
discussion. Significantly enough, this simple argument was never
refuted in a satisfactory way, i.e. by a reasoning that would have
taken the same starting point, but would have come to an opposite
conclusion. The counterarguments were all formulated on another level,
and were soon bypassed by an all embracing political discourse that
aimed at disarming the enemy and made use of the whole issue for its
own polemical ends. As a matter of fact, the affair was discussed in
the Frankfurt City Parliament by the conservative mayor Walter Wallmann
(CDU) as early as July, four months before the opening of the theater
season. Another discussion took place in October. One year before, the
parliament had already examined the expediency to stage Fassbinder's
play within the framework of the Frankfurt summer festival "Frankfurter Feste".
The performance was to take place in an underground station near the
old Opera. Its director Ulrich Schwab, who had put his whole weight
into defending the play, had to resign. In 1985, Schwab supported Rühle
actively during the whole affair.
The positions of the different political parties did not evolve
very much from 1984 to 1985, especially in the conservative liberal
wing (CDU / FDP). The two parties behaved as Germany's good conscience,
aware of their historical responsibilities and visibly fond of their
role as defenders of the Jewish minority. Thus, mayor Walter Wallmann
(CDU) declared repeatedly:
"We have a special obligation to protect our Jewish citizens and turn away from them injury and affliction of the soul." 18
The conservatives and liberals were definitely against the staging
of Fassbinder's play, first, because they did not want incur the risk
of appearing as anti-Semites, either in their own eyes or in the eyes
of the world, and secondly, because Fassbinder represented in his
convictions, as much as in his way of life, a negation of their highest
values. In this affair, the conservatives - and this means not only the
political parties but also the whole German establishment, from the
banks to the Churches and the rightwing press - apparently hoped to
settle two very different problems. On the one hand, they used the
controversy in their every day fight against the Left, which was
relatively easy, because being on the side of the Jews, they had the
better starting point for an attack. On the other hand, they seemed to
consider this affair as a good opportunity to demonstrate that they, at
least, had learned from the past: it was the Christian, and not the
National component of their sensibility that was at stake here. The
essence of their discourse was that
Germany had become guilty of the Jews, but that it had repented its
crimes. The word "reconciliation" was uttered repeatedly, but nobody
seemed to be aware of the fact that this is something only the Jews can
want or initiate. The Christian scheme of crime and expiation is the
underlying mobile of this discourse; some of its keywords are ”historical responsibility”, “Left anti-Semitism”, ”reconciliation” and the very German “Vergangenheitsbewältigung”,
the fact of coming to terms with the past. All these expressions tend
to deny that the Nazi past might be something one cannot cope with,
something insuperable; they are full of good conscience, at ease where
nobody is at ease, and this very fact makes them appear shallow.
The strategy of the CDU in this affair was the following: in the
parliamentary session of October 1985, it brought forward a motion to
condemn the play. The ”FAZ” reported its content:
“Because of everything that happened from 1933 to 1945 in the name
of Germany, because of everything that is associated with the name of
Auschwitz, we Germans cannot permit ourselves the slightest
misunderstanding. The only reason for the persecutions, humiliations,
robberies and the murder of members of a certain group of citizens in
the Nazi era was the fact that these persons were of Jewish origin, the
CDU motion said. Stupid and mean clichés as, for example, “bloodsucker
of World Capitalism” were used to create a climate permitting the worst
crimes against people of all groups of professions, income and age.
Fassbinder's play uses the same dangerous methods of generalization,
the parliamentary conservative party stated." 19
Nevertheless, this strong condemnation did not have any practical
consequences. When the Socialists (SPD) decided to side with the other
party and to defend Rühle, the affair shifted from the moral to an
almost exclusively political level, where it was to remain as far as
the political parties were concerned. Thus the SPD reproached the CDU
for putting Rühle "massively under pressure". As Günter Dürr, the chairman of the parliamentary socialist party in Frankfurt said, this attitude "was aimed at undermining the freedom of art guaranteed by the ”Grundgesetz”. 20
The CDU reacted immediately. Mayor Wallmann declared "that he had no intention whatsoever of preventing the play from
being staged. On the contrary, he insisted upon the fact that he was
not entitled to intervene in the programming of the repertory theater
and did by no means ask to do so." 21
He actually never did, and so the CDU found a very suitable balance
by taking refuge behind an irreproachable legalism: on the one hand the
party had proved its concern for the Jewish interests, on the other
hand it showed respect for Law and Democracy.
The SPD was in a much less comfortable position. When the debate became
political, it had to profile itself as a Leftwing party. It could not
simply denounce the anti-Semitism of Fassbinder's play as the CDU had
already done so. The problem was complicated even more by the fact that
Fest had given the tone of the controversy by taking the opportunity to
attack “Left wing anti-Semitism” in ”Garbage...”.
The whole German Left had reacted violently to Fest's invective. This
accusation had come from the wrong side and, as it had been directed
more against them as a political family than against Fassbinder
himself, (who was personally rather an anarchist), the reaction was
quite unanimous: Fest was not the one to give the German Left Wing
lessons about a suitable attitude towards minorities. Thus the play was
declared to be free of anti-Semitism, from the simple conclusion that
somebody like Fassbinder, who had defended the Turks and the
homosexuals, could not be anti-Semitic. This is not so much an
expression of opportunism as that of a very special sensibility: the
lack of historical insight, that does not see anything more to
anti-Semitism than an intolerant attitude towards minorities, is quite
typical of postwar German Leftism. Nevertheless, in a deeper layer of
the Left discourse one can perceive a kind of anger not to be free from
the past, although the Left had been opposed to Nazism and had suffered
from it, and a resentment that was directed - unconsciously, as I
believe - against the Jews as the ones to whom this fact is due. This
is the reason why so many Left spokesmen stated that it was dangerous
to put “the Jews under taboo”: a taboo was for them the sign that things were not yet in order, and the “neue Unbefangenheit”, the “new ease”
they claimed when dealing with problems related to the Holocaust was
but a proof of their uneasiness. An analysis of the Left discourse
shows that its keywords are freedom of art, censorship, autodafé,
catharsis (which the staging of ”Garbage...” was to provoke);
normalization (of the relations to the Jews), taboo (breaking of..);
philosemitism, meant as an insult; and power struggle of the Right.
The evocation of an autodafé indicates the hysterical tonality that characterized the whole Fassbinder affair. "Wehret den Anfängen", "protest against the beginnings" was
the slogan of the Left, referring to the Nazi persecution of modern
art. It was not difficult to demonstrate that this was an unfitting
parallel. The Nazi autodafé of ”entartete Kunst” was by no means comparable to the fact that one did not want to spend tax money to stage an anti-Semitic play. In the Federal Republic of 1985, there was no
situation of persecution, and even the keenest eye would have had
difficulties in discerning a new totalitarian menace in the protests
against ”Garbage, the City and Death”.
Strangely enough, the artificiality of the argument was barely
exploited by the Right. In a way, the uneasiness in respect to the Nazi
past was so general and so overwhelming that free reasoning seemed to
be impeded by the anxiety not to be confounded with any of the past
excesses, and humour was totally absent from the debate.
This dilemma was particularly clear in the attitude of the SPD,
which was hesitating over the controversy. The Socialist Party did not
want to appear less conscious of the historical responsibilities of
Germany towards the Jews than the CDU. On the other hand, it feared the
reproach of censorship and refused to be dissociated from the Left
Wing's fight for freedom of art and expression. In the parliamentary
debate of 1984, the party voted against the performance of Fassbinder's
play. In 1985, the controversy had become so clearly political that
there was not a single voice left within the socialist parliamentary
party to denounce its anti-Semitism. It was only stated that a public discussion
should take place at the same time as the performance in order to avoid
any misinterpretation. The cultural deputy (Kulturdezenent) of
Frankfurt was, at that time, the SPD-member Hilmar Hoffmann, whose
positions were backed up by the party. Chairman Dürr stated in August
1985:
"The Parliamentary Socialist Party supports the attitude of the
cultural deputy and opposes firmly the attempts of the CDU to put both
him and Rühle under pressure." 22
The Liberal Party, allied with the conservatives but still trying
to prove its independence, stated not without satisfaction, that the
official controversy was being overridden by a controversy between the
conservative mayor Wallmann and the socialist cultural deputy. In the
parliamentary debate of October 1985,
Hoffmann had declared
"that there existed, on principle, no censorship in Frankfurt. He
added that freedom of art was a fundamental right. This was the lesson
to be drawn from the terrible experiences of the German people during
the Nazi era and a necessary consequence of the persecution of German
intellectuals and artists under the Third Reich, many of whom had been Jewish." 23
In another statement, Hoffmann compared anti-Semitism to censorship:
"Is not censorship worse than anti-Semitism? Does not censorship stimulate anti-Semitism?" 24
The extermination of the Jews of Europe seems to have become quite a remote phenomenon in this kind of discourse.
The attitude of the green ecologist party was even more radical
than this. The women, especially, were active in defending the play and
attacking the German establishment that, according to them, defended
the Jews for inappropriate reasons: Jutta Ditfurth denounced the
reigning opportunism towards the Jewish Community. Such an attitude was
the
“ideal ground for censorship, she said. (...) Censorship had no
justification in Democracy, Ms. Ditfurth stated; and asked if a play
would also be withdrawn on the demand of the Turkish government or a
women's group." 25
In 1985, Chairman Tom Koenigs proved to be more moderate. He
admitted that his party was divided in the appreciation of the whole
affair:
"Tom Koenigs declared, on behalf of the ecologists, that his
parliamentary party had discussed the play and the forthcoming
performance at great length, but had come to no conclusion. The
ecologist's motion represented the smallest common denominator, he
said. ‘As for the rest, everybody speaks for himself.’ According to
Koenigs, the play touches upon delicate problems such as, for example, the German anti-Semitic tradition or the ”Westend”
speculation of the sixties and seventies with its pitiless alienation
of living space and the depopulation of a whole quarter of the City by
the speculators. Fassbinder had put his finger on an open sore. Koenigs
recalled the fact that not only the SPD, that had been governing at
that time, had participated in the speculation, “but also the CDU and other respectable groups of the City, and the whole High House here.” 26
Koenigs was the only one to refer to the problem of generations in
the appraisal of the debate. This is actually an important issue that
was going to play a role in further controversies. It hints about the
passage of time and the subterranean changes in the evaluation of
historical events or whole epochs:
“Maybe my generation lacks sensibility for the phenomenon of
anti-Semitism when Fassbinder's name is pronounced. We believe that the
oppressive reactionary tradition of anti-Semitism ceased to exist with
the postwar generation to which Fassbinder had also belonged.”
Addressing the “established” politicians, he added:
“On the other hand, you don't share our sensibility for speculators and profiteering.” 27
In another interview, he came back to the problem of the Leftwing
sensibility regarding Jews and anti-Semitism. He was asked:
“Was there any anti-Semitism in the protest movement of Left Wing
students against the speculations?” – “No”, answered Koenigs, “but
there was a lack of sensibility concerning this subject. We were
totally ignorant, and we didn't care.” He tells me that they had fixed
placards on the fences with the heads of the Frankfurt speculators on
them. Among them were Jews. The slogan was a sentence from the italian
lotta-continua-movement: "The pigs of today are the bacons of
tomorrow." One of the persons concerned had later shown him the concentration camp number on his arm. Koenigs was very serious when
he said: “There we had gone too far in our ignorance”. I asked him:
“Should the play be performed?” He returned my question: “If it is not
performed, will that prevent anti-Semitism? The speculation, the
quarter around the Station 28 , the Jewish speculators, all that existed. “Somebody had to play the part of the anti-Semite - Fassbinder did it." 29
The outcome of the parliamentary debate was as follows: the play
was condemned, with the voices of the CDU against those of the SPD (two
abstentions) and the ecologists. Nevertheless, the decision about
whether the play was to be staged or not depended on the theater, i.e.
on its manager Rühle. The pressure exerted upon him became rather
strong as the summer went on and the opening of the theater season
approached. In September, the Churches intervened in the controversy and sent an open letter to Rühle:
"A letter to the manager says that Jews become in this play the
symbol for immorality. ‘The Church cannot accept such a defamation and
degradation of a group of people.’ The Church that had itself become
guilty of the Jews has to condemn a situation where Jews are shown as a
contemptable and odious group." 30
The Protestant and the Catholic Churches took the Fassbinder affair
as an opportunity for a concerted ecumenical action that aimed at
breaking totally with the past. The Churches recognized publicly their
faults and omissions in the Nazi period and warned against everything
that would create a climate of new anti-Semitism. The day of the
première, they celebrated an ecumenical office and demonstrated,
together with the Jewish Community, against the play. Of all official institutions, the Churches were the
only ones that had an autonomous discourse and escaped the sterile
opposition Left / Right. In this controversy, they really fulfilled
their role as keeper of conscience and morality.
The Jewish Community got into the affair rather late. The first
action did not come from Frankfurt itself, but from Berlin. At the end
of September 1985, the daily ”Frankfurter Rundschau” reported:
"The ”Jüdische Kulturforum” in Berlin tries to prevent the première
of Fassbinder's play ”Garbage, the City and Death” by lodging a
complaint of racism and defamation against it." 31
Jürgen Flimm, the chairman of the influential ”Deutsche Akademie der darstellenden Künste”
entreated the Jewish cultural organisation to withdraw its complaint.
Nevertheless, the affair was brought to the tribunal. On October 14,
the attorney general dismissed the complaint on the grounds that the
play had a right to freedom of expression and art guaranteed by the ”Grundgesetz”.
Throughout the month of October, the affair was discussed daily by
all of the German newspapers. The Jewish Community of Frankfurt, with
its Chairman Ignatz Bubis, had announced that it would not tolerate a
première and would try to prevent it by every means at its disposal.
This was the very first time that a Jewish Community in postwar Germany
had become so active on the public scene. When the writer Ernst Jünger,
whose affinities with some aspects of the Nazi ideology were a secret to nobody, had received the
Goethe prize of the City of Frankfurt and Fest had held the ”laudatio”,
there had been no protestations from the Jewish institutions. Those to
be formulated had come from Leftwing Germans. The same was true for
US-President Reagan's visit to the Bitburg cemetery. The Leftists were
now reproaching the Jewish Community for this.
The misunderstanding was profound. There was no doubt that Chairman
Bubis was a conservative, that he had played his part in the ”Westend”
speculations, be it a minor one, and that he was now fighting his own
battle. Nevertheless, this did not mean that his battle was not
legitimate, even from a leftwing point of view. The problem with the
whole Fassbinder affair was that, because of its political character,
people in general could no longer distinguish between the political
orientation of the protagonists on the one hand, and the causes they
pleaded for with their specific content on the other. For the German
Leftists, the fact that the representatives of the Jewish Community had
a rather conservative tinge and were backed by the CDU, and that Fest
had made himself a spokesman on their behalf, made their cause
unacceptable to them. Present and past had become so mingled and
intertwined in this controversy, that it had become difficult for
politically committed people to find a position that would do justice
to both. Was it better to betray one's present or one's past? Almost
all sided with the present, not recognizing that a present without a
past cannot persist. This gives the affair its peculiar character, and
is the reason why sincerity and hypocrisy were so close to each other
in almost all public positions that only very independent people could
find their way out.
Daniel Cohn-Bendit was one such independent person. On November 1, 1985, he attended the première of ”Garbage, the City and Death”
that was to take place in the ”Kammerspiele” repertory theater. The
evening turned into a happening. Ignatz Bubis and other members of the
Jewish Community demonstrated on the stage against the play; the actors
asked to perform it, manager Rühle read a petition in this sense. As
the demonstrators did not move, a discussion was launched between them
and the public, which proved to be mostly hostile towards them. There was not much communication
between the two parties who repeated both time and again their by now
well known arguments: freedom of art versus anti-Semitic threat.
Finally, the “Red Dany” got up and explained to both sides why they were right. His arguments were comprehensive and generous. In a way it was his evening, and could be no-one else's. As one of the main newspaper put it in its comment next morning, in this story there were only losers. 32
The première was cancelled, and when people left the theater, they
passed through a row of demonstrators who, led by the ecologist women,
paraded outside against the Jewish demonstrators inside. A little
further, representatives of the Churches marched silently through the
streets of Frankfurt.
The next morning, the incident made the headlines of the whole
German press. There were considerable differences in interpretation
that often followed the established division Right / Left.
Nevertheless, the dominant impression was one of perplexity and
embarrassment; and the general feeling was that the past dominated the
present where it could not be integrated. One of many quotation reads as follows:
"Some wrong has been done. Those who did it could argue that they
did it in order to prevent an even worse injustice. These could be the
possible closing words of a long story. But this story is not that
easy, it is terribly confused. And it is not yet finished, it is only
about to begin." 33
The Fassbinder affair itself finished quickly. The two performances
of November 4 and 6 were cancelled by the theater. Instead, there was a
unique representation for the press on the 4th. On November 12, manager
Rühle announced publicly that he was definitely withdrawing the play.
But, as the years to come proved, the story was not finished. It was
only about to begin.
1.
See the weekly ”Die Zeit”, the articles of Ulrich Greiner,
November 1st, 1985, "Der Jude von Frankfurt"; of Gunter Hofmann,
15. 11. 1985, "Hinter den Fassaden von Main-hattan"; and ”Der
Spiegel” of November 11, 1985.
2. Ulrich Greiner, ”Die Zeit•, 1. 11. 1985.
3. The daily ”Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung”
4.
Gerhard Zwerenz, "Müll-Stück", ”TAZ“, 26. 10. 1985.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Hannah Arendt, ”The Origins of Totalitarianism”, Deutsch, London 1986, p. 438.
9. See the end of the article in the ”TAZ”, loc. cit., Zwerenz is an
utopist and a fighter, his enemy has a clear-cut complexion and a
social definition. Jewish fate does not fit into this kind of ”Weltbild”.
10. Quoted in ”Newsweek”, 11. 11. 1985.
11. Interview of Rainer Werner Fassbinder in the weekly ”Die Zeit”, 9. 4. 1976.
12. Josef Joffe, ”Die Süddeutsche Zeitung“, 5. 11. 1988.
13. Gerhard Zwerenz, ”Müll-Stück“, ”TAZ“, 26. 10. 1985.
14. Joachim Fest, "Reicher Jude von links", ”FAZ“, 19. 3. 1976.
15. German institution that grants credits to scripts or films.
16. Hannah Arendt, ”The Origins of Totalitarianism”, ”loc. cit., p. 459.
17. ”Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung“ (”FAZ“), cultural section, 25. 4. 1985.
18. FAZ, local section, 7. 7. 1985.
19. FAZ, 11. 9. 1985.
20. The “fundamental Law”, substitute for a constitution in the FRG. ”FAZ”, 9. 8. 1985.
21. Ibid.
22. FAZ, 9. 8. 1985.
23. FAZ, 14. 9. 1985.
24. Frankfurter Rundschau, 16. 9. 1985
25. ”FAZ”, 7. 7. 1984.
26. ”FAZ”, 7. 7. 1984.
27. Frankfurter Rundschau, 16. 9. 1985.
28. This quarter was to be transformed by the same speculators who had already taken car of the ”Westend
29. Die Zeit, article of Ulrich Greiner, 1. 11. 1985.
30. ”Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (”FAZ“), 12. 9. 1985.
31. Frankfurter Rundschau, 25. 9. 1985.
32. Horst Köpke "An diesem Abend gab es fast nur Verlierer", ”Frankfurter Rundschau“, 2. 11. 1985
33. Benjamin Hinrichs, "Hass im Kopf, Liebe im Bauch", ”Die Zeit“, 8. 11. 1985.
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