ABSTRACT
Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Der Mull, die Stadt und der Tod is a nightmarish vision of a metropolis that devours its men and women, turning them into living corpses. Fassbinder’s play had been published by Suhrkampf in 1976 but was soon withdrawn following attacks on its alleged antisemitism. Joachim Fest, the biographer of Adolf Hitler and an editor of the conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, even accused Fassbinder of ‘left-wing fascism’. Garbage therefore offers the strange paradox of a play that is ostensibly anticapitalist and anti-fascist while producing the classic stereotypes of antisemitic mythology. Fassbinder and his supporters, for example, undoubtedly saw elements of continuity between the Third Reich and the postwar Federal Republic. For German Jews the Fassbinder controversy presented a different kind of problem. The Fassbinder controversy, especially for the younger generation who had grown up in postwar Germany, seemed like a liberation from a self-imposed ghetto in which they had previously lived.
