Jewish Protest Halts ‘Anti-Semitic’ Play in Frankfurt

Jewish demonstrators occupied the stage of a city-owned theater Thursday night, forcing producers to call off the premiere of a Rainer Werner Fassbinder play denounced as anti-Semitic.

About 25 Jews moved onto the stage of the Frankfurt Playhouse as the curtain was about to rise on “Der Muell, Die Stadt und Der Tod” (“Garbage, The City and Death”).

Cast members appeared moments later and read a statement urging the demonstrators to be seated and let the play begin.

The protesters responded, “We will not yield!” and held up a banner saying “Subsidized Anti-Semitism.” At 10:30 p.m., theater officials canceled the premiere and rescheduled it for Monday night.

Jewish groups vowed to block that performance, too.

Michel Friedmann, spokesman for Frankfurt’s Jewish community, said Jews had obtained 12 of the 193 tickets for the premiere.

About 500 Jews, members of churches, citizens’ groups and political parties gathered outside the playhouse in cold, overcast weather before curtain time.

A few counterdemonstrators, some from the leftist Greens party, protested what they said was an attempt to censor free expression.

The 1975 play, set in Frankfurt in the early 1970s, is about a predatory Jewish land speculator who buys up old residential housing, demolishes it and sells the land to developers who erect high-rise buildings.

Fassbinder, one of postwar Germany’s most critically acclaimed and controversial movie directors, died in 1982 at age 36. He was best known for such brooding feature films as “Lili Marlene” and “Berlin Alexanderplatz.”

In an attempt to lessen public criticism, the name of the play’s main character was changed to “A” from “The rich Jew,” which critics had charged was an old anti-Semitic stereotype.

Left intact, however, was a four-minute monologue by a fringe character, Hans von Glueck, a poor man hurt by the wealthy Jew’s buy-outs. He says:

“He sucks us dry, the Jew. He drinks our blood and puts us in the wrong because he’s a Jew and we carry the blame. . . . If he had stayed where he came from, or if we had gassed him, I could sleep better today.”

Six million Jews were killed by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime.

The play’s producers defend it as an attempt by Fassbinder to probe “latent” anti-Semitism that survived in postwar Germany.