Fassbinder's "anti-semitism" and political incorrectness: A defense

The prevailing opinion among liberals and left-liberals in America in recent times is that one must carefully avoid any appearance of prejudice towards any social group. So, for instance, a film that not only includes but is centered around "negative” (unsympathetic) portrayals of, say, black Americans, would be ipso facto a “racist” work of art, and that is harmful to the cause of social peace and combatting rather than furthering injustice. But is it?

Fassbinder’s cinema is one of social criticism, and it is very focused on images of people because, like Bergman, he came out of the theater and his profound and unmistakeable opposition to contemporary capitalism and postwar German society is always articulated through a critique of persons and relationships between them. His genius for glances of one person on another, and for devices like mirrors reflecting a visage, along with a thematic concern for people’s attitudes that focuses on how they treat each other always filters his social criticisms onto characters and relationships. In this he is the contrary of Godard, who is interested in how people are imaged in advertisements, ideas of character and story, gestures, postures, statements, and other fragments, and their juxtapositions, but has little interest in the depth of character and its revelation in story; Godard cares about the particular and fragmentary images that live independent lives in people and their actual lives, and the main principle of his cinema is the meanings he can derive from the juxtapositions of these images. This makes his critical regard for contemporary capitalism society, as well as all the redemptive potentialities he entertains and inquires into, fundamentally cinematic. Whereas Fassbinder’s are always theatrical, focusing on how people think of themselves and how they relate to others. Godard is bothered by how people are alienated and oppressed by images of who they are that circulate in the capitalist society he dislikes; Fassbinder also sees capitalism as alienating, but this is revealed not in fragmentary images but in attitudes and interactions between characters: a cinema of actors, not images. What Fassbinder most believed in was an idea of love, and what he was most skeptical about was the way love is always involved in people (not systems, at least not directly) exploiting others, failing to recognize their own chances of happiness, and using their amorous and familial ties for purposes that are largely destructive. His general complaint can be given in two of his film titles: “I only want you to love me,” and “Love is colder than death.”

Cahiers du Cinema critic Yann Lardeau’s biography of the director starts out with the blanket observation that “the work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder dominated the seventies….”. I find this to be absolutely true. When I first saw some of his films in the late 70s, I recognized, as many people did, that they were spot on as critiques of how in today’s society the feminist slogan holds, in a way that is actually larger than just the question of how in families and couples men take advantage of women. In Fassbinder, everyone betrays and uses everyone else. America in the seventies was more liberal in some ways than Germany was in the generation after the war, and Fassbinder was part of the generation of young Germans who were outraged at their parents’ generation for having been Nazis. This outrage was most notoriously shared by the terrorists of the Red Army Fraction, commonly known as the “Baader-Meinhof Gang,” partly because of the notoriety of Ulrike Meinhof, who had moved to violent activism from journalism.

Fassbinder criticized everyone and he managed to get by with it. He spared no one, even if his most biting portrayals were of Germans in Germany (white, not Jewish) and the petty bourgeoisie, and sometimes lumpen and lower middle class. There is a remarkable dearth of positive portrayals in his films. He probably managed to escape greater censure just because it was obvious that he was interested in criticizing the whole of German society at the time, and the negative portrayals were largely from the point of view of the white Aryan German characters in the films. Among those he skewered were rich gay men (Fox and his friends, whose German title means “Fox, the talking head,” and whose French title is even more apt: “The right of the stronger”), rich lesbians (“The bitter tears of Petra von Kant”), black Americans (“The Marriage of Maria Braun”), and Jews (“Lili Marleen,” which includes a rich Jewish financier family whose father seems to represent an idea of patriarchy, and “In a year of Thirteen Moons,” which includes a “castrating” Jewish concentration camp survivor who runs a real estate firm in Frankfurt (!; he is feared as a powerful man by Erwin, who has become Elvira, having given up his manly part in a sex change because he loved Anton Saitz, who casually remarked that that would be fine if only he was a girl). In this film it is clear that Saitz is significant mainly as a fantasy projection, which of course does not mean there could not be, in Germany at the time, including Frankfurt with its historically large Jewish minority and their involvement in business and finance; undoubtedly there were. Fassbinder got into the most trouble with Jews in Frankfurt when he wrote a play, “Garbage, the City, and Death,” which includes a character called “The Rich Jew” and is quite scathing. In fact, it is even clearer here that Fassbinder is dealing not with “what Jews are like” but how they appeared in the fantasies of some Germans. Like much of his oeuvre, the play is about the fascist mind. It is about Germany, especially after the war, seen in continuity, since the basic complaint of his generation that he articulated so well was that German society had not fundamentally changed, and the typically petty bourgeois German family was essentially fascist in its character structure. Though the way his characters fail to effectively seek or seize their own chances for love and happiness, and the way so many of them cruelly use or are used by others, is universal enough, and certainly was at the time, that American, French, and other audiences had no trouble recognizing most of the characters. So many people use other people, and this is ugly and sad, indeed outrageous: that is the principle lesson of Fassbinder’s oeuvre.

The Jewish community of Frankfurt protested and managed to prevent the play from being performed in the city. I understand it still never has been. This shows what is wrong with PC attitudes everywhere, and why Jews should also disavow them. As if there are no unsavory or bad Jews! Anti-semitism does not maintain uniquely the thesis that there are some bad people who are Jews, any more than white racism is the belief that there are some bad black people. Who believes either of these things is false? Racism has more to do with the wish to maintain, for practical, social and moral purposes, the obviously false belief that if there were any bad members of a social group, and we were to allow that to be said or shown, then we would ipso facto be obligated and justified to not like that group and its members. Or to not like some of them because they are members of their group. The logical absurdity of this is obvious enough. The argument works because many people think that some things should not be said whether they are true or not. Or, equivalently, we must treat them as not true because of the practical social and moral consequences that would ensue if they were true. But of course there is another far more sensible route. It is this: the possibility that someone behaves badly who is a member of some sometimes oppressed social group has no implication whatever for how one ought to see and think of members of that group, considered as such. In fact, most people can be seen as both members of some social group and as having other, more general properties. For instance, a black American Muslim man is not only black and Muslim but also an American and maybe also just a man. Or maybe he is distinguished by something he does or says and that primarily. Fassbinder knew some Jews, but, growing up after the war (he was born in 1945 or 1946, accounts varying) may not have known many in his native Munich or in Germany after the war. What if he presents stereotypes? He was not interested in exploring the Jewish conscience as such, nor the gay conscience, or anything else (though he was certainly and very openly gay); he was interested in exploring the German conscience.

And so some artists have the audacity to criticize all kinds of people, and also ideas or representations of people of certain kinds. The larger problem is that we are so focused on avoiding racism that we avoid many discussions, and the effort to police society at the level of attitudes about all kinds of things, in order to make corporate work environments even less likely to be host to any kinds of social conflicts that could be bad for business either in the efficiency of operations or the need to avoid lawsuit expenses. While people neglect to worry about structural and economic issues that are far more determining of how people live their lives and are oppressed. I suspect that Jews in Germany today would be better off if these discussions did take place than if they are kept under wraps or avoided. There are also many things in our society that go relatively uncriticized just because we are given to understand that we cannot criticize a Jew, a black, a woman in authority, or - what about this?: a banker, a capitalist, a poor boy who does drugs and may say or do things that are smart or stupid, good or bad? There need to be more Fassbinders.

My readers know that I do criticize some Jews, and some tendencies in the Jewish world. I consider myself one of them, though that membership can be and has been contested. I think much of this world is reactionary, and I don’t like that. Many people in it say or do things that I think are awful. They say or do these things not just because they are Jews, but they say or do them because of wrong beliefs that some persons have and they say or do some of these things as Jews and not just as Americans or whatever other predicates besides general citizen of the whole world (or, a person as such, considered in the absence of all other qualities, except what he or she has said or done). We need criticism. I say this in the name of an ideal. My name for that ideal is democracy. I view this as an idea that our society has very inadequately realized. The world of democracy does not sit well with the demand for the worship of pieties. It needs conflict, which is what it feeds on to stay alive and flourish and grow. The world of democracy is one of conflict and criticism. Get used to it. Grow up. American democracy and the Jewish religion have at least one thing in common: they necessarily involve a social space that is a political one, and it is one made for adults. And adults are well served not by adulation, but much more by disagreement. Live freely and democratically; criticize and argue with your neighbors and friends. A democratic society is more than just a community, where people share their norms and values and lifestyles. It is the kind of community the ancients called a res publicae, a place of public things, matters or affairs that we have in common so that we can do with them what science and art do with things: problematize them.