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This lack is caused by the logic of the scandal itself: Because the play or the performance is prohibited, it has been withdrawn from the public, making it impossible to form a well-founded opinion on the controversy. 2.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.

Virtue, Law and Mercy

The attribution of responsibility in world society is increasingly a field of contestation. On the one hand, the perception of causal and moral links reaching far in space and time are ever more explicitly pronounced; on the other hand, the very complexity of these links often engenders a fragmentation of responsibility both in law (Veitch 2007) as well as in moral commitment. Moreover, those institutions of legal responsibility attempting to reflect some of these interrelations are often criticised as insufficient by those who follow alternative narratives of causation and moral community. Current institutions of responsibility in law appear to abstract from what could be called enabling contexts; they perform their cuts in the chains of enabling interactions at very brief intervals (Strathern 2001). The result is often “organised irresponsibility” (Veitch 2007; Beck 1996), producing appeals to a global community of concern in time and space without corresponding obligatory commitments. This talk explores alternative conceptualisations of responsibility, and enquires into their notion of the person, their temporal and socio-spatial dimensions, and their notion of liability.