‘Anti-Semitic’ Play to Be Offered Again

The director of a controversial play by the late Rainer Werner Fassbinder vowed Friday to continue attempts to present it despite protests by Jewish and other groups that the work is “anti-Semitic.”

Jewish groups countered with their own pledge to disrupt any of the eight scheduled performances of the work this month, as they did at the play’s intended premiere in Frankfurt on Thursday night. A Frankfurt Jewish community leader, Michael Friedman, said that members of his group had purchased tickets for all the scheduled performances at the Frankfurt Playhouse.

Director Guenther Ruehle said the cast would make the next attempt to present the play, “Der Muell, Die Stadt und Der Tod” (Garbage, The City and Death) on Monday.

He denied charges that the play is anti-Semitic. Rather, he said, it reflects such undercurrents in West German society today, attitudes that he said should be brought to light.

The play was written a decade ago by Fassbinder, the German filmmaker who died at 36 in 1982, but previous attempts to perform the 50-page play have been thwarted.

Two-Hour Argument

Thursday’s scheduled premier was canceled when about two dozen members of the Jewish community who had purchased tickets occupied the stage after the curtain rose. The audience, actors and demonstrators argued over the play for two hours before it was called off.

The disruption onstage coincided with a protest outside the 190-seat theater by Jewish organizations, as well as members of the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches, and West German political parties.

The play concerns the activities of a property developer in the 1970s in Frankfurt’s red-light district who has ties to city officials and prostitutes. The leading character, the speculator, was called “The Rich Jew” in the original script. He is detested by the local inhabitants for his real estate activities and his ties to corrupt officials, and at the end he murders a prostitute. His name was subsequently changed to just “A” in an attempt to lessen the criticism.

In one controversial passage, the speculator says: “I buy old houses in this town, tear them down, build new ones, which I sell very well. The city protects me, they have to. I am a Jew. The head of the police is my friend, the mayor invites me, and I can rely on representatives in City Hall.

“Of course, nobody really likes what they are allowing, but it is not my plan, the plan was there before I arrived.”

‘He Sucks Us Dry’

In another passage, a local character says of the speculator, “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.”

Fassbinder, in his will, stated that he wished the play to be premiered in Frankfurt, center of the German banking industry. But Mayor Walter Wallman last year banned a performance in the city’s Playhouse, and ultimately fired the theater company’s director, Ulrich Schwab, in the ensuing controversy.

Schwab’s successor, director Ruehle, decided to go ahead this year despite the protests.

Earlier, the West Berlin Jewish Cultural Forum filed a legal complaint seeking to ban the work, but Frankfurt public prosecutor Jochen Schroers said that since the play was a work of art, there was no basis for racial slander charges against the producers and the performance could not be legally forbidden.

Still, Frankfurt Cultural Director Hilmar Hoffmann said he was worried that “this unholy literary inheritance of Fassbinder could possibly endanger the process of reconciliation between Jews and non-Jews.”