The playwright, the novelist, and the comedian

a case study in audience responsibility

Dirk Visser

pp. 103-118

in: Williams Ortiz Gaye, Clara B. Joseph (eds), Theology and literature, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006

Abstract

The starting point for this essay is formed by a series of events that took place in the Netherlands at the end of the twentieth century. When in the 1980s a Dutch theater group wanted to perform Rainer Werner Fassbinder's play Garbage, the City and Death, they met with vehement protests, not least from the Jewish community, who perceived the play as anti-Semitic. One of the protesters, Jules Croiset, a Dutch Jewish actor, went so far as to stage his own kidnapping in protest against the play, claiming that he had been kidnapped by neo-Nazis who had read Fassbinder's play as an incitement to anti-Jewish violence.