Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s "Garbage, The City, and Death". A Four Act Scandal in Post-war Germany

Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Garbage, The City, and Death. A Four Act Scandal in Post-war Germany The paper explores the dramaturgy of the scandals around the play Garbage, The City and Death (Der Müll, die Stadt und der Tod) by German playwright, theatre and film maker Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Published in 1976, the play immediately caused a scandal in West Germany, because it was accused of reproducing anti-Semitic stereotypes. The presentation sheds light on the different phases of the scandal and their historical and cultural contexts in post-war Germany – starting as a literary scandal in 1976, being transformed into a theatre scandal in the 1980ies and finally being dissolved by the German premiere in 2009. The paper is structured as follows: Act One: The Literary Scandal. Destroying Fassbinder’s Garbage, Act Two: Preventing the Staging of the Play, Act Three: Blocking the Opening Night, Act Four: Performing the Play in Germany. By analysing the dramaturgical structure of this specific scandal, the paper discusses the following hypotheses: 1. Scandals arise through the circulation of decontextualised information in public. This is due to either a lack of information about the actual object or incident being scandalised or a lack of information about the context of the object or incident. This lack is caused by the logic of the scandal itself: Because the play or the performance is prohibited, it has been withdrawn from the public, making it impossible to form a well-founded opinion on the controversy. 2. The scandal is driven forward by an emotionalising rhetoric built around the decontextualised information. 3. Once the gap of information is filled, the scandalising rhetoric turns into a rhetoric of irrelevance: Reviews of the first performance of Garbage, The City and Death in Germany considered the play hardly a matter of public concern.

Meta-cognition about biological sex and gender-stereotypic physical appearance: Consequences for the assessment of leadership competence

Previous findings are inconsistent with regard to whether men are judged as being more or less competent leaders than women. However, masculine-relative to feminine-looking persons seem to be judged consistently as more competent leaders. Can this different impact of biological sex and physical appearance be due to the disparate availability of meta-cognitive knowledge about both sources? The results of Study 1 indicated that individuals possess meta-cognitive knowledge about a possible biasing influence of persons’ biological sex, but not for their physical appearance. In Study 2, participants judged the leadership competence of a male versus female stimulus person with either masculine or feminine physical appearance. In addition, the available cognitive capacity was manipulated. When high capacity was available, participants corrected for the influence of stimulus persons’ sex, but they fell prey to this influence under cognitive load. However, the effect of physical appearance was not moderated by cognitive capacity.

Norm enforcement in the city revisited: An international field experiment of altruistic punishment, norm maintenance, and broken windows

In laboratory experiments, people are willing to sanction norms at a cost—a behavioral tendency called altruistic punishment. However, the degree to which these findings can be generalized to real-world interactions is still debated. Only a small number of field experiments have been conducted, and initial results suggest that punishment is less frequent outside of the lab. This study replicates one of the first field experiments on altruistic punishment and builds ties to research on norm compliance and the broken windows theory. The original study addressed the enforcement of the anti-littering norm in Athens. We replicate this study in Bern, Zurich, and New York City. As an extension, we investigate how the experimental context (clean vs littered) impacts social norm enforcement. As a second extension, we investigate how opportunity structure impacts the maintenance of the anti-littering norm. Findings indicate that norms are universally enforced, although significantly less than in the standard laboratory experiment,and that enforcement is significantly more common in Switzerland than in New York. Moreover, individuals prefer more subtle forms of enforcement to direct punishment. We also find that enforcement is less frequent in littered than in clean contexts, suggesting that broken windows might not only foster deviant behavior but also weaken informal social control. Finally, we find that opportunity structure can encourage people to maintain norms, as indicated by the fact that people are more likely to voluntarily pick up litter when it is closer to a trash bin.