The Fassbinder Controversy

Text: Guli Dolev-Hashiloni

The 31st of October 1985 was supposed to be a festive evening in the Schauspiel Frankfurt theater: the opening night of a play by the deceased playwright and filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder, one of West Germany's most influential – and most provocative – artists. However, just before the premiere of Der Müll, Die Stadt und der Tod (Garbage, the City and Death) began, a loud protest erupted. Roughly 1.000 people demonstrated against the play outside of the theater, but even more shocking were the protestors inside the hall. When the curtains went down about 25 people sat down on the stage, physically preventing the play from starting. All of them were Jewish, and many were Holocaust survivors. 

The Fassbinder-Kontroverse (Fassbinder controversy) would go on to become one of the most important moments in the Jewish history of Germany after Nazism, discussed in the permanent exhibition of the Jewish Museum Frankfurt, and in countless books and articles.1 This controversy, which hinged on a problematic representation of Frankfurt's Jewish underworld, is actually influencing debates on antisemitism in the arts to this very day. No wonder that even Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a Jewish activist who claimed that the play is not antisemitic and opposed the protestors, had to admit that the protest was the "coming-out" moment of Jews in Germany.2

Der Müll, Die Stadt und der Tod was written by Fassbinder on a plane, and is loosely based on Gerhard Zwerenz' book Die Erde ist unbewohnbar wie der Mond (Earth is as Inhabitable as the Moon). Already upon the publication of the text in 1975 it sparked a debate about left-wing antisemitism, and therefore Fassbinder was never able to stage it until his death in 1982. The quarrel focused on one central character in the playscript, simply called "the Rich Jew" (der reiche Jude). However, in response to the criticism, his name was supposed to be changed to "A" in the planned performance in Frankfurt.

The "Rich Jew" is presented as a real-estate speculator with a penchant for prostitutes, whom everybody hates. As one character says about him, in rhymes: “He sucks us dry, the Jew. Drinks our blood and blames us, because he is a Jew, and we are to blame. […] And the Jew is to blame, because he blames us, because he is there. […] They forgot to gas him.”

Fassbinder always claimed that by writing such a despicable character he did not condemn Jewish people – but the society that despises them. In other words, he argued his play did not criticize Jewish people but rather mocked the antisemitic German society. In this interpretation, the audience is expected to hate the characters who curse the "Rich Jew" – and not the "Rich Jew" himself. 

Yet Fassbinder's own explanation was encountered with a lot of disbelief, perhaps because the text itself is ambiguous. Take the one short passage quoted above: In it, a nameless rich Jewish speculator – a description that already echoes Nazi lies about Jewish wealth and criminality – is presented as exploiting Germans, and his survival during the Holocaust is mourned. Forty years after Jews were truly gassed to death by Germans, these lines were literally understood by many Germans and Jews alike as a bold anti-Jewish hatred.

The debate in the feuilletons reached an incredible scale, far beyond the Frankfurter Rundschau and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. On November 8th, 1985, the first page of the nationwide weekly Die Zeit (The Time), which usually had two opposing columns on its cover page, was devoted to the play. The first article was written by Marion Gräfin Döhnhoff, who sided with the protestors and wrote against the play; the other by Theo Sommer, who sided with the play and wrote against restrictions on freedom of speech. The newspaper's decision to dedicate its cover to the debate indicates not only how deep the disagreement was, but also that it had long left the theatre bubble and became a hot public issue. 

The real-life context of the play

Many columns in the media, from both sides, had one thing in common. They all treated the "Rich Jew" as a made-up invention. Thus, they ignored something that was very well understood by the Jewish community in Frankfurt: The "Rich Jew" was inspired by real figures.

Straight after liberation and after years in the ghettos and the camp, hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees, originally from Eastern Europe, found themselves in Western Germany. They had no possessions at all, no proper education and neither chances nor willingness to integrate into the German society of 1946. Most Displaced Persons, or DPs – as these Jewish survivors were called – emigrated within a few years, mostly to the US or to the newly founded State of Israel. Some of them, however, chose to stay in Frankfurt, and some among them entered the black-market trade.3

The DPs started by trading products from the aid packages they were given: after the German currency lost all its value, swapping and bartering goods such as sugar and coffee was the only way to obtain some necessary commodities. Later on, some of these traders opened up Kabaretts and Lokale – bars of all kinds – mostly in Frankfurt's red-light district, that was dominated by Jews until the 1970s. There were dozens of these places, varying from proper legitimate pubs to fully illegal brothels, with a lot of in between. The vivid Jewish underworld in Frankfurt was extensively reported in the Israeli press, that wrote shockingly about these survivors who opened sex clubs in the land of their perpetrators, serving mostly Amis, as the American soldiers stationed around Frankfurt were called. The German press, however, was careful of mentioning Jewishness and crime side by side, and completely avoided the subject.4

As the 2024 TV series Die Zweiflers (The Zweiflers) shows, a few of these Jewish bar owners gained substantial wealth. And in the 1960s, some of them left the bars and moved on to real-estate, shaping Frankfurt's famous skyline.5 Mostly active in the Westend area, they demolished residential houses and erected skyscrapers, just like the “Rich Jew” from the play.

In the early 1970s – when Fassbinder wrote his play – the leftist struggle against the development of the Westend were arguably the most visible protest in Frankfurt. The Jewish real-estate investors were accused by journalists such as Jürgen Roth of using questionable means to cast residents away, such as neglecting properties and organizing robberies. Nonetheless, the residents and squatters' campaign against the towers sometimes included antisemitic undertones. Fassbinder himself lived in Frankfurt at the time and was known for his wild lifestyle. It should come as no surprise, then, that an old Jewish bar owner told me in an interview that Fassbinder used to frequent the red-light district. 

Ignaz Bubis, who later became the president of the Jewish community in Germany, was one of the protestors blocking the stage. Bubis never hid his involvement in the black-market after the Shoa, and never hid how much he was outraged by the play. Although he was not involved in Frankfurt's red-light district, he was publicly associated with the "Rich Jew", which he battled legally. Others noticed the similarities between the “Rich Jew” and the Holocaust survivor Josef Buchmann, who owned various bars and later various towers in town.6 Therefore, it seems that the Jewish community in Frankfurt opposed the play exactly because they did not perceive it as a complete fabrication, but as a mean and slandering portrayal of its own people.

Various different opinions were voiced in the ongoing debate. For example, Jewish theatre director Peter Zadek, quoted at the beginning, argued that even though the piece is clearly antisemitic, it is wrong to censor it: The German public is smart enough to judge it on its own. However, the play was taken down, and was first shown in Germany only in 2009, under renewed protests. Yet the stage takeover changed Jewish life in Germany forever.

The ”coming-out moment” of a discriminated community

The protest in the Schauspiel Frankfurt was a groundbreaking act of resilience of a discriminated community. During it, Jewish people in Germany stopped lowering their heads in front of the authorities while merely trying to survive or emigrate, and for the first time since the Holocaust, they acted collectively, visibly and openly to facilitate a change in a German institution by addressing the German public. This radically transformed the role of the Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland (Central Council of Jews in Germany), which helped organising the protests and the press campaign around it. In earlier years the Zentralrat was mostly an inner-community organization, dealing with education, welfare and so on. Through the protests it evolved into a much more outwards-facing and influential body, that regularly advocates what it sees as Jewish interests in the public German sphere. This change also led to an increased cooperation between the Jewish community and other marginalized groups in Germany – manifested in Ignaz Bubis' famous visits to Rostock, Mölln and Solingen in the 1990s, in solidarity with the victims of the xenophobic extreme-right terror attacks there.

The "coming-out moment" in 1985 also signified the increasing importance of the Holocaust in the German society, as well as the increasing presence of minorities in the cultural fields. At the time, Nazi crimes were rising to the surface, opening questions of responsibility after years of suppression. Only a few months before the premiere the Bitburg Controversy occurred, when Ronald Reagan and Helmut Kohl paid a commemorative visit to a burial site of SS soldiers, arousing much criticism. And only one year afterwards the Historikerstreit (Historians' Dispute) broke out, as the first extensive German intellectual attempt to conceptualize Nazi crimes. Simultaneously, the 1980s saw an increasing participation and representation of other marginalized communities in German theatre. Such was case of the Stern.Zeichen gay theater festival, which also took place in Frankfurt.

“Art must always be examined in its context”

Although the Jewish leadership in Germany clearly opposed the play, as Cohn-Bendit and Zadek prove, there is never a single Jewish voice, and marginalized communities too are diverse and heterogenic. This lesson is especially relevant for today's Germany, where heated debates on antisemitism once again shake the cultural world and the broader society. In 2022, for example, Wajdi Mouawad’s play Birds, following a love affair between an Israeli man and a young Muslim, was condemned in Germany as antisemitic after Jewish students disrupted it. It was removed for a while from the stage, although it was performed without problems in Israel and many other countries.

How much shall artistic freedom be restricted due to the fear of invoking antisemitism is once again a burning question in the German media, especially since October 7th, but even earlier, as the discussions around documenta fifteen and Achille Mbembe's post-colonial critique had shown. Many arguments used in contemporary debates look as if they were simply copied from the Fassbinder controversy: there too people claimed that Jews and not Germans should define antisemitism; that Germany should have stricter standards to antisemitism then the rest of the world; and that there is a generational gap between older supporters of cancelling and younger opponents of it. 

However, a simple copy-paste is dangerous. Art must always be examined in its context, and the Western German society in the 1980s is surely a different context then German society today. Indeed, dubious Frankfurt-based Jewish lawbreakers have already appeared in the works of German-Jewish writers Michel Bergmann and Maxim Biller and caused no drama, also due to the very different writers' identity. 

One way or another, the fact that the same questions and that the same arguments are discussed today proves that the Fassbinder controversy continues to inform cultural debates in Germany. Paradoxically enough, the cancellation of Der Müll, Die Stadt und der Tod in Frankfurt – an emancipatory act on its own – may have unintentionally contributed to more restrictive cultural norms decades later. Today, when art of all kinds is cancelled due to suspected antisemitism, campaigns against provocative representations of Jewish life are no longer protests against a powerful state. Instead, those campaigns target artists and are led by the German state itself, as Germany has cemented the fight against antisemitism as a core value. One thing is clear, though: ever since the protest in Frankfurt, whenever there is a debate today – Jewish voices participate in it.

About the author

Guli Dolev-Hashiloni is a writer born in Tel Aviv and a PhD candidate at the Center for Research on Antisemitism at the Technical University in Berlin. He holds an MA in Contemporary Middle East Politics and an MA in Global History, and translates from German and Yiddish to Hebrew. His research on the Jewish history of Frankfurt's red-light district was published in an essay form in the Diasporist and turned into an installation for an exhibition in Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin as a part of Laba-Mar'a'yeh program for Jewish and Muslim artists.

• 1

  See, for example: Brenner, Michael, ed. Geschichte Der Juden in Deutschland Von 1945 Bis Zur Gegenwart: Politik, Kultur Und Gesellschaft. München: C.H. Beck, 2012. One excellent book is a collection of press columns from the debate: Lichtenstein, Heiner, ed. Die Fassbinder-Kontroverse, oder Das Ende der Schonzeit. Königstein: Athenäum Verlag, 1986.

• 2

  Cited in: Freimüller, Tobias. Frankfurt und die Juden: Neuanfänge und Fremdheitserfahrungen 1945-1990. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2020, p. 21.

• 3

  Dolev-Hashiloni, Guli. "From Auschwitz to Skyscrapers", the Diasporist, 12.03.2025.

• 4

  Dolev-Hashiloni, Guli. "Die Zweiflers and Frankfurt's Yiddish Underworld", In Geveb, 02.24.2025.

• 5

  Tme., “Das Nachtleben soll weiter florieren: Besitzerwechsel des „Imperial“ läßt nicht auf eine Krise schließen,” F.A.Z, May 21, 1964, 14.

• 6

  Riehl-Heyse, Herbert. “Lehrstück auf dünnem Eis.” Süddeutsche Zeitung, 23.10.1985.