West Germany: Dumping on the Garbage Play

The curtain at Frankfurt’s Kammerspiel theater had just gone up on the late Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s controversial 1975 play Garbage, City and Death, and the stage was filled with almost 30 protesters. The interlopers, members of Frankfurt’s Jewish community, unfurled a banner reading SUBSIDIZED ANTI- SEMITISM and announced that they would not allow the play to go on. They remained onstage for nearly three hours, engaging the audience in a spirited discussion of what some critics call the “garbage play.” The protesters argued that staging the play, whose main character is an unscrupulous real estate speculator identified as “A., the Rich Jew,” will revive anti-Jewish feelings in the country. Director Gunther Ruhle insisted that Fassbinder, a * well-known moviemaker, only intended to criticize modern anti-Semitism. Such purposes may seem elusive in a play in which one character says of the protagonist, “They forgot to gas him.” The demonstrators, backed by 500 cheering supporters outside the theater, vowed that they would return again and again to make sure that Garbage, which has been blocked several times before, is never performed in Frankfurt.