Director of Controversial Play Drops Plans to Stage It for the Time Being

Guenther Ruehle, director of the controversial Fassbinder play “Garbage, the City and Death,” labeled anti-Semitic by the local and national Jewish communities and by some newspaper critics, announced here last night that he had dropped plans to stage it for the time being because the pressure to prevent its showing had become unbearable.

The Jewish community here, which had stated on several occasions its intentions to prevent the November 13th premiere of the play, welcomed the decision as avictory for reason and common sense. Community spokesperson Michel Friedman said that “with this decision, further damage to the relations between Jews and non-Jews has been avoided.” The conflict over the play showed that Jews had a future in Germany only if they stood up for themselves, he told a news conference here today.

But angry commentators on West German radio stations attacked the Jewish community for “censorship through violence.” Some warned that the Jewish success in blocking the staging of the play would not be lasting and might trigger more anti-Semitism in the country.

Meanwhile, the Ulm theater said it would seek to stage the Ruehle version of the play. The theaters of Cologne and Bochum also announced their interest in performing the play, but their theater directors aparently plan to prepare an altogether new performance.

CITES PRESSURE BY JEWISH COMMUNITY AND OTHERS

Ruehle said in his announcement that he still believed the play was not necessarily anti-Semitic, but that he had no choice but to abandon his plans of putting it on at this time because of the Jewish community and others. He was reported to have fought back tears as he spoke.

The announcement came following several hours of intensive talks between Ruehle, Frankfurt mayor Walter Wallman, and other political figures. Wallmann had told a largely Jewish audience yesterday marking the 47th anniversary of the Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) pogrom of 1938 that he could not accede to calls by Jewish leaders to ban the play but that he had urged Ruehle not to stage it.

In a related development, a non-Jewish official responsible for cultural affairs in the Bonn municipality, Rolf Schlessmann, announced he would join the demonstrators who planned to prevent the play’s premiere if he got the green light from the Jewish community. He said that many Germans still demonstrated a lack of sensitivity when it came to combatting anti-Semitism, but did not mention Ruehle by name in this connection.

Schlessmann made his announcement and remarks at a service in Bonn over the weekend commemorating Kristallnocht (Night of Broken Glass). The ceremony took place at the site of the former main synagogue of the city. A demonstrator carried a banner reading “Garbage, the City and this Place,” a reference both the Fassbinder play and to the failure of the Bonn authorities to approve the building of a documentary center opposing anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism at that site.

PLAY ASSAILED IN THE MEDIA

The play had become a storm center of controversy, which intensified after a special staging last week for journalists and critics. Some of them wrote that, despite the changes made by Ruehle in down-playing the central character of the nameless “Rich Jew” — a ruthless real-estate speculator who gets away with murder because the Germans feel they owe the Jews something — the play remained anti-Semitic.

The publisher of Der Spiegel, Rudolf Augstein, strongly attacked the play in the issue of the influential left-of-center weekly that hit the newsstands yesterday. Calling the play “anti-Semitic, colored over as pro-Semitic, ” Augstein charged that the decision to stage it demonstrated “a monstrous lack of sensitivity.”

The conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, which had opposed the performance of the play all along, said in its editorial today that Ruehle had failed to recognize the legitimate right of the Jewish community to protest against an anti-Semitic piece, thus creating a needless debacle.