[Rainer Werner Fassbinder's "Garbage, the city and death"-- a German landscape of the soul].

No other recent "art event" has aroused so much public debate in Germany as Fassbinder's play "Garbage, City, Death" (1976). The controversy it sparked on its appearance has still not entirely died down. In a painstaking psychoanalytic interpretation Vogt first shows that the play achieves an artistic representation of the unconscious dilemma besetting the second generation of non-Jewish Germans in their relationship to National Socialism. In Fassbinder's play this dilemma, which is bound up with vicarious guilt feelings, is however only presented and not in any way worked out. The upshot is that all those forms of identification with German traditions that have been repudiated on a conscious level re-enter, as it were by the back door, and attain a new virulence. The author demonstrates that at the heart of the play a mechanism of guilt-refusal is operative that inverts the historical culprit-victim relation and makes the Germans themselves into the real victims. In the second part of his article Vogt is concerned to situate the play and the controversy surrounding it in a broader political context--Bitburg (1985), the "historians' conflict" (1986), Jenninger's speech (1988)--revealing a specific collective psychological inscape in present-day Germany for which, in its profounder well-springs, Fassbinder's play may be legitimately regarded as symptomatic. Fassbinder (born 1945) articulates for his generation aspects of an "ethnic disturbance" (George Devereux) which continues to persist precisely because there is a German past "that refuses to go away" (Ernst Nolte).