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Koutsourakis, A orcid.org/0000-0001-6090-4798 (2020) Militant ethics: Daniel Schmid’s
film Adaptation of Fassbinder's Garbage, the City, and Death. Cultural Politics, 16 (3). pp.
281-302. ISSN 1743-2197

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Militant ethics: Daniel Schmid’s film Adaptation of Fassbinder's Garbage, the City, and
Death
Keywords: Fassbinder, cinematic ethics, politics of representation, Deleuze, Badiou,
Rancière.

Contributor details: Angelos Koutsourakis is a University Academic Fellow in World Cinema

at the Centre for World Cinemas and Digital Cultures, University of Leeds. He is the author
of Rethinking Brechtian Film Theory and Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2018), Politics
as Form in Lars von Trier (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013) and the co-editor of Cinema of
Crisis: Film and Contemporary Europe (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP 2020) and of The Cinema
of Theo Angelopoulos (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2015).

Abstract:
The publication of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s play Der Müll, die Stadt und der Tod (The
Garbage, the City, and Death, 1976) constitutes one of the major scandals in German cultural
history. The play was accused of being antisemitic, because one of its key characters, a real
estate speculator, was merely called the Rich Jew. Furthermore, some (negative) dramatis
personae in the play openly express antisemitic views. When asked to respond, Fassbinder
retorted that philosemites [in the West Germany of the time] are in fact antisemites, because
they refuse to see how the victims of oppression can at times assume the roles and positions
assigned to them by pernicious social structures. Fassbinder’s vilification on the part of the
right-wing press prevented the play’s staging; subsequently, in 1984 and 1985-6 two Frankfurt
productions were banned due to the reaction on the part of the local Jewish community. A
similar controversy sparked off by the film adaptation of the play Shadow of Angels by Daniel
Schmid. During the film’s screening at the Cannes Film Festival the Israeli delegation walked
out while there was also rumor of censorship in France. Gilles Deleuze wrote an article for Le
Monde titled “The Rich Jew” defending the film and the director. Deleuze’s article triggered a
furious reaction from the Shoah (1985) director, Claude Lanzmann, who responded in Le
Monde and attacked the cultural snobbery and “endemic terrorism” of the left-wing cinéphile
community. Lanzmann saw the film as wholly antisemitic and suggested that it identifies the
Jew ̶ all Jews ̶ with money. While, I acknowledge the complexity of the subject, I intend to
revisit the debate and the film, so as to unpack its ethical/aesthetic intricacy, and propose a
pathway that can potentially enable us to think of ways that political incorrectness can function
as a means of exposing the persistence of historical and ethical questions that are ostentatiously
resolved. I proceed to do this by drawing on Alain Badiou’s idea of militant ethics and Jacques
Rancière’s redefinition of critical art as one that produces dissensus.

Introduction

Thus, the ultimate aim of this essay is to suggest a pathway that can make us think about the

possibility of militant cinematic ethics that do not aspire to create a moralist consensus, but
produce conflict and facilitate a better understanding of the interrelationship between ethics

and politics. Much of the contemporary discussion on cinematic ethics focuses on involuntary

emotional responses and the types of attitudes that spectators are invited to adopt towards

fictional characters and narratives (see Jones, Vice 2011; Smith 2011; Carroll 2014). For the

most part, these discussions are associated with cognitive film theory, a strand in film

scholarship committed to identifying the conscious activities employed by audiences to process

a narrative rationally and emotionally. Yet cognitivist ethics dictate the conversation on cinema

and ethics in very narrow parameters aiming to produce a sense of apolitical consensus. Some

cognitivist scholars go as far as to suggest that characters in films can function as “moral

examples” that can inspire audiences to act ethically. In other words, cognitivists tend to

explore how films can produce “correct” responses or attitudes on the part of the spectators.

This is partly to be blamed on an uncritical acceptance of communal values that cognitivists

tend to universalize. However, as Janet Wolff aptly suggests, values and ethics have their roots

in communities, but one should not forget that communities are far from being static. They are

instead “always in process of formation and dissolution in relation to other communities and

to transformations in the economic, social, and discursive structures out of which they are

formed and in which they participate” (2008, 23).

Unlike cognitivist scholars, film commentators drawing on continental philosophy

understand cinematic ethics not as a process of moral instruction or adoption of a set of

absolute/prescriptive ethical principles, but rather as a process of investigation that cannot be

simply reduced to an uncritical acceptance of positive representations of groups who have

historically been the victims of discrimination (see Downing, Saxton 2009; Lübecker 2015;

Del Río 2016). Much of the recent discussion has focused on films that deploy an aesthetics of

resistance by producing negative affects and encouraging us to adopt a more critical stance

towards systemic structures and the contradictions of the dominant moralist codes. The works
of Nikolaj Lübecker and Elena del Río are key exemplars of this scholarly trend. Other

scholars, such as Robert Sinnerbrink, follow a more pluralist approach with the view to

identifying the connection between ethics, aesthetics and politics (see Sinnerbrink 2016). My

essay intends to join the scholarly conversation initiated by scholars working in the continental

tradition by exploring the concept of militant ethics through Schmid’s adaptation of Garbage,

the City, and Death. The term militant ethics is informed by Alain Badiou’s critique of ethics.

According to Badiou, the ethical turn in aesthetics and politics is problematic because it tends

to depoliticize the conversation striving for a consensus that operates as a justification of the

current regime of things. For the advocates of ethics seek to find ways to integrate oppositions

and conflicts to a predetermined whole, which is uncritically accepted as the universal

norm/truth. Militant ethics instead is predicated on the idea that political emancipation is

premised upon the production of dissensus; Badiou asserts that the abstract universality

promoted by the ethical ideology is prescriptive and aspires to conceal capitalist contradictions

and inequalities. The reason for this is that it understands the individual as a victim that needs

protection rather than as an active agent, who can work with others to bring about social

transformation.

The controversy caused by the play and the film

Before discussing Schmid’s adaptation, a series of introductory comments on the controversies

raised by the play and the film are in order. According to Fassbinder scholarship, the director

wrote the play during an international flight to the USA (see Calandra 1988; Elsaesser 1996;

Galt 2011). The play was loosely based on Gerhard Zwerenz’s novel Die Erde ist unbewohnbar

wie der Mond (The Earth is uninhabitable like the Moon, 1973). Merging expressionist,

morality play, and Brechtian aesthetics, Garbage the City, and Death takes as its starting point

the gentrification of the Westend district in Frankfurt, which was inhabited by numerous

working-class people, students, and immigrants. Real estate speculators tried to force the area’s
population out of the Westend, in order to transform it to a commercial district. Many

speculators were of Jewish origin and Fassbinder’s play takes this historical case as its point of

departure for examining the persistence of repressed conflicts and antagonisms in the post-war

West Germany of the time.

Set in the Westend of Frankfurt, Garbage takes place in spaces associated with the

underworld, such as red-light districts, run-down council houses, and nightclubs. The main

character is Roma B. a marginalized sex-worker whose labor supports the gambling addictions

of her pimp and boyfriend Franz B. Roma B. suddenly gains status and money through her

association with a new client, “The Rich Jew.” The latter is an unscrupulous real-estate

speculator, who falls in love with her and becomes her benefactor. Herr Müller, Roma B’s

father, is an unrepentant Nazi, who performs as a drag queen in seedy bars, and her mother is

a communist in a wheelchair. Thus, Roma’s family stands as a reminder of Germany’s

repressed history. Roma realizes that the Jew is using her to take revenge from her father,

whom he suspects to be responsible for his parents’ murder in a Nazi concentration camp.

Towards the end of the play, Roma feels dejected and begs the Jew to kill her, who agrees to

do so “out of love.” When the police discover her dead body, one of the Jew’s henchmen

denounces his boss only to be thrown out of the window by Müller II, a corrupt police

commissioner who collaborates with the Rich Jew. The former also manages to frame Franz

for Roma’s murder.

In a typical Fassbinder fashion, the boundaries between victims and perpetrators are

quite blurry; Germany’s traumatic past seems to burden its present of the time as evidenced in

various stichomythias between Roma B. and her anti-Semite father, where one gets to see the

latent antisemitism in post-war West Germany. In one of the most shocking passages, a

business rival of the Jew goes on an anti-Semitic tirade:

Hans von Gluck: He’s sucking us dry the Jew. Drinking our blood and blaming
everything on us because he’s Jew and we’re guilty…….Just being there he makes us
 guilty. If he stayed where he came from or if they gassed him I’d be able to sleep better.
They forgot to gas him. This is no joking matter. And I rub my hands together as I
imagine him breathing his last in the gas chamber (Fassbinder 1991, 180).

Instead of seeing this character as the textual proxy of the author, as some of the critics of the

play do, it would be more productive to place Garbage alongside other plays and films by

Fassbinder, which focus on questions of everyday fascism (of which more below) and West

Germany’s inability to come to terms with its past crimes. Fassbinder wanted to express some

uncomfortable truths about latent antisemitism, which was well concealed by the status quo to

promote a modernized image of Germany as a country that had managed to put its past

contradictions aside. In effect, this implied that one was not allowed to point to the

embarrassing tenacity of attitudes of bigotry, intolerance and suppressed hatred. David Barnett

contends that Fassbinder was forced by the management of the Theater am Turm to have Hans

wear a Nazi armband while voicing these lines. Fassbinder declined and his rationale was that

regular people shared similar sentiments and not just Nazi nostalgics, as the advocates of

German normalization suggested. As he explains, this was precisely the problem with Hans as

a character, who was not a former Nazi; instead his anti-Semitism is to be understood as

“sublimated business envy and unconscious collective guilt felt in the aftermath of Auschwitz”

(2005, 234).

Far more complicated in the play is the portrayal of the Rich Jew. He is presented as an

unscrupulous businessman, who collaborates with the authorities and the police to carry out

the unpopular gentrification plans in the Westend. Emblematic in this respect is his monologue

in the fourth scene of the play, where he introduces himself and his social position in an à la

Brecht monologue:

Rich Jew: “Besides I’m a Jew. The police chief is my friend in the broad sense of a
friend; the mayor invites me over. I can count on the city council. No one particularly
likes what he condones, but it’s not my plan, it was there before I came……. The city
needs the unscrupulous businessman who allows it to transform itself. It must protect
him thank you very much (Fassbinder 1991, 171).
What is problematized in this monologue and throughout the play is the very idea of social

agency. One is invited to consider how the character performs a role that has been imposed on

him by problematic social structures. At the same time, the character may well be seen in light

of what Enzo Traverso calls the end of Jewish modernity after World War II. The term Jewish

modernity refers to the vibrant intellectual culture instigated by people of Jewish origins in

continental Europe; this culture was committed to the production of radical thought, literature

and art. It embodied a desire for universal emancipation, which was instigated by the Jewish

community’s social experiences of discrimination, mobility and urbanity. According to

Traverso, the post-war European societies managed to integrate the majority of their Jewish

citizens into the very structures against which Jewish modernity reacted: “After having been

the main focus of critical thought in the Western world – in the era when Europe was its centre

– Jews today find themselves, by a kind of paradoxical reversal, at the heart of the mechanisms

of domination (2016, 5). In Traverso’s view, this integration of the European Jewry to the

structures of capitalism, managed to make a significant number of European Jews

unthreatening for the capitalist status quo. In many countries, including the USA, Jewish people

even managed to reconcile themselves with the political right, which traditionally opposed

them.

The play caused controversy partly due to the critics’ tendency to quote the antisemitic

lines by the characters Herr Müller and Hans von Glück out of context. On the 19th of March

1976, Joachim Fest published an article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung titled “Reicher

Jude von Links: Zu Fassbinders Stück „Der Müller, die Stadt und der Tod” (Rich Jew from the

left: on Fassbinder’s play Garbage, the City and Death). Fest went on to accuse Fassbinder of

Linksfaschismus (left-wing fascism). He took issue with the fact that the Rich Jew does not

have a name and thus the character’s role in the play reproduces a series of historical clichés.
Fest suggested that the new antisemitism comes from the left (Fest 1976, 19). His argument

equates antisemitism with anti-capitalism and, as critics have noted, this approach betrays a

desire to exonerate the right from its historical guilt. This interpretation is strengthened

considering that Fest was a Hitler biographer and revisionist historian; as David Barnett

explains, Fest wrote a more than one-thousand-pages Hitler biography, in which he devoted

only four and a half pages to the plight of the Jews (see Barnett 2005: 236). Other critics have

noted that following Fest’s article, Fassbinder’s critics came mostly from the right, which did

not want to rekindle a debate on the country’s troublesome past (see Lorenz 2011).

Consequently, there were some interesting alliances against Fassbinder, who, as Daniel Schmid

points out, was shocked to see “that former Nazis were suddenly and sanctimoniously

presenting him as an anti-Semite” (1997, npg). Following this public controversy, the

publishing house Suhrkamp decided to temporarily withdraw the play from publication.

Attempts to stage the play in 1984 and then in 1985-86 failed to materialize due to the

intervention of local politicians and the reaction on the part of the Jewish community. Again,

many critics of the play came from the right including Walter Wallmann, the racist mayor of

Frankfurt and the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Wallmann ran a xenophobic

racist election campaign in 1980 and forced many Ethiopian and Afghani asylum-seekers out

of the state of Hessen. Roger Karapin explains that “the asylum issue again played a role in

Wallmann’s successful mayoral campaign in 1985” (2002: 205). Furthermore, the Frankfurter

had previously threatened the Jewish community not to oppose the controversial visit by

Hehlmut Kohl and Ronald Reagan to the Bitburg cemetery, where the two politicians paid their

respects to the buried Waffen-SS (see Markovits, Benhabib, Postone 1986, 26).

Evidently, the play confronted a sensitive issue that West Germany had tried to relegate

to the past. Then again, the figure of the Rich Jew raises reasonable questions regarding the

ethics of representation. Did Fassbinder uncritically blame the evils of capitalism on a

vulnerable minority? The answer lies in considering how the playwright/filmmaker has

depicted oppression in other plays/films where vulnerable individuals unwillingly

accommodate the image projected on them by society. This is for instance the case in plays and

films such as Katzelmacher (1969), Faustrecht der Freiheit (Fox and his Friends, 1975), and

Mutter Küsters’ Fahrt zum Himmel (Mother Küsters’ Trip to Heaven, 1975). Fassbinder’s

rationale was that one cannot depict oppression without showing how the oppressed respond

to repressive structures in order to survive. This approach subtly undermines liberal ideas of

choice, demonstrating how choice can be limited within an unequal social environment.

According to Gary Indiana, Fassbinder was usually attacked because of his emphasis on anti-

heroes at a historical period that people were badly in need of heroes:

His enemies included both reactionaries and progressive types who couldn’t bear
looking at their own neuroses. Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven, 1975, and The Third
Generation 1979, alienated the whole spectrum of the conventional left, while films
like Katzelmacher, 1969, and Veronika Voss, 1982, exposed the spirit of fascism
thriving in postwar Germany. The play Garbage, the City and Death (filmed in 1976
by Daniel Schmid as Schatten der Engel) brought cries of anti-Semitism from people
determined not to understand it. Fox and His Friends, 1974, and The Bitter Tears of
Petra von Kant, 1972, outraged gay groups by displaying homosexual relations that
were every bit as corrupt as heterosexual ones. (The message: capitalism turns everyone
into a whore; anyone who resists this fate comes to a bad end.) But the bigger scandal
was Fassbinder’s anarchism, his proclaimed self-exemption from any program or belief
system. Our beliefs are animated by feelings, and, as he relentlessly showed, our
feelings are manufactured for us, not least by the movies (1997, 12).

Responding to the negative critiques of the play, Fassbinder noted that the Rich Jew is merely

executing the plans that have been developed by an elite; they use his Jewish identity as a

protective shield for the implementation of policies that perpetuated social inequality (see

Fassbinder 1992, 119). He also noted that the outcry caused by the play aimed in fact to silence

those willing to explore a taboo issue of the West-German society. Philosemites were in fact

antisemites who wanted to exonerate themselves of their past guilt and avoid touching

uncomfortable questions about the historical continuity of structures that gave rise to fascism:
 I mean the way Jews have constantly been treated as a taboo subject in Germany since
1945 can result in hostility towards Jews, particularly among young people, who have
not had any direct experience with Jews. When I was a child and I met Jews, people
would whisper to me. “That’s a Jew, behave yourself, be nice to him.” And that
continued with variations, until I was twenty-eight and wrote the play. It never seemed
to me that that was the right attitude” (1997, 12).

Scholars have agreed that the play was very much ahead of its time in the sense that the country

was not ready to come to terms with its historical past and its equally problematic present of

the time: one needs only to recall that one year after the first publication of the play the Federal

Republic of Germany experienced the famous crisis of the German Autumn. But there is

something more intricate in the play that has to do with the author’s refusal to reduce fascism

to something that belongs to the past as it is the case in many of his films and plays e.g. Pre-

Paradise Sorry Now, where he muses on questions of everyday fascism. Fascist attitudes for

Fassbinder are omnipresent in everyday social relationships between employers and

employees, family members, lovers, and even left-wing activist groups; this is also the case in

Garbage, the City, and Death, where we see the micropolitics of domination amongst people

living in the margins of society. Telling in this respect is Roma B’s relationship with her

clandestinely gay boyfriend and pimp, and with the Rich Jew, who both exploit her for personal

gain. As Thomas Elsaesser notes, the blurring of the boundaries between oppressors and

oppressed and the depiction of the victims’ capacity to act in dehumanizing ways towards other

underdogs are recurring themes in Fassbinder’s oeuvre: “his homosexuals are not always nice,

his Jews can be exploitative, his communists may be careerists” (1996, 31).

Thus, in Fassbinder’s universe, the social violence experienced by those at the bottom

of the social hierarchy is shown as replicating itself in their own relationships and interactions.

Fassbinder’s understanding of everyday fascism chimes neatly with Gilles Deleuze and Felix

Guattari’s view of fascism not just as a historical event of the twentieth century, but as

something immanent to the micropolitics of everyday life. Key to their understanding of

fascism is what Michel Foucault mentions in his preface to Anti-Oedipus; fascism cannot be

reduced to figures such as Hitler and Mussolini, but refers to “the fascism in us all” that makes

us desire and perpetuate the very conditions of our repression (1983, xiii). Deleuze and

Guattari articulate a similar point and assert that fascism is not necessarily tantamount to a

totalitarian state. Fascism is also visible in the “microfascism” of everyday interactions and in

the masses’ tendency to reproduce and desire their own oppression (1983, 215). The

consequence is that fascism is something not necessarily associated with malicious individuals,

but a “disease” that can affect everyone participating in the micropolitics of power in the

everyday life. Ian Buchanan usefully suggests that everyday fascism for Deleuze and Guattari

stands for the desire for power. People do not just conform to power, “they want what it offers

them, even at the price of their subjection” (2017, 108).

No doubt, Deleuze might have recognized similar questions in Schmid’s adaptation of

Fassbinder’s play, which was released as Schatten der Engel (Shadow of Angels, 1976).

Fassbinder played Frantz B. (Raoul in the film) Roma B’s pimp (she is called Lily in the film

and played by Ingrid Caven). At the film’s premiere in Cannes, the Israeli delegation walked

out in protest against Schmid’s adaptation. In 1977, the film was screened in Paris and the

French minister of the interior censored it, while cinemas were attacked by protestors with

smoke-bombs. Deleuze and other intellectuals signed a petition protesting against censorship. 1

On the 18th of February 1977, Deleuze wrote an article in Le Monde titled “Le Juif riche” (“The

Rich Jew) in which he defended Schmid and Fassbinder. His line of argument was that the film

spoke about the problematic conditions of post-war Germany. He suggested that the two

leading characters, Lily and the Rich Jew, are two individuals who respond and adapt

themselves to conditions of fear. The charges of antisemitism were insubstantial since the Rich

Jew “owes his wealth to a system which is never presented as Jewish, but as that of the city,

the municipality and the police” (1998: 45). Not unlike Fassbinder and Schmid, Deleuze argued
that people who criticized the film were mostly those who wanted to obstruct any public debate

on a sensitive issue that has political implications. In a passage that merits to be quoted in full

he concluded by saying:

Schmid has declared his political intention, and the film constantly shows it in the
simplest and most obvious way. The old fascism, however current and powerful it may
be in many countries, is not the new problem now. We are preparing ourselves for other
fascisms. A complete neo-fascism is setting up shop, in relation to which the old
fascism appears as a figure from folklore (the transvestite singer in the film). Instead of
being a politics and economy of war, neo-fascism is a global agreement for security,
for the administration of a no less horrible “peace,” with the concerted organization of
all the little fears, all the little anxieties that make us into so many micro-fascists,
assigned to stifle anything that is even slightly strong, every slightly strong face, every
slightly strong word in his street, her neighborhood, his movie theater. “I don’t like the
films on the fascism of the Thirties. The new fascism is so much more refined, so much
more disguised. Perhaps, as in the film, it’s the motor of a society in which social
problems would be settled, but in which the question of anxiety would only be stifled.”
[Schmid quoted by Deleuze here]. If Schmid’s film is banned or blocked, it will not
be a victory in the struggle against anti-Semitism. But it will be a victory for
neofascism, and the first case in which we could say to ourselves: But was this, could
this be only a pretext, the shadow of a pretext? Some people will recall the beauty of
the film, its political importance, and the way it will have been eliminated (Ibid, 46).

Deleuze’s line of argument prefigures some of the key ideas he articulates with Guattari three

years later in One Thousand Plateaus, where they elaborate on the connection between fear

and fascism as well as on fascism’s capacity to contaminate everyday social relationships, even

amongst those who regard themselves as antifascists. The connection between fear and the

“new fascism” is paramount, since fear makes individuals adaptable and ready to integrate

themselves to oppressive structures offering at the same time a pseudo-sense of choice.2 The

Rich Jew in Fassbinder’s play is a case in point, and Deleuze and Guattari’s arguments point

to the contradictions of liberal societies. Liberal societies proclaim to be against totalitarianism;

but there is an inherent totalitarianism in their modus opeandi too, since they coerce the

population to desire its very conditions of domination by marginalizing those who do not fit in.

Choice in liberal societies does not offer individuals the capacity to criticize and change social

structures; instead, choice turns into a means of reconfirming the existing order of things by
pronouncing its inalterability. Badiou has also mused on this arguing that the supporters of

liberal democracy praise it precisely because they are aware of its inegalitarianism. Liberal

democracy conceals or justifies its contradictions by suggesting that it is the only system of

government that protects its citizens from the condition of Evil, the past monstrosities of

fascism and Stalinism and the structures of underdevelopment in the Third World. Yet, for

Badiou, the self-evidence of this deduction is a red herring and aims at camouflaging how

systemic conditions of inequality prevent social emancipation by naturalizing a reality

structured upon unjust social structures (see Cox, Whallen 2018).

Claude Lanzmann, the renowned director of the film Shoah (1985), who was a friend

of Deleuze, took exception to the latter’s article and accused the French philosopher of being

an advocate of an art for art’s sake aesthetic. For Lanzmann, the film perpetuated the fascist

cinematic aesthetic of Veit Harlan; he was also disturbed by the fact that the Jew in the film

was the only character who was nameless:

Among all the characters in the film – whores, idiots, transvestites, each worthy of
individuation – why does not he [the Jew] possess either a surname or even a first name?
From the beginning to the end of the film he is - Der Jude - (the Jew) or - Der Reiche
Jude - (the wealthy Jew) (1977, 23).

Lanzmann pointed to the Israeli delegation’s irritation with the film at the Cannes film festival,

while he posed the legitimate question whether thirty thousand Jews in West Germany have so

much power as to be blamed for the evils of capitalism. While Lanzmann is correct to ask this

question, he seems to ignore the tensions in Frankfurt during the 1970s, where many real estate

speculators were of Jewish origin. They were employed by the city officials precisely because

of the Jewish taboo in the FRG that would immediately render people criticizing their

unpopular policies as antisemites. As Dan Diner suggests, the Jewish community found itself

implicated in a market that produced a social conflict for which they were unprepared. 3 As far

as the character’s name is concerned, one needs to note that Fassbinder deploys stereotypes in
his portrayal of other characters too. Both Lily’s Nazi father, and the corrupt police officer are

called Müller, a typical German name that produces a sense of typicality in both characters

instead of individuality. The first one acts as a representative of the old system and the second

one of the systemic corruption of the time.

Two observations are paramount. The play instigated reactions in Germany not only

from the Jewish community, but as mentioned above from the conservative right, which was

historically hostile to the European Jewry. We might want to think of the right’s desire to cancel

the play’s performances as an attempt to publicly exonerate itself from its past guilt and present

a revived image of tolerance not just of the Federal Republic of Germany, but of the political

right itself. This recalls a famous Jewish joke: “What is a philo-Semite? An anti-Semite who

loves Jews” (as cited in Badiou, Hazan 2009: 7). The film, on the contrary, provoked mainly

reactions in France where it was screened as part of the Cannes Film Festival. Apart from the

Israeli delegation, which found it offensive, it caused friction within the French left. Some of

the protesters came from the left and were amongst those attacking cinemas with smoke bombs,

whereas other public intellectuals from the left, such as Deleuze, found the reactions

problematic, because they thought that the film had been misread. At the same time, the

negative reactions on the part of left intellectuals such as Lanzmann can be seen as a response

to the fifth Republic’s inability to acknowledge France’s complicity in the deportation of the

French Jews. One needs not to forget that the documentary Le Chagrin et la Pitié (The Sorrow

and the Pity, Ophüls, 1969), which discussed French collaborationism, was banned from the

French television until 1981. The responses provoked by the play in Germany reflect the

political right’s desire to rebrand itself. The film, however, provoked negative reactions in left

circles in France on account of the country’s historical revisionism that for many years denied

its historical responsibility for the Holocaust. One thing is certain: Fassbinder’s play and
Schmid’s adaptation opened up the possibility of raising uncomfortable issues that made both

countries revisit their problematic history.

Rituals of Humiliation

In a way, the play and the film prefigure the contemporary state of things, where the

commemoration of the horror of the Shoah is used as a means of building a liberal consensus

that does not aim to change the very conditions that led to the emergence of fascism; Cecile

Winter has insightfully argued that today in Western democracies the word Jew has turned into

“a transcendental signifier” that aims to exonerate the West for its past crimes (2006, 219).

Such an approach is not concerned with a productive reexamination of the causes of fascism;

it acts as a protective shield for the current economic status quo, rather than a call for collective

responsibility, social justice and democratic participation. As Winter explains, liberal

democracies hold a “monopoly over the word “Jew”” with the view to suppressing any political

movement addressing their inherent conditions of inequality (Ibid, 232). The recent

revivification of the extreme right across Europe demonstrates the failure of the belief that

commemorating the crimes of fascism without changing the material conditions that produce

right-wing extremism can prevent the repetition of sinister historical phenomena. Similarly,

Traverso understands contemporary Holocaust memory as a desire to reduce history to a binary

of victims and perpetrators. Holocaust memory is conservative, because it assumes that liberal

democracy is the only guarantee that similar atrocities will not take place again. Yet Traverso

cautions that such an approach simply enables a commemoration of the victims of the past and

not a commitment to fighting “the executioners of the present” (2016, 3). For Traverso,

Holocaust memory can turn into a smokescreen that prevents us from debating current issues

such as Islamophobia, the refugee crisis, and histories of European colonial violence in which

the Holocaust needs to be placed too.

 Schmid’s adaptation stays for the most part faithful to the play and mobilizes an

aesthetic treatment of the material that invites the audience to break with the doxa that fascism

and the crimes of the past are a historical aberration. In keeping with Fassbinder’s cinematic

aesthetic, Schmid places a great deal of importance in theatricalized staging and stylized

language. The film’s expressionistic visual imagery invokes a universe that revives memories

from the camps clearly connecting the present of the time with the past. This is a token of the

filmmaker’s desire to exploit the capitalist contradictions of Frankfurt to make visible the traces

of the past in the present, as manifested in practices of dehumanization that allude to the

persistence of the logic of the camp.

Let us start by exploring questions of everyday fascism. A remarkable sequence in this

respect is shown in the opening of the film when a client approaches Lily and the other sex-

workers who gradually encircle him to draw his attention. He for his part gazes at them and

enunciates a sexist adaptation of meeny, miny, moe to choose the woman with whom he will

spend the night. The women are framed static in the shot occasionally gesturing towards the

client, while the restricted dramatic space adds an element of aggression to the characters’

movements in space. In the following visual, we can see the signs of fatigue on the women’s

faces who complain about their working conditions in the cold streets of Frankfurt. The

sequence effectively conveys a dark image of the underworld of Frankfurt, where the desire

for survival erodes people’s capacity for empathy and sociability. The shot points to the

normalization of violence and humiliation as survival strategies.

Frankfurt is represented as a city of inequality that reproduces conditions of oppression.

Later, Lily having been unable to attract any punters approaches an immigrant street cleaner

and tries to solicit him as a client. She interrupts his work in a mannered way by placing her

foot on top of his broom and asking him: “Love”? The immigrant snubs her cruelly telling her

that much love may cause diseases. Lily then responds with a racist tirade. In a typical
Fassbinder fashion, marginality does not make people immune to bigotry. This lack of

solidarity and the capacity for bigotry amongst the underprivileged are indexes of the film’s

point that fascism is not just a historical phenomenon of the past, but something immanent in

everyday relationships structured around the play of domination and submission; pertinent here

is the underdogs’ capacity and desire to participate in humiliating and sadistic power games

that reproduce a social reality of violence. This is in keeping with what Brad Evans and Henry

A. Giroux identify as a fundamental aspect of fascist culture and imaginary, that is, the

“ritualization of humiliation,” which refers to these interactions and practices that dehumanize

individuals and standardize their “expendability and disposability” (2015, npg).4 Humiliation

in the fascist imagery is not just a power game, but a means of normalizing debasing attitudes

and oppressive hierarchies.

The film abounds with similar examples that point to the underdogs’ tendency to

humiliate and degrade each other as well as to their inability to form relations of solidarity. In

the sequence that comes immediately after the aforementioned one, Lily’s boyfriend and pimp

forces her to go back to the streets and solicit more clients. She is then humiliated again, this

time by an immigrant Gastarbeiter. Schmid’s emphasis on similar rituals of humiliation is put

forward through a stress on stylized gestures that border between violence and cruelty. The

director makes use of static shots and expressionist imagery that highlight these instances of

cruelty. Schmid here evokes the typical Fassbinder mise en scène, which manipulates theatrical

devices and acting styles rooted in experimental performance. Adrian Martin calls this “arch-

theatricality” and suggests that this conscious dialogue with the art of theater on the part of

filmmakers of the likes of Fassbinder and Rivette led to the re-emergence of long-take

cinematography and the “open frame” (2014: 85).

In Fassbinder’s cinema – and indeed Schmid follows in the footsteps of Fassbinder’s

aesthetic in this film – this reanimation of the long-take and the static shot aimed to produce an
attitude of observant curiosity committed to discovering social attitudes in the characters’

physical interactions. The combination of long-take cinematography, static shots reminiscent

of the early days of the medium, and hyper-theatricalized performance and mise en scène invite

the audience to consider the persistence of Nazi aesthetic sensibilities in the present. There is

indeed something theatrical in the ways the characters carry themselves and deliver their lines

as if the filmmaker cautions the audience that post-war politics has not abandoned the kitschy

theatricality linked with a Nazi aesthetic sensibility as well as the bigotry that comes with it.

Paradigmatic in this respect is a sequence where Lilly encounters her communist wheel-chaired

mother and her Nazi father, dressed as woman. Lily’s mother asserts in a wooden language:

“we will not submit to conditions set by others to make us suffer.” What is implied here is that

even Marxist opposition has turned into an empty slogan a kind of bad theater; the scene

concludes with Herr Müller responding to her by closing the blinds, a gesture that creates a

theater curtain effect.

This overstylized mise en scène prioritizes mood and style over diegetic motivation

and coherence. In foregrounding style and atmosphere, the film gives rise to cinematic excess.

This term has been introduced by Kristin Thompson who suggests that cinematic excess refers

to all these stylistic elements deployed by filmmakers not with the aim of strengthening a film’s

narrative unity; cinematic excess, instead, aspires to disorganize narrative consistency and

causality. It emphasizes all these stylistic features that cannot be contained within the narrative:

“At that point where [diegetic] motivation fails, excess begins” (1977, 58). Excess can be

identified in experimental films but also in straightforward narrative ones and it is not fortuitous

that Thompson refers to Eisenstein, a filmmaker, who unlike other Soviet directors e.g. Dziga

Vertov and Esfir Shub, experimented with film form without doing away with narrative.

Cinematic excess can either be deployed for aesthetic reasons, or also as a means of suggestion

to appeal to a reality that cannot be contained within a conventional story-telling format.

 Consider, for example, a scene towards the end of the film when the other sex workers

collectively abuse Lily for having solved her financial worries by becoming the Rich Jew’s

partner. Within a tracking-shot that lasts roughly two and a half minutes, we get to see Lily

slowly walking through a street where her former colleagues congregate; as she walks down

the road the camera captures a sex worker questioning Lily’s new lifestyle. Lily walks past her

only to be humiliated by the rest. There is an element of circularity in the sequence, since as

Lily continues her walk the same people re-appear again and again in the center of the frame

and repeat their abusive behavior. The viewer has the feeling that the character finds herself

returning to her initial point of departure re-encountering again each of her former friends. The

stilted dialogue and the highly formalized gestures are not in service of verisimilitude; they

rather point to a reality that cannot be expressed by means of dramatic and compositional

coherence.

Here Schmid’s emphasis on audiovisual excess that prioritizes mood over narrative

alludes to the tenacity of the “concentrationary” mind-set in the present, where the desire for

individual survival disintegrates people’s capacity for sociability. My understanding of the

term “concentrationary” is informed by Griselda Pollock and Max Silverman’s theorization of

a concentrationary cinema. Drawing on the works of David Rousset and Giorgio Agamben

amongst others, Pollock and Silverman suggest that the concentrationary mind-set is something

that defines modernity and cannot be restricted to what took place between 1933-1945. The

key aspects of the concentrationary outlook are the structures that impede humans’ capacity

for socialization, spontaneity, and empathy; from this perspective, the term concentrationary

refers to a system that has its roots in a specific historical period, but whose mechanism extends

beyond that moment in history. Pollock and Silverman explain that the concentrationary can

be expanded to refer to biopolitical practices of systematic dehumanization and humiliation

that are part and parcel of the historical experience of modernity.

 Crucial here is their important clarification that within the concentrationary universe

the inmates were not necessarily meant to be murdered immediately (the Konzentrationslager

are to be distinguished from the Todeslager). Instead, they were subjected to experimental

biopolitical practices dedicated to their gradual and systematic dehumanization:

the concentrationary plague is not simply confined to one place and one time but, now
unleashed on the world, is a permanent presence shadowing modern life, and that
memory (and art in general) must be invoked to show this permanent presence of the
past haunting the present so that we can read its signs and counter its deformation of the
human (2015, xv).

This argument can be further clarified when considering some of the films that they place under

the rubric of “concentrationary cinema” − a type of cinema that connects the traumatic past

with the present to reveal the persistence of the concentrationary mind-set. Apart from Resnais’

Nuit et Brouillard (Night and the Fog, 1956), which they deem as a paragon of the “genre”,

some of their other case studies are Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter (1974) and Michael

Haneke’s Funny Games (1997). In these films the experience of the camps returns as a haunted

imaginary and sadistic violence that permeates spaces that we might not even associate with

these gruesome historical experiences. As a result, the aim of concentrationary cinema is to

resist the liberal doxa that the mechanisms of dehumanization and humiliation that were

utilized in the camps are absent from post-war democracies.5

These arguments provide an apposite context for rethinking Fassbinder’s play and its

film adaptation. Both the play and the film allude to the persistence of the concentrationary

mindset as implied by the strategies of adaptability and survival that people on the margins

develop. Survival in a repressive environment implies the compromise of one’s ethical

principles; to survive in a concentrationary universe entails a capacity to reproduce the violence

one suffers to those who are weaker. One recalls Primo Levi’s experiences from the camps as

narrated in Survival in Auschwitz, where he explains that the desire for survival diminished the

Häftlinge’s ability to form relationships of solidarity and mutual respect. The longing for
survival makes the individuals capable of desiring the very things that they should find

intolerable; fascist attitudes can, therefore, spread to the victims as well. These points have a

direct bearing on my argument that in Shadow of Angels, the lack of solidarity on the part of

the oppressed is an indicator of the persistence of the concentrationary mindset in the present.

It is a defining characteristic of an unequal social environment that forces subjects of

oppression to adapt to humiliating structures.

For instance, when the Jew first appears in the diegetic universe and introduces himself

to Lily, one of his first lines is: “I am not like the other Jews.” He is accompanied by two thugs

the Little Prince (Ulli Lommel) and the Dwarf (Jean-Claude Dreyfuss); in his conversation

with Lilly the Jew keeps on making humiliating remarks about his thugs and they reciprocate.

As the Jew and Lily enter the former’s car, the Dwarf tells her: “he is repulsive girl, but he pays

well and his virility is enviable.” The Jew on his part tries to justify his unethical business

tactics and exonerate himself of any guilt. Suddenly, an expressionist visual that breaks any

sense of diegetic continuity intrudes in the narrative universe. Within a semi-lit room, which

recalls a brothel iconography, we see the Dwarf naked placed at the center of the shot, while in

the left side of the frame a naked woman sings an aria. This is another key example of cinematic

excess concerned with mood/atmosphere rather than diegetic continuity and unity. The scene

turns into a semi-independent interlude, which is not subordinated to narrative causality. In his

study of cinematic Stimmung (mood), Robert Sinnerbrink has aptly explained how mood can

either serve a supporting role within the cinematic universe, that is, it can intensify narrative

tensions and emotions, or it can instead have a meta-cinematic role that invites the audience to

consider questions of aesthetics, ethics, and politics. Quasi-autonomous mood sequences,

create uncanny images and sounds “expressive of a multitude of affective and reflective

dimensions” (2012, 162).

 The abovementioned sequence can be seen in light of Sinnerbrink’s comments as a

broader meta-cinematic commentary on aesthetics and politics. The mise en scène and the

lighting communicate a sense of audiovisual surplus, which recalls fascist theatricality, but also

films that manipulated the appeal and sense of fascination generated by fascist aesthetic

sensibilities; the tableau here seems to act as an intertextual reference to Luchino Visconti’s

The Damned (1969) and Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter. The sequence activates an

encounter between the present and the traumatic past that haunts it. This is a retroactive visual

that disturbs neat chronological categories and points to the persistence of a disquieting

experience that cannot be relegated to the past. The scene’s lack of narrative function, its

staginess, and its indirect reference to the camp universe reinforces the reading that Shadow

cautions about the continuity of camp structures in the present.6

Militant Ethics and Dissensus

The film’s subtle references to a diverse group of people who suffered during the fascist years

– and some of them kept on facing discrimination in the post-war Germany – e.g. gays,

immigrants, and sex-workers provides the historical context that enables us to think of the

perpetuation of fascist attitudes in the post-war period. The play and the film engage explicitly

with the parallels between fascist exclusionary and binary mechanisms and contemporary

practices e.g. gentrification. Additionally, the lack of positive images of the oppressed disrupts

conventional accounts of fascism as aberration and demonstrates – as per Deleuze’s and

Guattari’s famous formulation – fascism’s capacity to expand like a cancer and poison social

relationships. It is also worth rethinking Fassbinder’s suggestion that showing positive images

of the underdogs is not necessarily a responsible manner of dealing with sensitive issues, since

such an approach can make the audience assume that past histories of violence and material

structures that produced them have been overcome.7

 The analytic I am advocating in this article intends to make us think of cinematic ethics

in much more complex ways and think of how cinema can point to collective structures of

oppression without simply resorting to the binary of ethical/unethical characters. From this

perspective, the timeliness, the urgency of re-reading the film and the play lies in urging us to

think about ethics and cinema beyond virtue theoretical approaches that simply explore how

films can produce moral examples or Levinasian ones that reduce ethics to one’s duty to

recognize an abstract other. The problem with both approaches is that they assume a somehow

universalistic character and personalize conflicts which have a social dimension. Fassbinder’s

desire to reveal how oppressive structures can “contaminate” even vulnerable groups, which

unconsciously accept them in order to survive or even fit in, has been influential on filmmakers

such as Ulrich Seidl, Michael Haneke and Lars von Trier.

In Seidl’s Paradies: Liebe (Paradise Love: 2012), we follow the story of a middle-aged

overweight Austrian tourist visiting Kenya to meet young locals and have sex with them. The

film’s complexity lies in the fact that she and her friends on the one hand fetishize local black

men, while Kenyan men take advantage of their need for companionship to ask them for money

and presents. One is invited to go beyond a simplified understanding of ethics as individual

responsibility and consider how social conditions force vulnerable individuals to reproduce

abusive behavior or even stereotypes. Consider, for example, how the poor Kenyans in the film

participate in perpetuating the stereotype of the virile black male. Similarly, in Manderlay

(2005) von Trier explores how slaves in the USA could become complicit in their oppression;

the aim here is not to criticize individual behavior, but reflect on the horror of slavery as an

institution that could make oppressed people perpetuate their disadvantaged position as a

means of surviving. All the same, in Das Weisse Band (The White Ribbon, 2009) Haneke

explores questions of everyday abuse in a small village in North Germany on the eve of WWI.
The film brilliantly muses on how the abused – in this film children – can replicate abusive

behavior to more vulnerable individuals.

In all these films, the filmmakers try to challenge ethical binaries in order to encourage

the audience to think about oppression in dialectical ways. Vulnerable groups can also

reproduce structures of oppression, because of their socially disadvantageous position. This is

also the case in Shadows of Angels and in Fassbinder’s original play, because although the anti-

Semitic reading can be debunked through analysis, Schmid and Fassbinder play with anti-

Semitic stereotypes that appear shocking and provoke the audience. One is not invited to

reconfirm them, but to engage with them rather than ignore them and this in itself is a gesture

of aesthetic resistance, because it goes beyond liberal aesthetics of positive representation.8

This is the reason why I argue that the film’s (and obviously the play’s) daring confrontation

with such a complex subject matter can be best subsumed under the banner of what Badiou

calls militant ethics. Badiou takes issue with the contemporary turn to ethics as articulated in

theoretical paradigms predominant in the Anglophone University, such as Cultural Studies and

studies in postcolonialism. The crux of his argument is that the turn to ethics presupposes that

liberal democracy is the only social structure that can prevent the repeatability of past horrors.

Ethical ideology is founded on the premise that evil is something definite and pre-existing and

it is the ethical duty of liberal thinking to protect those (minorities) who tend to be more

susceptible to discrimination and harassment. For Badiou, there is something inherently

apolitical behind such an approach; liberal ethics speak from a position of superior power, since

the Western democracies are the ones to define the universal ethical consensus. The

contradiction that arises is that they are the ones responsible for a political history of violence

that produces these divisions, which are rooted in concrete material conditions and not in

prejudices as per the liberal rhetoric. This in turn suggests that any forms of “alterity” can be

accepted so long as they integrate themselves to the existing order. The “Other” is accepted
provided that he/she becomes indistinguishable from the “universal individual,” namely the

Western one. Consider for instance the integration of the Rich Jew in Frankfurt as portrayed in

Schmid’s film, which is founded on his capacity to execute the gentrification plans of an

economic elite. His “otherness” is rendered innocuous because it simply sustains the dominant

economic but also political and ideological order.

Setting as an example the Nazi atrocities and the horror of the Shoah, Badiou postulates

that the advocates of ethics understand the Holocaust as the epitome of radical evil. In treating

this historical event as a matter of abstract evil, ethical thought strives for a universalized

consensus that prohibits any political understanding of the particularities of fascism. This

dominant viewpoint prohibits an understanding of fascism as “a political sequence” and as the

product of particular material forces and contradictions of Western modernity (2002, 65). In

Badiou’s estimation, responding to Nazism through a universalized consensus that reduces it

to a form of radical evil prevents us from noting different totalitarian symptoms in the present.

His raison d’etre is that reducing such a loaded political issue to a matter of ethics runs the risk

of depoliticizing it and in doing so we are prevented from understanding other political

contradictions taking place in the historical present: “by dint of seeing Hitlers everywhere we

forget that he is dead, and that what is happening before our eyes is the creation of new

singularities of Evil” (2002, 64). The key precept here is that responding ethically to political

questions becomes a reductive approach, because past “radical evils” turn into a protective

shield for the current state of things; as such, the historical experience of fascism and the horror

of the camps are treated as ethical aberrations ignoring their political and historical context.

Therein resides Badiou’s fundamental critique of ethics. Abstract ethical ideology goes

hand in hand with a moral reformism that inhibits any radical critique of the present. Badiou

sets as an example the dominant human rights rhetoric whose principal standpoint is the refusal

to understand humans as members of organizations, who can actively contribute to the

changing of their social circumstances. Instead, human rights legislation aims at stabilizing the

status quo by means of minor modifications that can make life more tolerable, without however

empowering those whom it purports to protect. As Benjamin Noys states, Badiou suggests that

for the partisans of the ethics “the Other must stay as Other to receive our pity” (2003, 125).9

As such, ethics sits at the antipodes with theoretical and revolutionary Marxism because it fails

to envisage an alternative to the status quo and energize the underprivileged. Consensual ethics,

therefore, produces a uniformity of thinking that impedes the rise of new social movements.

For this reason, Badiou concludes that the understanding of the Holocaust as the paragon of

extreme Evil and the cultivation of a victim ideology aim to silence any critique of the structural

flaws of liberal democracy.

My claim, therefore, is that Shadow of Angels can be seen under the rubric of what

Badiou calls militant ethics whose purchase lies precisely in their capacity to produce conflict

rather than harmony: “Contrary to consensual ethics, which tries to avoid divisions, the ethic

of truths is always more or less militant, combative” (2002, 75). Schmid’s adaptation of

Fassbinder’s play performs the gesture of dissensus, since it aspires to explore how a taboo

subject operates as a means of hindering criticism of the insidious social structures of the time.

Moreover, the film highlights the material forces that perpetuate the logic of the camps in the

present by forcing those who are prone to victimization to adapt to degrading social

circumstances. In doing so, Schmid and Fassbinder evade the canonical ethical tendency to

create a pseudo-sense of communal coherence. Badiou cautions that the creation of

homogeneous and universal ethical values goes hand in hand with the desire to create a unified

community, something that is politically dubious, since the manufacturing of homogeneous

communities is premised upon mechanisms of exclusion; those who do not fit in are

marginalized. One is tempted to imagine here the imminent fate of those underprivileged

inhabitants of the Westend in Fassbinder’s play, the sex workers, the working-class, the
immigrants, and the gay people, who were to be excluded from their district in the name of

economic development, which is purportedly in service of community wellbeing.

Communities, however, are far from being fixed and, as Badiou suggests any attempt to name

a community and create a consensus tends to conceal the conflicting tendencies within it. As

he says, “every emancipatory project” aspires “to put an end to consensus” to reveal suppressed

political conflicts (Ibid, 32).

Badiou’s point chimes neatly with Jacques Rancière’s comments on dissensus as a

political gesture that intends to reveal the divisions within a community. For Rancière, this is

also the task of contemporary critical art that does not predetermine its own effects but produces

conflicts and divides the audience. Art breaks with the commonsensical by showing a non-

uniform image of the community. Whereas the ethical consensus is grounded in an

unambiguous understanding of reality and the production of a collective unitary subject – and

here Rancière’s criticism is certainly applicable to cognitivist approaches to ethics and

representation – political art fragments reality and refutes consensual hermeneutical harmony.

From this perspective, political art is not concerned with communicating a message and

offering an unequivocal method of interpreting the world; it aspires to generate debate and

produce divisions within the community. It is for this reason that, like Badiou, Rancière is

suspicious of artistic treatments of the Shoah and efforts to build a political community by

commemorating it. Much of the artistic output and political debates in the post-1989 world

have lost their radicalism and to an extent this is to be attributed to the use of the Shoah as a

means of building a liberal consensus. As Solange M. Guénoun explains, “for Rancière, as a

theoretician of dissensual democracy, the Shoah is, first and foremost, an object of a dominant

consensual discourse that blocks the political horizon, a depoliticizing, demobilizing, inhibiting

fiction of political inventiveness and an artistic usurper of insurrectional forces” (2009, 184).

The key contradiction that arises is that the production of artworks that commemorate the
Shoah – a political subject per se – has not made citizens politically engaged and alert, but has

led to the depoliticization of a vast amount of contemporary art and the public sphere.

A key premise of Rancière’s argument is that consensus impedes artistic development

and political imagination. Both in art and politics dissensus is committed to denaturalizing any

pre-existing preconceptions regarding what can be considered as normal by attempting to bring

into the field of vision something that has been suppressed. In this context, unlike the historical

avant-garde that at times resorted to practices of agitation, contemporary political art does not

predict its own effects or guide the audience to a specific hermeneutical response. 10 As he says,

For critical art is not so much a type of art that reveals the forms and contradictions of
domination as it is an art that questions its own limits and powers, that refuses to
anticipate its own effects. This is why perhaps one of the most interesting contributions
to the framing of a new landscape of the sensible has been made by forms of art that
accept their insufficiency (2015, 149).11

Rancière’s understanding of dissensus and critical art find deep resonances in Shadow of

Angels. The stereotype of the Rich Jew and the film’s implication that the concentrationary

mind-set is still persistent refuse to pacify the historical anxieties of the time. Considering

Shadow of Angels through Rancière’s understanding of critical art, it is legitimate to suggest

that the film’s political impact is the product of its refusal to articulate a clear-cut message that

can unify the audience. Conversely, its political incorrectness is not a matter of bigotry, but of

a desire to produce disagreement, which is a necessary precondition for any fruitful

engagement with politics and aesthetics. Disagreement is the sine qua non of socially engaged

art, which is not interested in preaching to the converted, but in creating a space for debate

through its formal complexity and interpretative indeterminacy. As James Harvey cogently

argues, for the French philosopher, “political art should not explain to its spectator, but, rather,

should provide a space of engagement for the spectator to occupy and participate” (2018, 7).

Taking a cue from Rancière, I suggest that the presence of the Jew in the film becomes

a different form of sensory disruption, refusing to accommodate a unified image of post-war

Germany. The Jew acts as a retroactive reminder of the country’s history of violence, while it

simultaneously disrupts its complacency in the light of its post-War economic development.

Thomas Elsaesser notes that along with Alexander Kluge’s film Abschied von gestern

(Yesterday Girl, 1966), Shadow of Angels and later Peter Lilienthal’s David (1979), were the

only post-war films with a Jew as a central character (see Elsaesser 2013,262) ; one can

certainly notice here how other films of the time presented a different form of communal

pseudo-coherence by refusing to represent what was still a taboo issue. The absence of the

figure of the Jew was not only a means of evading guilt, but also of cultivating a new sense of

communal homogeneity; this in turn shows the persistence of past attempts to name a

community (a national one) through mechanisms of exclusion. But there is also something

more provocative in Schmid’s film, which is that the reproduction of the stereotype of the Rich

Jew invites one to consider how democratic notions of inclusiveness are reliant on different

forms of exclusion: those who disrupt the sense of communal homogeneity are expected to

adjust themselves to the image projected on them by society. In doing so, they reconfirm their

status as “others” and “aliens;” in other words, their inclusion is a novel, subtle form of

discrimination. Consequently, strategies of survival and adaptability that were the practice of

the concentrationary universe are still relevant and applicable in the present.

In bringing this essay to a close, I would like to point out that both the reception of the

play and the film demonstrate that artistic dissensus is a strategy deployed by artworks that

refuse to railroad the audience to a uniform response and interpretation; films that perform the

gesture of dissensus are grounded in a militant understanding of ethics. They do not aspire to

produce harmony based upon allegedly universal values; they generate productive and

unresolved tensions that divide a community and force it to engage with histories of violence

hurt and persist in the present. Schmid’s adaptation of Fassbinder’s provocative play is

compatible with Badiou’s critique of ethics and Rancière’s call for a critical art that produces
new “forms of enunciation” (2010, 141).12 For the film resists the production of a pseudo-

communal coherence and rather than celebrate redemption and historical progress points to the

continuing threat of totalitarianism which derives from the persistence of the concentrationary

mind-set and universe. In refusing a redemptive narrative of therapeutic healing of the past

traumas, the play and the film visualize certain problematic structures in the present. The

ethical significance of this approach is that it seeks to expand the debate on complex historical

legacies and identify the persistence of past histories of violence in the present.

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Reflections On Anti-Semitism, edited by Alain Badiou, Ivan Segré, and Éric Hazan, 3-44.

London: Verso, 2013.

Badiou, Alain. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward.

London: Verso, 2002.

Barnett, David. Rainer Werner Fassbinder and the German Theatre. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Buchanan, Ian. “Gilles Deleuze,” in Histories of Violence: Post-war Critical Thought,

edited by Brad Evans, Terrell Carver, 107-123. London: Zed Books, 2017.

Calandra, Denis. “Politicised theatre: the case of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Garbage,

the City and Death.” Modern Drama 31, no 3 (1988): 420-428.

Carroll, Noël. “Moral Change: Fiction Film and Family,” in Cine-Ethics: Ethical

Dimensions of Film Theory, Practice, and Spectatorship, edited by Jinhee Choi and Mattias

Frey, 43-56. New York: Routledge, 2014.

 Cox, Cristoph, Whallen, Molly. “On Evil: An Interview with Alain Badiou,” Cabinet,

5 (2001). Accessed September, 25, 2018.

http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/5/alainbadiou.php.

Del Río, Elena. The Grace of Destruction: A Vital Ethology of Extreme Cinemas. New

York: Bloomsbury, 2016.

Deleuze, Gilles, Guattari, Félix. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans.

Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,

1983.

Deleuze, Gilles. “The Rich Jew,” Discourse 20, no 3 (1998): 44-46.

Diner, Dan. “Banished: Jews in Germany After the Holocaust”, in A History of Jews in

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1
For more on the historical context see François Dosse’s Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari:

Intersecting Lives (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 399-400.

2
There are certainly theoretical affinities between Deleuze and Giorgio Agamben here. For

Agamben famously suggested that the experience of the camps was not an abnormality in

modern history; instead liberal democracies rely on biopolitical practices that prevalent in the
camp universe. The implication of Agamben’s thesis is that fascism is not an exception – not

the fascism of the personality cult and the mass rallies – but the fascism of the biopolitical

organisation of social and spatial relationships within the liberal democracy. This creates

oppressive structures that produce fear and fear can make individuals acquiesce to repressive

conditions. See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (California:

Stanford University Press, 1998), 181-182.

3
Diner offers a good summary of the historical context. As he says, “Because the Frankfurt

area experienced a building boom at this time, and banks were willing to lend under

conditions that attracted investors to construction and real estate, distortions were inevitable.

This was especially the case when persons of Jewish faith and origin who still valued their

provisionality and transience in Germany became active in a sector of the economy that is

based on long-term social interaction. Such distortions were the consequence of the lax

approval policies required to modernize the city and the almost trivial barriers to bank loans.

These factors created unprecedented pressures that heated up the market, pressures to which

Jewish developers, who were new to the sector, also succumbed. But they desired neither

new visibility nor the social conflict that this situation brought with it, nor were they really

prepared to deal with it.” Diner, “Banished: Jews in Germany After the Holocaust”, in A

History of Jews in Germany Since 1945: Politics, Culture, and Society, edited by Michael

Brenner (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018), 44.

4
Henry A Giroux, Brad Evans, Disposable futures: The Seduction of Violence in the Age of

Spectacle (San Francisco: City Lights Publishers, 2015), Kindle-book, npg.

5
See Pollock’s Chapter “Redemption or Transformation: Blasphemy and the Concentrationary

Imaginary in Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter (1974)”, in Concentrationary Imaginaries:

Tracing Totalitarian Violence in Popular Culture, 121-160. See also Silverman’s Chapter

“Haneke and the Camps” in the same book, 187-200.

6
Schmid’s staging throughout the film makes use of Fassbinderian cinematic motifs.

Fassbinder has commented on the aesthetic appeal of the fascist mise en scène which he

manipulated in many of his films including Lili Marleen (1981) and his comments tally with

Susan Sontag’s well-known commentary on “fascinating fascism”. As Fassbinder says, “I think

it’s possible to say something about National Socialism, which is specifically German, simply

by showing what was appealing about it. The parades had a certain aesthetic of their own that

appealed to people. The swastika had a certain appeal…..But for me the Third Reich wasn’t

just an “accident.” It was a predictable development in German history. But its “impact” had a

great deal to do with the aesthetics of staging.” Fassbinder, The Anarchy of the Imagination:

Interviews, Essays, Notes, edited by Michael Töteberg, Leo A Lensing (Baltimore: John

Hopkins University Press, 1992), 66.

7
Responding to the controversies caused by the play, Heiner Müller suggested that there is a

danger when a democracy tries to repress uncomfortable feelings and to treat aspects of its past

as taboo. See Denis Calandra, “Politicised theatre: the case of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's

Garbage, the City and Death.” Modern Drama 31, no 3 (1988): 420-428.

Similarly, Fassbinder has explained that treating something as taboo can be a different form of

discrimination. As he says, “That’s the last taboo in Germany, this business with the Jews. And

clinging to this taboo, in my opinion, isn’t a way of defending the Jews but a further form of

discrimination. It stands to reason that when you create a taboo you get a backlash. If you’re

not allowed to talk about them, that simply means that someday they’ll be the scapegoats again.

I can’t explain it any other way.” Fassbinder, The Anarchy of the Imagination, 19.

Thomas Elsaesser captures this brilliantly and as he says, “the good Jew, the positive

identification figure in a fiction film easily becomes a screen of projection that compensates

either latent aggression or unacknowledged guilt-feelings. It was a trap that Fassbinder

consistently wanted to expose in his films (also with respect to other minorities: foreign
workers, homosexuals) and that Henryk M. Broder once satirized in his (imaginary) West

German citizen who says: “If I take the trouble to be a philo-Semite, the least I can expect is

that the Jews know to behave themselves.” Thomas Elsaesser, German Cinema: Terror and

Trauma: Cultural Memory Since 1945 (London: Routledge, 2014), 99.

8
Commenting on Spike Lee’s Bamboozled (2002), a film that intentionally plays with the

history of racial stereotypes in Hollywood and the television industry, W.J.T Mitchell aptly

explains that banning stereotypical images and replacing them with benign ones is not the

correct aesthetic/political response, because it aims to neutralize or even ignore the

contradictions that led to their genesis. See WJT. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 298.

9
Benjamin Noys, “The Provocations of Alain Badiou,” Theory, Culture & Society 12, no 1,

(2003): 125.
10
Rancière’s point corresponds with his understanding of a post-Brechtian aesthetic, whose

dialectical contradictions produce “unresolved tensions” instead of anticipating the answers to

the questions they pose. See Rancière, The Intervals of Cinema, trans. John Howe (London:

Verso, 2014), 104. Importantly, Fassbinder has been discussed as a post-Brechtian playwright

and director. See Barnett, 174, 251.

Abraham Geil has excellently clarified Rancière’s view that art that produces calculable effects

tends to be consensual in the sense that it predetermines a certain response and interpretation.

Geil, “The Spectator Without Qualities”. Rancière and Film, ed. Paul Bowman (Edinburgh:

Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 53-82.

11
Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, trans. Steven Corcoran (London,

New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), 149.

12
Rancière, Dissensus, 141.