Christoph Schlingensief, Voxi Barenklau, Thomas Demand - Christoph Schlingensief - German Pavillon - 54th Venice Biennale 2011 - Sternberg Press (2011) PDF

CHRISTOPH SCHLINGENSIEF
GERMAN PAVILION, 2011

54TH INTERNATIONAL
ART EXHIBITION
LA BIENNALE DI VENEZIA
EDITED BY
SUSANNE GAENSHEIMER
WITH THE ASSISTANCE OF

EVA HUTTENLAUCH
WITH CONTRIBUTIONS BY
HELKE BAYRLE
KLAUS BIESENBACH
JOHN BOCK
FRANK CASTORF
THOMAS DEMAND
CHRIS DERCON
DIEDRICH DIEDERICHSEN
BORIS GROYS
CARL HEGEMANN
IRM HERMANN
JOHANNES HOFF
ANDY HOPE 1930
ELFRIEDE JELINEK
SCHORSCH KAMERUN
ALEXANDER KLUGE
DIETRICH KUHLBRODT
AINO LABERENZ
TORSTEN LEMMER
MATTHIAS LILIENTHAL
JONATHAN MEESE
MICHAELA MELIÁN / THOMAS MEINECKE
KLAUS MERTES
EVA MEYER-HERMANN
WERNER NEKES
HANS ULRICH OBRIST
PETER RAUE
CHARLOTTE ROCHE
STEPHANIE ROSENTHAL
KARLHEINZ SCHMID
ELISABETH SCHWEEGER
GEORG SEESSLEN
FRANK-WALTER STEINMEIER
SANDRA UMATHUM
ANTJE VOLLMER
Via Intolleranza II, Arsenal, Vienna, June 12, 2010
TABLE OF CONTENTS
15 FOREWORD
ELKE AUS DEM MOORE
19 INTRODUCTION
SUSANNE GAENSHEIMER
27 IMAGES
AUTHORS’ CONTRIBUTIONS
135 HELKE BAYRLE

Settebello
139 KLAUS BIESENBACH

I Wanted to Capture Everything in Pictures:
Christoph Schlingensief in Conversation
with Klaus Biesenbach
155 JOHN BOCK
165 FRANK CASTORF

He Asked the Question of Guilt
169 THOMAS DEMAND
173 CHRIS DERCON

Comrades
183 DIEDRICH DIEDERICHSEN

Combating Discursive Scarcity, Futile In-
tention, and the Negative Gesamtkunstwerk:
Christoph Schlingensief and His Music

191 BORIS GROYS
When Words Fail

TABLE OF CONTENTS
197 CARL HEGEMANN 279 KLAUS MERTES
GERMANIA: Art and Non-art in the Work Requiem for Christoph Schlingensief
of Christoph Schlingensief Oberhausen, August 30, 2010

209 IRM HERMANN 283 EVA MEYER-HERMANN
From Berliner Republik to Mea Culpa A Barbed Seed

213 JOHANNES HOFF 291 WERNER NEKES
Life in Abundance: Schlingensief’s Splinters of Memory
Deconstruction of (Post)Modernism
297 HANS ULRICH OBRIST
223 ANDY HOPE 1930 Multiplications: Christoph Schlingensief in
Mathematically Carnival Labyrinth Conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist

233 ELFRIEDE JELINEK 309 PETER RAUE
The Squanderer Memories of Christoph Schlingensief

237 SCHORSCH KAMERUN 313 CHARLOTTE ROCHE
That’s Probably What They Call Freedom The Soil of Burkina Faso

241 ALEXANDER KLUGE 317 STEPHANIE ROSENTHAL
The Complete Version of a Baroque 18 Images per Second:
Invention by Christoph Schlingensief Christoph Schlingensief—the Image-maker

245 DIETRICH KUHLBRODT 323 KARLHEINZ SCHMID
A Chance Acquaintance Dear Christoph

251 AINO LABERENZ 327 ELISABETH SCHWEEGER
A Personal Perspective on Christoph
255 TORSTEN LEMMER Schlingensief
Christoph Works!
331 GEORG SEESSLEN
259 MATTHIAS LILIENTHAL Art in Films? No. Art as Film
Eighty Percent Internal Dynamics: Matthias
Lilienthal in Conversation with Franz Wille 337 FRANK-WALTER STEINMEIER
The Artist of Democracy
267 JONATHAN MEESE
Jonathan Meese is Mother Parsival 341 SANDRA UMATHUM
Theater of Self-Questioning: Rocky
271 MICHAELA MELIÁN / THOMAS MEINECKE Dutschke, ’68, or the Children of the Revolution
Read Texts by Christoph Schlingensief
from Mode & Verzweiflung and Sing a Song 349 ANTJE VOLLMER
by Vier Kaiserlein Christoph Schlingensief: Myth and
Overpainting, Nepal and Parsifal
355 APPENDIX
TABLE OF CONTENTS
FOREWORD
ELKE AUS DEM MOORE
INTRODUCTION
SUSANNE GAENSHEIMER
FOREWORD
ELKE AUS DEM MOORE
The Venice Biennale is the world’s oldest and most distinguished biennial. It is distinct from
other biennials by the principle of national representation through country-specific pavil-
ions. Processes of globalization and digital networking are changing our world, creating
new challenges, and compelling us to conceive national identities in new ways. In Susanne
Gaensheimer, the Foreign Office has found a curator for the German Pavilion whose work
is dedicated to these current challenges. She has chosen to present the work of Christoph
Schlingensief, a preeminent contemporary artist, to an international audience.
Schlingensief attacks the cornerstones of society with instruments that transcend barriers on
the levels of content as well as form, creating combinations that are surprising, even shocking,
and powerfully evocative. With relentless intensity he probes deep-seated German senti-
ments, frankly addressing the way things stand in a Western world in which consumerism and
social isolation prevail. “The relationships between people ought to become the highest form
of art in our world,” he said. He was interested in what moves people and what people, when
they come together, can set in motion. He saw Europe as being in crisis, and proposed an
artistic strategy framed not just as a gesture of art but as a political demand. Schlingensief
developed a form of art that foregrounds exchange and community and facilitates a union of
bodies of knowledge from different cultures. It is in this light that we can understand the project
he started in Burkina Faso, the opera village Remdoogo, which is being built in response to the
needs of the local population and enables them to produce their own images. Schlingensief’s
intention with this project was not to bring German culture to Africa but to initiate social ener-
gies that see mutual learning as fundamental. He was not only one of the most renowned con-
temporary German artists, but also an energetic protagonist in international cultural exchange.
Since 1971, the Institute of Foreign Cultural Relations (ifa), as the partner of the Foreign Of-
fice, has managed the presentation of the German Pavilion in Venice in collaboration with
the appointed curator. As the oldest organization promoting German cultural and educational
policies abroad, the ifa presents German art around the globe and produces exhibitions
held at the ifa galleries in Stuttgart and Berlin that examine the art of countries undergoing
transformation. The ifa sponsors international exhibitions and maintains the Biennale archive.
The Foreign Office is the principal sponsor of the German Pavilion at athe 54th Venice
Biennale. We would like to thank all our partners, including AXA Art Insurance Company,
Deutsche Welle, the Goethe-Institut, and especially all the private benefactors.
It is my very special pleasure to work with Susanne Gaensheimer. After Christa Kühne and
Gudrun Inboden, she is the third female curator to direct the German Pavilion. With her
curatorial choice she has made a firm decision that requires courage, determination, and per-
sistence. I would like to express my profound gratitude to her. I would also like to thank the
members of the team around Christoph Schlingensief for their great dedication and sensitive
precision with which they have worked after to present his work to the world. I am deeply
grateful in particular to Aino Laberenz, his longtime companion.
FOREWORD 15
Draft of Key Visual for the Wellness Center Africa
Double Standards, 2010
INTRODUCTION
SUSANNE GAENSHEIMER
“I have worked in many fields: as a film, stage, and opera director, a producer, a solo enter-
tainer, a human being, and as a sick human being and a Christian, too, and as a politician
and a performer, and I’ve also always been interested in artists who practiced their art almost
compulsively, and didn’t necessarily see it as different from the compulsion of having or
wanting to live. Some form of schizophrenia has always been typical of my work and my life.
If I were to focus on one thing only, I’d get bored; my head would never hit its stride. Be-
tween music and the image, between people and language, between the healthy and the
sick, between the funny and the sad, I always need to have the chance to assert the opposite
as well. An unambiguous world is not something I believe in. The assignment to use the
German Pavilion, a suspicious representational building, for purposes not of representation
but of art strikes me as exactly right: a heavy burden, but art makes light what is otherwise
heavy. Yet perhaps that’s exactly what’s good about it. I, in any case, love rifts and antago-
nisms, and over the next few months I will find out which antagonisms are the most pro-
ductive for Venice, for the German Pavilion, and for Burkina Faso.” Christoph Schlingensief
Wellness Center “Africa”
Sometime in the spring of last year, Christoph Schlingensief began to think about an idea for
the German Pavilion that he would work on until his death on August 21, 2010. This idea
gradually took definite shape as he played through the possibilities it opened and the asso-
ciations it called up in his mind; but of course he had not fleshed it out in all formal detail by
last summer. The way he worked, Christoph Schlingensief would probably have kept reconsid-
ering and condensing this original idea right until June 1, 2011, the day the German Pavilion
was to open, responding with his outstanding capacity of observation and celerity to what
would happen in his immediate as well as extended social and political environment. What
would ultimately actually have taken place at the German Pavilion? There is no way for us
to know, and so all we can do today is describe the shape this idea had taken when, after his
long struggle with cancer, Christoph Schlingensief unexpectedly died while working on it.
It is surely a great loss to the art world that it will not experience Christoph Schlingensief’s
contribution in the German Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale. For what he wanted to
do would have challenged the perceptual habits of the pavilion’s visitors and confronted them
with the need to rethink this highly ideologically charged site, a site that has been discussed
ad nauseam and is fraught with significance even today. Schlingensief’s dissecting and
yet generous style, his uncompromisingly critical and yet humorous attitude, his tendency to
overburden objects and overwhelm spectators, his straightforwardness, and most impor-
tantly, his profound dedication to the social would have been able to undermine the monumen-
tality of this building and to allow us to experience it in a new way.
It became clear in one of our first conversations that Christoph Schlingensief was not inter-
ested in addressing the pavilion as such, nor did he see it as a stage on which to produce
INTRODUCTION 19
himself as an artist. He saw it more than anything as the site of a process in which the visitor These plans clearly illustrate how the idea of wellness and relaxation as well as the ostenta-
was to participate. He then developed his idea for the German Pavilion by elaborating fun- tiously idealizing image of “Africa” would have immediately turned into their pointed exaggera-
damental themes that had run through his projects of the past several years, with carefully tion and caricature. Displaying the hedonism of Western societies implicit in their exoticizing
placed emphases on several points. In addition to motifs that had already been central to notions of Africa, the “black continent,” would have made for trenchant commentary, par-
his trilogy on illness—Der Zwischenstand der Dinge [The Intermediate State of Affairs], Eine ticularly when set in the context of the Venice Biennale, a destination for wealthy tourism. The
Kirche der Angst vor dem Fremden in mir [A Church of Fear vs. the Alien Within], and Mea emphasis on “wellness,” a phenomenon of modern civilization, and its exaggeration in the
Culpa—the plans for the pavilion also incorporated his longstanding engagement with nation- principle of “preventative medicine” would likewise have taken up a theme that had strongly
alism, racism, and Eurocentrism, as well as the very personal experiences and insights he occupied Schlingensief ever since he became ill. The endeavor to use preventive measures
had gained from his great project for the future, the opera village he conceived for the African and all forms of insurance to preclude anything unforeseen and to mobilize our techno-
nation of Burkina Faso. logical and financial means to protect ourselves against any discomfort—an endeavor that is
fundamental in Western societies and inevitably doomed to fail—always struck Schlingensief
Christoph Schlingensief wanted to transform the German Pavilion into a grand wellness as a reflection of repressed insecurity and helplessness. “Why are we constantly trying to
center, to be called “African Wellness Center” or “Wellness Center Africa” or, later on, the help the African continent even though we cannot help ourselves?” was a question he had
“German Center for Wellness and Prevention.” The pavilion was to be equipped with func- repeatedly asked in other contexts, and it became a leitmotif of sorts in his concept for the
tional bath and sanatorium facilities, with a swimming pool, a sauna, and a hamam; services German Pavilion, whose initial levity, not unlike that of his last play Via Intolleranza II, would
to be offered included cryotherapy and massages and, as in Mea Culpa, Ayurveda—though have turned rapidly into a caustic, unrestrained, and merciless critique of society and mankind.
an “African Ayurveda.” A Burkinabè company was to erect an architectonic structure made
of mud brick, and plants and trees would grow everywhere. Visitors would also have the pos- The Biennale’s exhibition format, with its national pavilions, had immediately brought the asso-
sibility to get preventive computer tomograph scans taken; an obscure Swiss company ciation of the idea of the world’s fair to Schlingensief’s mind, which he wanted to address in
called Ingenia would have set up an information booth, offering a saliva test to determine the the pavilion’s surroundings. In an allusion to Hagenbeck’s ethnological zoos and the colonial
visitors’ genetic ancestry. A central element of the pavilion’s design, balancing between exhibitions of the nineteenth century, as well as the Brussels World’s Fair, which, as late
reality and a theatrical production, would have been a large projection of a panorama, a sort as 1958, had featured an ethnological exposition (called village indigène) literally exhibiting
of zoetrope or diorama, featuring footage of the natural scenery surrounding the construc- Congolese and Ruanda-Urundi people in commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the
tion site of the opera village. To be recorded over the course of a year, the images were to Belgian state’s takeover of power in the Congo, Schlingensief wanted to erect cage-like
render the way the landscape changes with the seasons and the time of day in the manner structures outside the German Pavilion in which he would have presented Africans as artists,
of a real-time projection. This panorama would have enclosed the wellness center so that the actors, computer technicians, and all sorts of other “curiosities.” One of these cages would
visitors would have found themselves amid a permanently changing African landscape—a have housed an African painter creating pictures of “Negros” in the manner of Gerhard
landscape that, to Schlingensief himself, always exuded calm and healing. Schlingensief’s Richter—a reference to the sale at Sotheby’s in early summer 2010 of a painting by Richter
plan was that with every twenty-fourth frame in the film the image would be replaced with entitled Neger, which Schlingensief had spontaneously brought up during one of his last
a different one: images of a starving African child, a child soldier, or another situation that performances in Via Intolleranza II. The German Pavilion’s façade was to be transformed into
illustrates the poverty and catastrophic situation in the country, but also images showing a funfair-style “Totally Wacky Tavern,” with a gigantic Negro mask with a moving oversized
everyday life in Africa as a well-functioning routine, something our media usually fail to rep- bottom lip laughing at the crowd from the gable.
resent. These intercalations would have been brief irruptions of the real, almost passing
beneath conscious perception, into an ostensibly authentic but in fact highly romanticized “The space is testing you, rather than you testing the space”—Schlingensief’s permanent
situation. He also wanted to integrate a great variety of other visual media into the wellness quest for a shift of perspective was also behind the plan to build a ramp that would let visitors
center: pictures Burkinabè children were to take using disposable cameras, video material look into the pavilion from above. The panorama shot of an African landscape that was to
to be shot by African students, and other films produced in the opera village. He was go- enclose the wellness center would likewise have generated such a shift: Africa would ob-
ing to mix them with images of torture and violence from his own films such as 100 Jahre serve the observer. But Schlingensief conceived the entire space of the pavilion as a sort
Adolf Hitler—Die letzte Stunde im Führerbunker [100 Years of Adolf Hitler—The Last Hour in of projection screen, a camera. So it is not at all improbable that he would have designed the
the Fuhrerbunker], Terror 2000, and Die 120 Tage von Bottrop [The 120 Days of Bottrop] in pavilion’s interior, like all of his theatrical productions in recent years, as a rotating stage,
order to condense the material into a “medical-sociological torture chamber.” Dependent on an Animatograph whose rotating movement and constantly shifting superimposition of spaces
technological feasibility, there was also going to be a sort of closed-circuit installation in and projections would have undone not only the one-dimensional position of the spectator
which visitors would have seen themselves with black skin. The swimming pool, too, would but also a linear conception of space and time.
contain tinted water so that visitors would have turned black in it, “purging” themselves of
their whiteness.
INTRODUCTION 21
“Plan B” eted oeuvre. Three themes are central to the concept: Christoph Schlingensief’s engage-
ment with his own illness and biography, the wide field of cinema and film, and his initiative
Even before Christoph Schlingensief’s death became foreseeable, the media and the public to found an opera village in Africa.
began to raise the question concerning a “Plan B.” An English locution that has become
popular in Germany, designating the attempt to prepare for all eventualities; using it in direct In the main hall of the German Pavilion we have installed the stage of the Fluxus oratorio A
reference to the death of a person is not entirely in good taste, and it is hardly surprising Church of Fear vs. the Alien Within, which Schlingensief conceived for the 2008 Ruhrtri-
that Schlingensief would respond with the plan to call the website representing the German ennale as the second part of his illness trilogy, after Zwischenstand der Dinge and before Mea
Pavilion “Plan B.” He thus used his own slow death once more to satirize a fundamental Culpa. Written immediately after Schlingensief had undergone surgery to remove one lung
attitude that is so typical of German society today, one Schlingensief had repeatedly taken and several months of chemotherapy, the play was first performed in Duisburg, then at the
aim at: the attempt to compensate for human insufficiency by asserting absolute control Berliner Theatertreffen and in Amsterdam. A Church of Fear vs. the Alien Within is perhaps
and repressing the possibility of failure. Christoph Schlingensief’s most personal work; he portrays his illness openly and unsparingly,
using his own painful experience to examine the existential circle of life, suffering, and death.
I had no “Plan B” for the event of his death, since my resolution to invite Christoph Schlingensief The stage is a reconstruction of the Oberhausen church of his childhood and teenage years,
to design the German Pavilion was based on my conviction of his significance as an artist where he served as an altar boy for years and where the funeral service after his death was
and my view that he was the right artist for this site at this moment in time. The more I learned also held. The theme of religious faith, of belief and doubt, which had always been central
about his work, the more my convictions grew. My decision developed from the idea that to Schlingensief’s thinking, is scrutinized in a highly subjective perspective and with a keen
for the German Pavilion I should approach an artist of my own generation who looked back eye for its ambivalences. Yet the play addresses not only themes of childhood, illness, and
on a solid career—in Christoph Schlingensief’s case, almost thirty years—whose art had faith, but also Schlingensief’s views regarding music and the visual arts. His engagement with
not merely responded to the artistic, social, and political issues in a reunified Germany but Richard Wagner’s music as well as the art of Joseph Beuys and the Fluxus movement—both
had even influenced public discourse. Christoph Schlingensief was one of the Germany’s positions in art history profoundly shaped his own practice, but he repeatedly questioned
most significant artists, filmmakers, theater directors, and performers, one who always artic- and parodied them as well—find expression in A Church of Fear vs. the Alien Within. The
ulated and asserted his position, uncompromising towards the public and himself, and with play’s stage, unlike that of other works by Schlingensief, not only serves as the venue of a
all the clearness and straightforwardness necessary to comment effectively on the situation. theatrical production; with its many film projections, including no less than twelve 16mm
Schlingensief’s oeuvre is complex, and it is in the nature of his work that it itself was subject projections, and a multitude of spatial and pictorial elements, it is an encompassing spatial
to permanent self-interrogation and transformation. My decision was ultimately determined installation as well—a role it always also played for Schlingensief. It shows central features
also by his opera village project in Burkina Faso, which demonstrated that Schlingensief, that defined Christoph Schlingensief’s art over the last several years, while generating atmo-
rather than relating the questions he raised only to Germany, placed them in a global context. spheric effects so powerful that it can stand by itself, without a theatrical production in the
In this visionary social as well as artistic undertaking—the project to build a festival hall strict sense taking place. It is the only stage design Schlingensief considered and conceived
complete with a school, housing facilities, and a hospital in Africa in close collaboration with not only as a stage on which to direct, but which he also organized tours of when the show
local partners—and in also reflecting the failure of his humanitarian efforts in Via Intolleranza II, itself was not playing.
he transposed his analysis of “Germanness” into a transnational dimension.
In one of the pavilion’s two side wings, we have set up a movie theater where a program of
Now, after his death, it seems all the more important to me to make Christoph Schlingensief’s six selected films from different moments in Schlingensief’s career play on a large screen:
oeuvre, which is well known in Germany, accessible to an international audience. Yet real- Menu Total (1985–6), Egomania (1986), the Germany trilogy of 100 Jahre Adolf Hitler
izing a project conceived by Christoph Schlingensief without him is impossible. Though it (1988), Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker [The German Chainsaw Massacre, 1990], and
would have been appealing to implement his plans, it was also clear that too many questions Terror 2000 (1991–2), as well as his penultimate film, United Trash (1995–6). Presented
had been left unanswered, and no one was competent to make the necessary subsequent on a structured schedule, these films exemplify central features of Schlingensief’s filmic
artistic decisions. Christoph Schlingensief’s death changed the situation fundamentally. What oeuvre. The theater is accessible at all times during the Biennale’s opening hours and accom-
had originally been planned as an artistic project by Schlingensief could now only become plishes two tasks at once, offering an international audience the opportunity to see a sig-
an exhibition about him. In constructive collaboration with Aino Laberenz, Christoph nificant selection from Schlingensief’s films—some of the films have been subtitled for the
Schlingensief’s wife and longtime collaborator, as well as a circle of close collaborators and first time—while introducing the artist’s filmic visual language into the canon of visual culture.
confidants such as Carl Hegemann, Thomas Goerge, Voxi Bärenklau, Heta Multanen, As far back as the early 1980s, Schlingensief developed a highly individual style of an in-
and Frieder Schlaich, and drawing on extensive conversations with Chris Dercon, Alexander credible visual power whose ostentatious B-movie aesthetic had parallels in the work of visual
Kluge, Matthias Lilienthal, and Francis Kéré, we have developed a concept for the German artists such as Paul McCarthy and, later, Andreas Hofer, Jonathan Meese, and John Bock.
Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale that focuses entirely on existing works—theatrical pro- Although Schlingensief’s performative actions such as Church of Fear and film installations
ductions and films by Schlingensief—and offers insights into central aspects of his multifac- such as Area 7 have been recognized in the art context, his filmic oeuvre has long remained on
INTRODUCTION 23
the periphery of the art world. Yet both in their radical social critique and in their excessive visu- Sternberg Press for their great confidence in us. My gratitude goes to the Ruhrtriennale and
ality, Schlingensief’s films prove an unconsciously prophetic element of our cultural memory. Francesca von Habsburg for the loans, and to all the authors and artists for their profound
contributions to this book. I am grateful to Felix Semmelroth, head of the department of culture
Learning from Africa of the City of Frankfurt, who was highly supportive of my commitment in Venice and put
the infrastructure of the MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt at my disposal to make
The pavilion’s second side wing is dedicated to what ultimately became Schlingensief’s most the organization of the project possible. I would like to thank my husband and my children
important project: his vision of an opera village in Africa. Schlingensief conceived the plan for their love and patience. And last but not least, I want to thank Christoph Schlingensief
for this social project the night before his surgery, and committed himself to it with all his for his art as well as the precious insight that every single moment of life is a gift.
strength and devotion until his death. Starting in 2010, the African opera village Remdoogo
has begun to emerge near Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso; the structure will
include a school, film and music classrooms, studios and storage facilities, housing facilities
and accommodations for visitors, a canteen, offices, a café, residential areas, a soccer
field, agricultural areas, a restaurant, a hospital, and a theater stage with a festival hall and
rehearsal rooms. Schlingensief designed the project with friends and partners in Ouaga-
dougou and in collaboration with the African architect Francis Kéré; part of the plans have
already been realized. The opera village is to be a place where children, teenagers, and
adults living in the immediate neighborhood and abroad learn to develop their musical and
artistic talents and showcase them in joint productions; where young Burkinabè can live
and explore their love of experimentation and curiosity and unleash their creative powers. In
keeping with Beuys’s idea of the social sculpture and the expanded concept of art, the
project seeks to merge art and life, to serve as a research laboratory for the reunion of art
and non-art. In addition to visual and documentary material already produced in Africa and
photographs taken by children and teenagers at the project site, the exhibition in this part
of the pavilion will feature selections from the panorama footage showing the opera village’s
surroundings Schlingensief had already commissioned an African filmmaker to make be-
fore he died. We will also present a compilation of scenes from Via Intolleranza II, the play in
which Schlingensief distinctly articulates his concern for Africa, but at the same time dem-
onstrates his ability to self-reflection and self-critique. Almost painfully, the play addresses
the complex and complicated relation between vision and failure, between being a person
and an artist, and the perhaps irresolvable contradiction between Western intolerance and
the sincere attempt to achieve a real and equal encounter.
Acknowledgments
I would like to express my profound gratitude to everyone who continued to believe in the
project after Christoph Schlingensief’s death and supported it in decisive ways. The realization
of the pavilion would have been impossible without the enormous generosity of friends and
patrons such as Iwan Wirth, Brigitte and Arend Oetker, and Harald Falckenberg, as well as
the dedicated efforts of Cornelia Pieper, Klaus-Dieter Lehmann, Hans-Georg Knopp, Monika
Grütters, Rosa Schmitt-Neubauer, and other cultural politicians. Another important partner
was Hartwig Fischer, who was an integral supporter of the project. Nor could I have developed
the exhibition for the pavilion without the tremendous dedication and wide-ranging knowl-
edge the abovementioned confidants and associates of Christoph Schlingensief’s brought
to the project. Christine Kaiser, Eva Huttenlauch, and all other members of the staffs in
Venice and Frankfurt were equally indispensable to the project’s success. I am especially
grateful to Helge Malchow of Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch and to Caroline Schneider of
INTRODUCTION 25
GERMAN PAVILION, 2011

54TH INTERNATIONAL
ART EXHIBITION
LA BIENNALE DI VENEZIA
IMAGES
A CHURCH OF FEAR
VS. THE ALIEN WITHIN
STAGE INSTALLATION FROM

CHRISTOPH SCHLINGENSIEF’S
FLUXUS ORATORIO AT
THE GERMAN PAVILION, 2011
A CHURCH OF FEAR VS. THE ALIEN WITHIN 29

A CHURCH OF FEAR VS. THE ALIEN WITHIN Model 31
Stage Installation from Christoph Schlingensief’s Fluxus Oratorio
A CHURCH OF FEAR VS. THE ALIEN WITHIN at the German Pavilion, 2011
A CHURCH OF FEAR VS. THE ALIEN WITHIN
55
16mm Projections
57
16mm Projections
59
16mm Projections
A CHURCH OF FEAR VS. THE ALIEN WITHIN Performance at Ruhrtriennale, September 2008 61
A CHURCH OF FEAR VS. THE ALIEN WITHIN Performance at Ruhrtriennale, September 2008 63
FILM PROGRAM AT
THE GERMAN PAVILION, 2011
MENU TOTAL
Germany, 1985–6
16mm, 81 min., black and white
EGOMANIA—ISLAND WITHOUT HOPE

Germany, 1986
16mm, 84 min., color
100 YEARS ADOLF HITLER—THE LAST

HOUR IN THE FUHRERBUNKER
Germany, 1988–9
16mm, 60 min., black and white
THE GERMAN CHAINSAW MASSACRE—

THE FIRST HOUR OF GERMAN
REUNIFICATION
Germany, 1990
TERROR 2000—INTENSIVE STATION

GERMANY
Germany, 1991–2
UNITED TRASH
Zimbabwe, 1995–6
FILM PROGRAM 65
FILM PROGRAM 67
FILM PROGRAM Menu Total 69
FILM PROGRAM Menu Total 71
FILM PROGRAM 73
FILM PROGRAM Egomania—Island without Hope 75
FILM PROGRAM Egomania—Island without Hope 77
FILM PROGRAM 79
FILM PROGRAM 100 Jahre Adolf Hitler / 100 Years of Adolf Hitler 81
FILM PROGRAM 83
They came as friends
and turned into sausage
Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker /

FILM PROGRAM The German Chainsaw Massacre 85
Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker /
FILM PROGRAM The German Chainsaw Massacre 87
FILM PROGRAM 89
FILM PROGRAM Terror 2000 91
FILM PROGRAM Terror 2000 93
FILM PROGRAM 95
FILM PROGRAM United Trash 97
FILM PROGRAM United Trash 99
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PLANNING AND BUILDING OF THE

OPERA VILLAGE NEAR
OUAGADOUGOU, BURKINA FASO
Documentation 2008–11
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Christoph Schlingensief’s address at the groundbreaking ceremony for the In any case, the trip to Burkina Faso almost a full year ago was the beginning of a quite in-
opera village on February 8, 2010 credible story. As early as December 2008, Peter Anders expressed the wish that Francis
and I meet sometime, but as these things go, we were unsure and busy with other things. But
Dear ladies and gentlemen: Mr. Anders wouldn’t let up, and so Francis and I finally spoke on the phone. Within ten
minutes it was clear that we absolutely had to meet. We were both surprised at how much
When I came to Burkina Faso a year ago, I had already gone on several trips to various we had to say to each other. And then there was an encounter with His Excellency Xavier
countries in Africa. The Goethe-Institut—with its very smart and dedicated regional director Niodogo, the Burkinabè ambassador to Germany, at a stage play I had directed. We met after
for Africa, Peter Anders in Johannesburg—had made these trips possible for us. Unfortu- the show, and from then on we knew we wanted to—I would even say, had to—do some-
nately, Mr. Anders cannot join us here today because he is in Berlin to present a film created thing together! Xavier Niodogo passed our wish on, and when—after trips through Cameroon
by African directors and produced by the Goethe-Institut, but he called me this morning and Mozambique, countries I also found interesting, especially since my friend Henning
to send his most cordial greetings, also on behalf of the president of the Goethe-Institut, Mankell has been leading his Teatro Avenida in Mozambique for more than twenty-five years
Mr. Klaus-Dieter Lehmann, and his associates, Messrs. Hans-Georg Knopp and Bruno —I finally arrived in Burkina Faso, something happened that I cannot describe in words. I
Fischli. These trips deeply impressed the diversity of Africa, of the very different countries visited Francis Kéré’s school in Gando, and what I saw there was a miracle! Working with
with their very different cultures, on our minds. the locals, Francis Kéré had built a school that possessed so much beauty, such infinite
power, an amount I had never seen anywhere in the world. The teachers at the school, the
I first set foot on the African continent rather gingerly back in 1993, in Zimbabwe, where I shot children who studied writing, math, and so on, the family surrounding Francis were of such
films, feature films, looking for Richard Wagner’s grail; later, I built a very art installation in incredible beauty and purity, of such infinite love and softness that I, in a very shaky state at
Lüderitz. Wherever I went I discovered treasures that I myself had long used up and lost in the time, and my wife Aino felt very safe and sheltered among them. In no other country
Europe. The different countries of Africa had something that I could no longer find, or had on the African continent that I have traveled have I experienced this pure sense of safety and
perhaps even lost, in Germany or on other trips around the world. But what exactly was that? comfort more strongly than in Burkina Faso. Spirituality—which I believe is the ability to
Was it merely a touristic sentiment, or was it a force that I found there and that struck me feel things that do not always manifest themselves in outright physical form—has a very spe-
as familiar even though I somehow no longer possessed it? Something must have happened cial significance in this country! The wealth of Burkina Faso, I think, consists in the spiritual
in my frenzied and stressful life in Germany that had made me oblivious to exactly who I purity of its residents. The world really still seems to work differently here.
was. Too often had I asserted so many things in my works that I no longer quite knew whether
it was reality or merely reality’s imitation. There is a film by the famous German director To be sure, Burkina has its problems as well; here, as in any other country, the question of
Detlef Sierck whose title, Imitation of Life, describes precisely the sensation I always felt when equitable distribution of course comes up again and again, but in that regard, too, I trust
I was in Africa. In the countries of this continent, everything was much more concrete. It that we will have the opportunity in the next few years to think about how art might be able
was more direct, harder, sometimes so hard that I was glad to leave as well. But the concrete to solve these issues in new ways. Art has more to offer than l’art pour l’art. Art, when it
life and often also the very hard struggle for survival in some African countries made me is at its best, is an organism that grows out of life and allies itself with life, allowing entirely
feel that I had lost myself. I had become pretty glutted and self-satisfied. And I—like all of us new forces to emerge. Politics, too, must be artful, and the ways people relate to each other
in Europe—lived at the expense of people who had no chance to survive or to take their ought to become our world’s greatest form of art!
lives in their own hands.
That’s the cause I am championing, the cause around which I have until now been able to
Today, too, many questions come up; as I’ve noticed, tomatoes from France, which is to say, bring so many people together who are interested in it! Remdoogo shall become a Gesamt-
from Europe, are cheaper here than ones produced in Burkina Faso. Or cotton, too—the kunstwerk where people live and are encouraged to study the highest form of art, the art
same problem, it seems to me. And why is it that solar plants are not built in Burkina Faso of living together. Learning from Burkina Faso: that shall be the motto that sounds forth from
or in other African countries but in China and Europe, when it is here, on the African continent, this place and day. I want the world to finally understand what wealth the African continent
that the sun pours out its power so without measure? Why doesn’t the European Union possesses in its people! And that we in Europe and elsewhere as well will survive only if we
arrange for solar plants to be built here? That, too, is an idea my architect and comrade Francis go back to school and finally learn who it was we used to be. I know that many people in
Kéré and I have discussed. Questions the opera village raises as well. Germany, Switzerland, France—but also many creative artists from Burkina Faso—think that
yet another theater will now open its doors where all sorts of things will soon be performed
Last year I was in very bad shape, and Francis Kéré’s father, chief of the village of Gando—it on the stage, not unlike in the city. I would like to ask everyone for their patience. Francis and
is my great pleasure to welcome him and his company, and I am deeply honored that the I wouldn’t have discovered this place if Stanislas Méda hadn’t had the idea, and I would
chief of Gando would make his way to the opera village—noted just yesterday that, to his like to thank him and his staff very much. And when I heard that twenty-five years ago Siriki
delight, I seem to have grown a bit of a tummy again. Ky discovered a place not far from here that is now home to the stone sculpture park, a
place that, as he told me, possesses a unique power, I knew at once what he meant. I, too,
REMDOOGO 103
have felt a power here that I want to call the dramaturgy of nature. God knows I am not given generously supported this project from the very beginning; and the German ambassador,
to esotericism, but I am a spiritual and religious human being. And so Francis and I imme- Dr. Ulrich Hochschild, who asked skeptical questions to draw our attention to important
diately chose this place because it is sheltered from the noise and pressure of the city, and issues. I am grateful, once again, to the Goethe-Institut.
also because I don’t want to step on the toes, as they say, of any artists who have done
magnificent and important work there for years and decades, perhaps for their entire lives. I owe particular gratitude to the generous sponsors and friends: the great writer and friend
I call upon the local cultural institutes representing Germany and other countries to invest of Africa, Henning Mankell; the German-American movie director Roland Emmerich; and
a lot more energy so that this cultural wealth will also be perceived in other countries of the the German superstar Herbert Grönemeyer. They, as well as thousands of generous donors,
world. Art needs no laws to be understood elsewhere as well. As Henning Mankell writes have made the launch of the opera village possible! We are deeply grateful to them!
in his introduction, art is a universal language!
In addition, I would like to thank the Ruhrtriennale, represented by Michael Helmbold, Willy
I think the opera village, with its many different sections, will lead to a new idea of art, and Decker, Jürgen Flimm, Ulli Stepan, and the wonderful stage designer Barbara Ehnes, who
what will emerge will at some point also raise interest in tourism in Burkina Faso. The school created the Erwin Piscator-style total theater building that is waiting back there in those con-
will be our center, educating five- to eighteen year olds for whom it will open up wholly new tainers. I am grateful to the brilliant and great conductor Daniel Barenboim, who will take
possibilities. And who will let us share in their works! It will be a festival for everyone all over on the sponsorship of the opera village with the Staatsoper Berlin and bring in additional
this world when we will see how children from Burkina Faso develop their own images, support through concerts and other special events. My thanks also go to Rupert Neudeck,
learn the music of their country, build musical instruments, start bands, record music, shoot who will send us some of his Green Helmets for the construction of the opera village.
films. Starting tonight, a website will go online in three languages that, through twelve
rounds of gradual expansion, will show visitors how the village is growing, how people live And I owe especial gratitude to Francis Kéré and his staff, who have worked for months to
and work here, how their children discover their future. And when the first visitors join us, develop the plans and designs detailing the impressive model. I have met his team and must
they will perhaps already be able to spend the night at the opera village and eat here; perhaps say that his associates are no less wonderful than Francis himself.
they will be looking for an opera singer who sings most wonderfully, but perhaps they will
then hear the primal scream of a new-born baby that has just come into the world at our little I also want to thank my own wonderful people: Thomas Goerge, Celina Nicolay, Sibylle
clinic here in the opera village. Dahrendorf and her team, Claudia Kaloff, Meike Fischer, and Matthias Lilienthal.
What wonderful song! The first scream of a child. By far better than opera, and truer by far And finally I would like to express my very special gratitude to my dear wife Aino, who has
than anything we can otherwise present on our stages. This little clinic in particular, which stuck with me through thick and thin! Without her, I would surely have departed this wonder-
will also be another major element of the opera village, is an important indicator of art’s powers ful planet on several occasions. My darling, I thank you!
of healing. Art can heal! Art is balm for the soul.
Spirituality, and directness too, unrestraint, the unmixed joy of life, and a link between
And at some point there will surely also be a Remdoogo festival of film, music, and art. Not heaven and earth. That’s what Remdoogo shall be! The necessary connection of art and
an attempt to compete with other creative artists in the city, but a festival that carries the non-art. Helping and beauty belong together. How does Faust put it? I want to see the
radiant power of Burkina Faso out into the world. Yet it is a long way until we get there, a path throngs come to hear our opera’s songs. … Absorbed in that august presentiment I now
to which our school will be central; we hope to open parts of it as early as this October. enjoy the happiest moment!
At least that is the goal toward which we should all strive together!
And my last and greatest gratitude is to God! He is more than what we have made him into!
But before I end my speech, I would like to thank first and foremost the Federal President And more than anything he is boundless!
of Germany, Horst Köhler, who has time and again supported and encouraged me in my
pursuit of this idea. Learning from Africa! He liked it from the very beginning, and he sends Long live the opera village!
his warm greetings and the best wishes to everyone here.
To look into the face of a human being who has been helped is to look into a fair country,
I would also like express my particular gratitude to my friend Filipe Savadogo, minister of friend friend friend.
culture of Burkina Faso, who, with his entire staff, has accompanied the project all the way
through, and without whom this groundbreaking ceremony would never have happened! I
also want to use this opportunity to thank the German Federal Cultural Foundation, with its
Artistic Director Hortensia Völckers and my longtime companion Torsten Mass; the Foreign
Office, and especially the former Minister of Foreign Affairs Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who
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FIRST COLLAGES, SKETCHES, AND PLANS
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LOOKING FOR A SITE IN BURKINA FASO – NOVEMBER 1, 2009
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THE SITE IS FOUND – NOVEMBER 4, 2009 SIGNING OF THE CONTRACT WITH THE GOVERNMENT – NOVEMBER 5, 2009
MODELS BY FRANCIS KÉRÉ – JANUARY 2010
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TRANSPORT OF CONTAINERS – FEBRUARY 5, 2010 LAYING OF THE FOUNDATIONAL STONE – FEBRUARY 8, 2010
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AN UNDERGROUND WATER LINE WAS FOUND! – FEBRUARY 24, 2010 APRIL 2010
JUNE 2010
COLLAGE BY THOMAS GOERGE & FRANCIS KÉRÉ
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JUNE 2010 MARCH 2011
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CARDBOARD MODEL 1 – OCTOBER 2009 CARDBOARD MODEL 2 – FEBRUARY 2010
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Photo: Kabyagda Yhsuima Photo: Amone Rokiatou Photo: Amone Rokiatou
Photo: Ba Fatao
Photo: Amone Rokiatou
Photo: Samandoulgou Fassala
Photographs by Burkinabè children between

REMDOOGO five and eleven years old taken with disposable cameras 121
Photo: Tamagda Inouasa
Photo: Sargho Ftinata
Photo: Samandougou Abdoul
Photo: Samandougou Abdoul Agig Photo: Samandougou Abdoul
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Photo: Dialo Rainatou Photo: Tamagda Celina Photo: Tamagda Celina
Photo: Yacomba Kéré
Photo: Tamagda Celina
Photo: Samandoulgou Fassala Photo: Tamagda Inouasa
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VIA INTOLLERANZA II
PERFORMANCES AT
KUNSTENFESTIVALDESARTS
BRUSSELS, MAY 15, 2010, AND
AT VIENNA FESTWOCHEN,
JUNE 12, 2010
Photo: Zerne Osmane Tenke Bogo
Photo: Dialo Rainatou
Photo: Zongo Abdoul Rasume
REMDOOGO 127
VIA INTOLLERANZA II Performances in Brussels and Vienna, 2010 129
Chapter 5:
Introduction of the European Cultural Code:
1) Love without limits
2) Art is giving form to doom
3) Life is what doesn’t work out

HELKE BAYRLE
SETTEBELLO
Settebello, 2011 Settebello, 2011
Christoph Schlingensief at the Venice Biennale Christoph Schlingensief in Frankfurt am Main
HELKE BAYRLE June 2003, Video Stills September 2003, Video Stills 137
KLAUS BIESENBACH
I WANTED TO CAPTURE EVERY-

THING IN PICTURES
CHRISTOPH SCHLINGENSIEF IN
CONVERSATION WITH
KLAUS BIESENBACH
Klaus Biesenbach: When did you know that you were an artist? Biesenbach: To come back to the question of the artist. The artist can also be someone,
after all, who writes a text, who makes a film or music or does theater. I think our society
Christoph Schlingensief: Well, I don’t know that even today—four or five years ago I tried often distinguishes between the visual artist and the creative artist, but the point of my
saying, I’ve done films, I’ve done theater and opera, and now? We’ll see, now I’m going to question is really: I know this from myself, there was a phase when I drew like crazy. But
go into art, I’ve had dealings with people from the art world on many occasions. I know a every child does that. Do you remember anything that went beyond just this creative-child
couple people, and there are artists who I think are great. thing? Where people around you first said, there’s something going on that’s more than
the normal creativity of a five year old?
And then at some point a curator working for Hauser & Wirth was sitting in the audience,
and after the show she asked, “Well, so what now about the table and the slaughtered Schlingensief: With drawing, not at all, in fact I had a shocking experience: we were sup-
chicken on top of it, and where is the drawing?” I said, “They’ve been taken away and rinsed posed to draw our primary school. When my picture was finished, the director, who
off, they’ve already been put away for next time.” But she took an interest in where all also taught art, took out a wide marker pen, took my drawing and then redrew all the edg-
that stuff goes, so I started throwing some ideas around, and I thought to myself, well, I es of the building with thick marker lines, as well as the windows and the door. To me
might produce something that could remain. that was such an injury to this picture, I thought it was horrible! That I remember—I was six
or seven at the time, that must have been early in primary school.
But this process, to my mind, is already concluded by now, as I realized it also led me to
make mistakes. With the Animatograph, for example, a large rotating stage I built in a slum In any case, I never thought about being an artist, I always wanted to be a movie director. I
near Lüderitz, the project was called Area 7. And this Animatograph was built over the always wanted to be someone who has the chance to record something with a camera,
course of six weeks, in collaboration with the people there in Namibia, they were paid for which is to say, to play, to stage.
it, too; a ship was dragged through the desert for the objects to be bolted on top of it,
down to pieces of corrugated sheet iron we had collected—I don’t know what all was bolt- Biesenbach: How old were you?
ed to this Animatograph in the end. The children painted it, and films were shot during
those six weeks. Schlingensief: I was eight at the time.
When everything was finished, we wanted to project films onto the rotating stages one Biesenbach: When you were eight you already knew what film was?
night. We made a big show out of it, of course, and we also filmed this show. But I had al-
ready lost touch with it, had lost it a long time before. It didn’t really grab me all that Schlingensief: Yes, my father always shot films, Double 8 films, and so after seven and a
much anymore, and added to that was the grand absurdity that we had wanted to bring half meters he had to switch them around to expose the other side. Then it was sent in,
food as well but we didn’t have any plates or spoons for it. So we just set out the food, developed, cut along the middle, spliced together, and finally you had fifteen meters. At
and then they came with paper tableware to put the food on and then they gobbled it up. eighteen frames per second, fifteen meters made for roughly four minutes of film.
Then people got into a brawl over the food, it was just a disaster.
Biesenbach: And then you would watch it at home?
I then had the Animatograph dismantled and taken along, the idea being that it is art, after
all, and I want to keep showing it, there were plans for an installation at the Burgtheater Schlingensief: We would watch it two weeks later in our living room. One time my father
in Vienna, for instance. Later on it was in fact shown there. had switched the film around twice. So suddenly there were people walking across my
mother’s tummy and my own tummy on the beach at Norderney. I asked my father how that
Looking back now I didn’t like the film that was made in Namibia either, because at the was possible, and he explained to me that he’d switched the film around twice.
time I didn’t even really know what I was doing. I did something imitative every day, I probably
also imitated the figure of the artist. Children then weren’t as trained as they are now; there were only three television stations.
One had a noisy picture and sound, the second had a good picture but no sound, and
I noticed, and this is probably something that didn’t happen until two years or even a year the third channel had both picture and sound, but the signal was gone all the time. Once I
ago: the mistake was to take the Animatograph away instead of leaving it standing in Na- was allowed to watch a boxing match on television, I was supposedly four at the time. My
mibia, saying, I have my photographs, I have my films, I’ve experienced things, had ideas, mother was in the kitchen, I was in the living room watching the men go at each other. When
or disappointments as well, what do I know? I’m taking all that with me. one of them was knocked out, I apparently turned the television off and told my mother,
“Man dead—television off,” and so then I didn’t watch any television for weeks because the
But no, I did have to take the object with me as well, and that was the mistake. man was knocked out, gone, off air, as it were.
KLAUS BIESENBACH 141

Then my father let me have the camera. That was in 1968. But even before that, I had al- Schlingensief: Yes, and in it I play the teacher who accompanies his class on a trip to a
ways rehearsed theatrical plays of sorts with people we met at the bed and breakfasts country hostel, where he then holds his lessons in the open. After a falling-out with the
on Chiemsee where we went on vacations. That is to say, organized scenes of some sort, children he wants to bolt—he is leaving the house and suddenly a bra falls out of his suit-
and of course I liked to be in the main scene. The first film was just a chase, three people case, and he is disgraced. I don’t even remember how the film ends.
coming after a go-kart, and farmer Meiwes, he waved a flag. That was also the film’s title,
Fahnenschwenkerfilm [Flag-waver Film]. And later, when I had enough money for a Biesenbach: How long is that film?
soundtrack, I put the wedding march to it.
Schlingensief: Probably ten or fifteen minutes. My uncle Paul shot it on the Super 8 camera.
Biesenbach: When did you stage these scenes at that bed and breakfast on Chiemsee? It was really a play, which he then helped me adapt for the screen, scene by scene. So,
coming through the door, suitcase opens, and so on. That’s when I started taking a shot twice
Schlingensief: In 1967, I think. That must all have been around that time. I had bought a when it didn’t work out the first time. Or three times, because I didn’t think it was good.
book of theatrical sketches you would practice and then perform. And so we put on an after-
noon program in the barn for the parents. Biesenbach: Was there a screenplay for it, or any outline?
Biesenbach: You were the director? Schlingensief: Yes, there must be screenplay somewhere. I wrote something of the sort, I
remember that. There are screenplays I wrote, even typed up, that I composed when I
Schlingensief: Yes. was eleven or twelve. Around that time I also bought books at Messerschmidt’s Photo Shop,
I think that was the name. These were books about how to make films, real manuals. In
Biesenbach: And who were the actors? the back of one book, in the list of sources, I discovered that there was also a book about
special effects. And so I got that book, and then I also got one about real, major special
Schlingensief: The children who were staying at the same bed and breakfast with me. The effects, like the Schüfftan process, where you place a mirror at an angle in front of the lens
problem with the films, even with the first, the Fahnenschwenkerfilm, was that the camera and scratch some of it off so that you can look through it while also inserting a scale
always needed to be wound up. And whenever you would wind it up of course there would model backdrop via the mirror. You then see the actors walking through the door of a tiny
be a jolt, and then it would take a while. So everyone had to stop when the camera was model house that looks like it’s a regular-sized building.
off, I shouted, “Stop now!” and then I’d quickly wind it up, turn it back on, and say, “Now
run!” That’s why you always saw pursuers that started running—and suddenly the picture I copied all of these tricks, translating them chapter by chapter into my own language, be-
would jump and they would stand frozen-like. And then they would start running again. cause I wanted to publish my own book about special effects. I really didn’t do anything other
than what people are now doing for their doctoral theses using Google, selecting pieces
It had something of the show about the boy with the boomerang, I distinctly remember from other works, and pasting them together. So I also copied what it said in those books.
that, it was a broadcast where a boy could bring the world to a standstill with his boomer-
ang. Whenever the boomerang shot up into the air, everything froze and he would run Biesenbach: What was it you were interested in, was it form? Did you want to be in control
around and arrest the perps. I Dream of Jeannie, too, was a very important television show, of it? Or were you more interested in embarrassing the teacher by having the bra fall out
because by blinking her eyes she was able to fulfill wishes. Or Get Smart, with the tricks of the suitcase?
in his shoe, and so on, so this was all about tricks and cheating time, or making two times
overlap, that was what fascinated me most. Schlingensief: No, I wanted to shoot real movies. They were supposed to be films of the
sort I knew. I had seen Tatort, for example, or Der Kommissar, that sort of thing, and
Biesenbach: So at the age of eight, you didn’t document some actual chase, for example, these shows were major events for me. I always thought, that’s what I would like to do, and
but instead staged it? when a film featured a helicopter, that was the greatest thing ever!
Schlingensief: That was staged, yes. And I very deliberately put the farmer on his spot, I noticed, of course, that by being in the position of the director you’re also a central figure
selected the flag—I remember it was very important to me that it would be this way and no of sorts, and that’s certainly something I needed. I then founded the film club called
other way. And the first film after that, there was even a script for it, which must still exist Amateurfilm Company 2000 when I was ten. And we put together a trailer for our films, too,
somewhere. that looked like the one 20th Century Fox uses: a high-rise building with two rockets
on the left and right, which were pieces of table fireworks that sprayed these fountains, and
Biesenbach: That one is called Die Schulklasse [The Class]. then there was a countdown from ten to zero. Of course there was a lot of jolting and
flashing, since it was all handmade.

And I managed time and again to turn my parents’ or other people’s conversations to my the issue that so many people keep on deluding themselves and saying, “Now I’ve got it,
hobby, filmmaking. I remember that I posed as a director when I was only twelve or thir- now redemption has come!” is already in there. And you can also recognize my point of
teen, and then when I was sixteen I picked up the tic with the silk scarf and the cowboy view, that I see redemption as a form of delusion. Why that is I don’t know, but it’s some-
boots, I had probably seen somewhere that that’s how directors dress. … In any case, thing I’ve always felt very strongly about.
I played the director wherever I went. I was the director.
Biesenbach: Let’s go back for just a moment. The Erdkundefilm [Geography Film] was next?
Biesenbach: When did you first perceive Hitchcock or whomever else as the director of
a film? When I was eight or nine or ten years old—at that age we would already know a Schlingensief: Yes, that was the attempt to get better grades in school by working with a
band, we already knew that Erik Ode was Der Kommissar … special medium, since technical presentations and the like were never my thing. In make-
believe writing I always received As, whereas my interpretations got C minuses or even Ds
Schlingensief: Exactly. The first films I consciously saw were Laurel and Hardy, Charlie because I permanently put myself in the shoes of the perpetrator. But this was the ’60s
Chaplin, Tom and Jerry, Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny with sound, where he shaves to the and ’70s, and where I went to school you were supposed to take the position of the victim
music from The Barber of Seville, a sensational film! I remember screening that for my into account, the Holocaust and such. … I once had a total falling-out with my history
cousins. And when the moment came where the fat one falls down the chimney, I ran teacher because I said that I thought it was tendentious to forever study only the history of
the projector forward and backward again and again in order to repeat the scene. Only the victims, I thought it was incredibly important to study the perpetrators, since I personally
much later did I realize that they had already reeled the film drum forward and backward couldn’t rule out that I might have made films in the Third Reich as well.
in Jean Renoir’s films from the 1920s and 1930s, also to make the film longer—they didn’t
have long filmstrips yet. So I did the same sort of thing as a child without knowing that Biesenbach: How old were you at the time?
that was how it was done. But it was an obvious thing to do, since the effect of his falling
down was also funny when the chimney rose up again all by itself. So that’s why I was of Schlingensief: Fifteen or sixteen.
course familiar very early on with the names of people such as the comedians Stan Laurel
and Oliver Hardy, or Charlie Chaplin—Western Cyclone, and then Ole and Aksel … ! Biesenbach: And when the Erdkundefilm was made, you were even much younger than
that, you were only twelve or something like that?
Biesenbach: And who was the first director whose name meant something to you?
Schlingensief: Yes, I don’t remember anymore what was in it; there was also a film set
Schlingensief: Charlie Chaplin. in a retirement home—that was actually quite nice. It was about relations between the gen-
erations, I was on a sort of social-issues trip. In any case, these were films where I at-
Biesenbach: But he was ultimately also the actor … tempted to use my abilities in the area of film to make a contribution in school. The aim was
of course to score points in a field others didn’t work, mostly so I wouldn’t have to do
Schlingensief: … who took center stage, yes. Charlie Chaplin was the one who acted as the bullshit others were saddled with, writing essays, throwing around percentages, and
well as directed. And I would have liked very much to act—I was very funny. I was very so on. That wasn’t my thing.
gangly and I could make people laugh just by the way I moved. And for a long time I would
harbor the ambition to act as well, and later, in the theater, I often did. But I am so awed I wanted to capture everything in pictures. Then I was able to sit at my work for hours, for
by the camera that I always tense up when I am cast for a role in a feature film. days without food, I sat there at night and edited until I got sick to my stomach, until I
just couldn’t keep at it, to the point of exhaustion. That I was able to do. But I could never
Biesenbach: In which of your films do you act? have read books to the point of exhaustion, that was out of the question. Technical
literature I would always eat up, I would race through it, it went straight into my head, and
Schlingensief: I only played small roles. In Tunguska—Die Kisten sind da [Tunguska—The it always also made me raise a thousand questions. But once things veered into the
Boxes Have Arrived] I am Major Pater Hilf, which is actually a nice cameo. But of course orbit of this particular ’70s-style dopiness, “society as such,” “the social system,” and re-
what I play there is a Jerry Lewis role, I am a priest who goes nuts and somewhere deep in flection here and reflection there—Arno Plack, Living Without Lies and that sort of
the forest falls in love with a retard who lives there, and then tries to convert him to the thing—I was dead set against it. That didn’t do anything for me, I thought it was disgusting,
faith, to doing good. and that was where the girls usually did best, we had those gasbags in pedagogy class,
I didn’t like any of that.
What is interesting is that in that role I already say sentences like, “I am igniting a fire here
for all people in this world who constantly hope for redemption, who constantly hope for Biesenbach: Next in your filmography is Wer tötet, kommt ins Kittchen [If You Kill, You Go
redemption. A symbol for all people who constantly hope for redemption!” Which is to say, to the Slammer], what was that?

Schlingensief: That was the first film after the Class one. It was a Super 8 film, which how gotten hold of, and a dimmer switch I used to slowly turn the light down. Later on, I
meant a leap forward, since the footage now came in cassettes. We had already set up also set up a sound studio with a mixing console, the whole shebang.
the film club, Amateurfilm Company 2000, which initially consisted of Karl-Heinz
Henning, Klaus Müller, and myself. Wait, now I remember! I played theater as early as Biesenbach: When did you first get in trouble with authorities? When did you first set a
kindergarten: I was the seventh dwarf and had a major role, but I came down with a mid- theatrical production, or a role, or a film in motion that led to conflict?
dle ear infection and couldn’t play. So Klaus Müller subbed for me, and everyone had to
wear cotton-wool beards and carry candles. And he couldn’t hold his steady because the Schlingensief: I don’t know. I mean, I do know that there were instances, of course, where
handle got too hot for him, but the kindergarten teacher always said, “Keep carrying it, someone would not like a particular film, that did happen, but …
keep carrying it!” until his false beard caught on fire and he ran off with his face on fire.
Klaus suffered severe burns. His butt was then surgically transferred to his face, and of Biesenbach: So when the bra fell out of the suitcase, everyone laughed, because it was
course he was always teased for that. like Laurel and Hardy.
Biesenbach: You mentioned the film club, what was that? Schlingensief: Everyone laughed, that was not a problem. Well, I do remember that at some
point there was a crisis because the girls were coming. We were a pure all-boys high
Schlingensief: The Amateurfilm Company 2000, that was Klaus Müller and Karl-Heinz school, there were lots of people, and all boys. And then ten girls joined our school—and
Henning, the son of the innkeeper. In primary school, his aunt, called the Sheep—her they were studious like you wouldn’t believe! So I immediately told everyone they mustn’t
mouth was crooked, she had some sort of neurological issue—always came during recess bring girls along, as they were destroying the structure we had here …
and brought him a cocoa drink and sweet rolls with raisins, which she handed to him
through the fence. And we all stood around him—we would get the leftovers when he was Biesenbach: You were the captain?
done eating. And since I was his best friend I was the first to get something. And that
was great, of course; I always stood there, craving this roll and hoping that he wouldn’t eat Schlingensief: I was the captain.
too much. In the first film produced by the Amateurfilm Company he plays a detective. The
murderer, that was Klaus Müller. Biesenbach: No girls?
Biesenbach: And you were the director? Schlingensief: No girls! They’ll mess everything up, I said.
Schlingensief: I was the director. Wer tötet, kommt ins Kittchen was shot in Karl-Heinz And then at the age of fourteen I had a crush after all. Her name was Claudia, she was
Henning’s father’s inn, and the funny thing is that Klaus Müller played not only the murderer, the sister of a fellow student, and she was really very pretty. Strangely enough, she
but also the victim, a journalist. So it was a member of the press who got killed. developed a crush on me, and we dated for two weeks. Claudia was the first girl I made
out with at a party. Friends explained to me how it was done, they were all experts al-
Biesenbach: Who founded that film club? ready. “When the music is playing, you have to hold her tight, move on up close, keep
turning her around, and then you put your tongue in her mouth,” and so on. I still re-
Schlingensief: I did. And in high school I was then also given rooms in the basement that member that whenever I was about to get my act together I would see my friends sitting
became our film club lounge, they were actually bomb shelter shafts. That’s where we on the bench, sticking their tongues out to tell me to make my move. It was completely
had our conference room, and we also put together our magazine and the program booklets terrifying. So finally I worked up the courage: and presto! I had my tongue in there, and
down there. then that lasted for ten seconds or what have you, and then, presto!—tongue comes
back out, we sit down, and then I put my arm around her—and there we sat, all tied up
And there was a movie theater in my parents’ basement, which was really my movie theater. in knots.
I had put insane efforts into setting it up, but it was my childhood dream: to own a movie
theater. I built a real viewing room: a mattress with a plank of wood on it, and then chairs Biesenbach: That’s an interesting answer to the question of when you first got into trouble …
for twelve viewers on top. Of course the whole thing was pretty shaky when you sat on
it. A hole was drilled into the wall for the projector, and there was a curtain in front of the Schlingensief: Well, yes, I can’t think of anything else right now. The authority was always
screen that opened and closed automatically. I had built it out of two remote-controlled the system itself. And I also have this attitude of subservience to authority in me, which I
Carrera slot cars attached to the curtain by nylon threads: when you activated the slot car now also find, time and again, in my religion: “Oh, but you mustn’t do that!” It is only now
on the right it pulled the curtain open, and the slot car on the left would close it again. that I’m learning to be generous enough to say that if someone has different ideas about
There was also the famous gong from Essen’s Lichtburg Movie Theater, which I had some- a subject, then I will by no means try to take them away from him. I don’t want to force him,

I don’t want to attack him, not at all, let him be happy with it. What he needs, let him Biesenbach: After all, the seventies were also conflict-laden years: Munich ’72, the
have it. But I was still brought up to be subservient to authority. German Autumn.
Biesenbach: But you didn’t come into conflict with any authorities, such as Mr. Möllemann, Schlingensief: Yes, there was a lot going on, I know. I also saw all the films that were very
Mr. Kohl, the priest, until you were twenty? controversial at the time. I saw Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom, for example. I got a tick-
et after flipping my collar up, because I probably looked younger than eighteen. And then I
Schlingensief: No. But I did come to blows with my father! That was a major explosion. suddenly thought I saw my religious studies teacher and my Greek teacher and I got
That was with my first great love, Inge, whom I dated for six years—we were making out scared. And so I left after fifteen minutes. I got up and left the movie theater swearing
down in the basement under some table, both of us naked. And then my father came down loudly, along the lines of, “What shameless dreck, what filth!”
to the basement. Came down the stairs whistling like Peter Lorre in Fritz Lang’s M. He
walked through the room as though he wanted to take a look at what was going on down I had an incredibly bad conscience. A couple days later I then was back at the theater and
there, and I knew he knew exactly that I was there—he’d always had the seventh sense, watched the entire film, which I thought was great. Afterwards I felt very guilty and was
after all, whenever I came home, my father would show up at the window, as though he disgusted with myself; to my mind it was of course way out there. Just as I sat in the lobby
had some sort of GPS device, though of course they didn’t exist back then. as The Exorcist was playing, as I wasn’t allowed to see it and no stunt got me in. Instead
I must have heard the film three times, sitting in the lobby—I sat in the lobby and just listened
In any case, at some point he also came into the room we were in, and suddenly he bends to the soundtrack. I thought it was just crazy, pictures were playing in my head to go with
down, his hand comes swooping under this table we had covered with blankets: “Now the soundtrack. At some point later on I actually saw the movie. I still thought it was great,
what is this here? Now what is this here?” I just grabbed my things and ran upstairs, and but by far not as great as the one in my head.
he came after me, “You’re staying here!” “No,” I said, “I’m not staying here,” and then
we ran out to Altmarkt Square. So I screamed at him and kept yelling, “Leave us alone, you Sound, in any case, was becoming ever more important to me. I had already missed it in
perverted pig!” Which was of course insanely embarrassing, on Altmarkt Square—the the films from my childhood. When I was ten or eleven, I sometimes projected them on our
pharmacy, the church, there were lots of people everywhere around us. That was an instance television set. I turned the television picture off, but kept the sound on. So my film now
of real conflict; I remember that distinctly, that was a major explosion. had a soundtrack, and sometimes the asynchronicity even produced a new synchronicity. I
got all excited, called my mother, and wanted to show it to her: you should have seen that,
Another conflict arose in school with a teacher, when my patience snapped and I told her this door was in synch, that car was in synch, the music made it exciting, and then sudden-
that I really thought her way of treating things made me want to throw up. I wasn’t a Social ly the dialogue made it funny. I think that was a very important experience for me, to see
Democrat or a leftist at the time, my ideas were probably leftist after all, but because of my how foreign materials bring in a new level and add a new exposure to your own material.
parents I leaned more toward the Christian Democrats. Though at one point I also wound But there was no way to repeat it, it was a random generator. Whenever my mother came
up with the KPD/ML [a Communist organization] and sold eggs for them on the market square in it wouldn’t work, the news would be on, and of course that didn’t fit at all. But even when
for six pfennigs apiece. Until I found out some day that the chickens didn’t even benefit the sound didn’t fit the images, it expanded them.
from the proceeds, they were just being exploited, and that’s why it was so cheap. But the
KPD/ML people wanted to demonstrate that things can be produced more cheaply, and I then used this way of adding another level in art class, for example. For quite a while I got noth-
that was all. So I immediately bolted because I thought that was pretty dubious. ing but As in art. I would take catalogues and put entire dialogues into the mouths of the char-
acters in them, drawing speech balloons and writing stories for them. As a child I read all the
I was a member of the city’s youth film group for a while. We staged these raids on at the comic strips I could get my hands on, although I am not a comic strip expert at all. The language
Lichtburg Movie Theater in Essen, putting the lady at the cash register on the spot with of comic strips was crucial to me. My mother thought that that was why I never read novels.
a U-Matic video camera, asking why they weren’t showing anything but this imperialist shit
from America, why the Lichtburg wasn’t running any German movies. I thought it was Biesenbach: Let me come back to Salò and The Exorcist. Were there other films beside
disgusting, they should stop threatening the poor lady—it bothered me, there wasn’t those two that had a comparable impact on you?
anything she could do about it. But then came the answer: she is indeed the saleswoman
for this shit, she is a part of the system and has to take a stand against her employer. But, I Schlingensief: Yes, I saw a science fiction movie, for instance, called Der Untergang der
said, she can’t do that, she’ll get it in the neck—I defended her. So from then on I was U3000 [The Sinking of U3000]. I saw all episodes of Godzilla that there were, always on
in a very controversial position, I distinctly remember one of them really fucking hated me. Sundays at eleven—these were also very important films because the special effects in
His name was Balou, and unfortunately he was also the leader of the local Boy Scouts. them were of course mind-blowing.
To him I was not a leftist but just some bourgeois sonny. That was one conflict, now the
conflicts are coming back to me.

Biesenbach: But the fact that William Friedkin or Pier Paolo Pasolini were really artists, Schlingensief: That was in 1976, at the Saalbau municipal event space in Essen. My
that film would allow a director to achieve not just some sort of pure creativity but perhaps father was a member of the Lions Club, and they held these events at regular intervals with
even something that finds a new form, as in Pasolini, was that something you realized people of note. On one of these evenings they had invited Joseph Beuys to give a lecture.
during the first twenty years of your life? And my father took me along.
Schlingensief: Yes, but in a way that I didn’t reflect on, that I simply perceived, since the Biesenbach: Were you fascinated by Beuys?
International Short Film Festival Oberhausen was always there, and I went too.
Schlingensief: Yes, I definitely was, while my father and the other men all fell asleep during
Biesenbach: When did you start going there? the lecture. Or rather they became a little sedate, but then in the end Beuys said, “And
I’m telling you, this social system will be utterly destroyed in seven years’ time.” So all the
Schlingensief: My father took me one time when I was twelve, though I didn’t go as regu- men collectively woke up and started barking, woof, nonsense, woof, so they all definitely
larly as some others. At some point Oberhausen’s municipal film theater started having heard that one sentence. And they thought to themselves, “Well, Mr. Beuys, how about
the Youth Film Festival, but they had this extreme political touch, with documentaries of you take your hat off for starters”—that attitude was palpable.
one kind or another, important responses, and then endless discussions about the Third
World or that sort of thing. And I thought that was boring, but these events time and again Five years ago, when my father was still alive, I asked him, “Do you remember that thing
allowed me to see films that were different. with Beuys?” And he said, “Yes, I remember that, I even put it in my appointment book”—
he always had these very slim appointment books—“seven years to go, six years, five
Biesenbach: Nagisa Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses? years, and in the final year it didn’t come to pass, he was wrong, Beuys was.” And so I
said, “But he kept you preoccupied with it for seven years, he actually just articulated
Schlingensief: I saw that one as well when it came out, I was about to keep going back to the uncertainty within you, the fact that you’re also expecting that things might change.”
see it again and again. And my father said, “Yes, that’s true.”
Biesenbach: When did you consciously see your first Fassbinder? These mechanisms that Beuys had in him, this prophetic aspect, the fear that someone is
saying something I actually do fear, and the fear that it might actually come to pass that
Schlingensief: Umm, that’s a good question. way, that fascinated me.
Biesenbach: Germany in Autumn was made at the time; Berlin Alexanderplatz was in 1980. Biesenbach: Did you listen to the lecture at the time?
Schlingensief: I saw Germany in Autumn when it came out, I know that. Schlingensief: Yes, I did. But I don’t remember what he talked about.
Biesenbach: Early 1978, you were seventeen. Biesenbach: But that one sentence about the destruction of the social system you do
remember?
Schlingensief: I saw that, I remember, I also saw The Marriage of Maria Braun; that was later.
Schlingensief: I remember that, yes, yes, most definitely. Why that is I don’t know either,
Biesenbach: Did you realize that there was someone at work here who was a great artist? but I remember that sentence. That impressed me very much at the time: that someone
would stand there in front of the room and roil an entire room of dozers, that a prognosis,
Schlingensief: Yes, well, I would say, in Fassbinder’s case I saw that, I also saw films by an idea was able to force people to respond.
Bernhard Sinkel, and Volker Schlöndorff’s The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum. They all ran
at the municipal theater, the theater for ambitious films. Biesenbach: The years of your childhood and puberty are also the years when the Federal
Republic tried out civil disobedience. If you think about it, ’67, ’68, ’69, these were years
Biesenbach: If someone had asked you, who is Heinrich Böll, who is Fassbinder, would during which everything was revolutionized and evolutionized and changed in one way or
you have known at seventeen? another, then in the early 1970s there were sit-ins, the oil crisis, the Munich disaster, a
terror attack in the Olympic village.
Schlingensief: Fassbinder, yes, Heinrich Böll, too, I think.
Biesenbach: When did you first hear about Joseph Beuys? Schlingensief: And the Anti-Radical Decree. That was a huge issue, and I think my first

Super 8 film, Das Geheimnis des Grafen von Kaunitz [Count Kaunitz’s Secret], that’s a Schlingensief: Das Totenhaus der Lady Florence was the attempt to picturize a trashy
film in which the suspect escapes in a helicopter in the end, rather than getting caught. “John Sinclair” novel, and it took half a year’s work, because we never had money for foot-
age. So we always had to shoot on weekends whenever more money had come in. And
Biesenbach: Which is to say, the suspect wins? that’s where I first came to understand what continuity is—what happens when you have
money for footage only every second week, or you can only shoot on weekends because
Schlingensief: My former art teacher, Dieter Hermann, plays a man who locks up five boys you have no time during the week. Because what happens is that the detective walks into
and girls in order to use them as hostages after a successful bank heist. The police stage a the interrogation room wearing long hair and a yellow T-shirt—and comes back out wear-
major operation featuring Fritz Kahle, the greatest actor at Oberhausen’s municipal theater ing short hair and a green T-shirt because in the meantime he’s been to the barber’s and
at the time, and Dieter Hermann runs over to the helicopter, gets in, and flies off. bought new clothes. And the murderer comes down the stairs in a red T-shirt and walks
out into the street in a blue T-shirt … Which is to say, you always saw how time had run in
Biesenbach: And you organized a helicopter at sixteen? parallel because I’d never paid any attention to continuity. And in the end, because of the
typical flashbacks in a “John Sinclair” novel, I had completely lost track of the action and no
Schlingensief: Yes. longer had any clue where I was in time at any moment.
Biesenbach: Where did you get it from? Biesenbach: And your mother or your father lent a hand with these films, didn’t they?
Schlingensief: It came from a company that monitored pipelines of some sort from the air, and Schlingensief: My mother only very reluctantly, when I asked her to help, but my father
I somehow got wind of that. I always got wind of everything. I made phone calls like I was always stood up for me when I ran out of money.
insane. My father once had a phone bill for, I think, 600 marks because when I was sixteen
or seventeen I even called a Hollywood studio to ask what kind of lamps they used and Biesenbach: But he also acted, as a double?
where to order them.
Schlingensief: Yes, yes, of course, he drove the car as well, lying invisibly in the car he
Biesenbach: What did your father do about the phone bill? had to drive around on Mülheim’s Steinstraße.
Schlingensief: He was livid. Especially since there was only one phone line, and when I But then a turning point came when I presented Mensch Mami, wir dreh’n ‘nen Film
was upstairs making calls to organize my films, my father downstairs in the pharmacy was [Come On, Mom, We’re Shooting a Film] at the Westdeutscher Rundfunk broadcasting
cut off from ordering medications. And when he found out, boy would he come upstairs. station, which had already broadcast something I’d done, as part of a children’s show.
Biesenbach: You saw Salò, you experienced Beuys; you must have picked up one way or Biesenbach: What was it that was broadcast?
another on what was going on during the German Autumn.
Schlingensief: Six minutes out of Graf von Kaunitz. And then I showed them Mensch Mami,
Schlingensief: Yes, very much, but not really by reading the paper; it was more the perma- wir dreh’n ‘nen Film and when the film was over and the lights went on, one producer got
nent discussions at this Oberhausen Film Short Film Festival, or at the municipal film up—this is really seared into my mind, which is why I’m so cautious with children when I talk
theater, with films about the Anti-Radical Decree. to them—and said to me: “This film shows that you will never love a human being.” That’s
what he says to me—and I was sixteen.
Biesenbach: And there were sit-ins, and there was Mutlangen, and Heinrich Böll, and civil
disobedience. Biesenbach: What is Mensch Mami, wir dreh’n ‘nen Film, what kind of film is that?
Schlingensief: I didn’t go there at all, to the nuclear thing, I never took part in any of that— Schlingensief: A real piece of slapstick comedy about a family man who absolutely wants
Brokdorf, that was never what I was interested in. to shoot a film with his family in Much, the village where my mother was born: the grand-
ma, who is in a wheelchair, ends up in the chicken coop, there are chases, the police arrest
Biesenbach: Before Der Graf von Kaunitz, there were other films: Rex, der unbekannte the wrong guy, there is making out in front of the camera—in the end the film blows up,
Mörder von London [Rex, the Unknown Murderer of London], Das Totenhaus der Lady then the entire house, and the director’s mother says, resignation in her voice, “Herbert, oh
Florence [The House of the Dead of Lady Florence], Columbo. Were these sort of attempts Herbert, must you really overdo absolutely everything.” That I remember, that’s the final line,
on your part to organize things for yourself? and then “Y.M.C.A.” starts playing.

Biesenbach: Did you have a team at the time, or were you by yourself?
Schlingensief: We were a team, but I organized it. I had my plans, they were so precise.
They specified, this shot takes three seconds, that one five second, I timed it all in ad-
vance. But the friends who joined the club of course also contributed in major ways. One
was better at operating the camera, the other was good with the sound, but I know I JOHN BOCK
was so egomaniacal that I messed with everything, and then that’s how it had to work out.
And when it didn’t work out I would be in a major funk. Once, as we were shooting for
Punkt, I was coming back from the bathroom and heard them talking about me: how the
film was total shit, and that I probably had a screw loose somewhere, and how my antics
were really outrageous. That hurt badly. At that moment I felt very, very lonely, but I didn’t say
anything to anyone. But it hurt so much.
KLAUS BIESENBACH
Christoph Schlingensief, Zoo Bayreuth
JOHN BOCK “Klütterkammer,” ICA, London, 2004, Installation View 157
The camera is running
unevenly. Risk of fracture.
Break-even point licks!
The little wheel is sludging out
secretions. The screen
clicks forward, trickles
into the buttonhole, and
gets caught up lewdly
logically in the light-cackle.
So I hold one Myself,
my body countenance,
into the cutting lens. When
the camera’s running, then go,
go for it, to the WORK.
Lay down in that
Zest-For-Action-Drama
on the paddock.
Creeping up to the B / W
Existo. So I’ll eat my way
into the picture. Jaws are
working in synchrony
with the picture crackling,
no holds barred.
Knitting the camera in so the
picture can be built snuglywarm.
When camera suppurates,
spotlight on it. Bit Shit
CUT when CUT CUT
is pouting in the corner and
everything is getting out of hand,
LETTING things slide anyway.
Christoph Schlingensief, Zoo Bayreuth

“Klütterkammer,” ICA, London, 2004, Installation View
Christoph Schlingensief, Remdoogo II

“Fischgrätenmelkstand,” Temporäre Kunsthalle, Berlin, 2010, Installation View
Christoph Schlingensief, Remdoogo II

JOHN BOCK “Fischgrätenmelkstand,” Temporäre Kunsthalle, Berlin, 2010, Installation View 159
JOHN BOCK 161
Come on, get it!
Closer!
Do it!
No, harder, until the lens fogs over.
Light flocculates out of your back.
Turn around, a shadow puddle behind the ear.
Got it?
Again, until shadow puddle stiffly
slaps against the back of the head.
Full bread.
It’s shaking. No matter. Are you on it?
Turn your way into the camera.
Eat the lens. Sound. Next door.
No, get it. Just scream something!
But what?!
“Am hungry for sour bread + everything
that’s on the agenda after that.”
Is he getting a green light? Left would be good.
Stop! Now! “Am hungry for …”
Stop! More fiercely! What has to come out
has to come out. The lens is pulp. Scratch
it out of your skull.
“Basal skull fracture on the corner pillar”
Fierce stormgathering is to suck up the
cameramachine. Which then twists it deliriously
into your cerebral gyri.
Ritual bubble.
Are you in it?
Not yet.
Go in!
Some ritual is slapping itself sore against
your shoulder pad. Apply Sidomastik
over stitches. Crusty, but it’s holding up.
Lens is shaking. No, not now.
Pause!
JOHN BOCK 163

FRANK CASTORF
HE ASKED THE
QUESTION OF GUILT
I n 1993, Matthias Lilienthal asked me about Schlingensief. I had seen Das deutsche
Kettensägenmassaker [The German Chainsaw Massacre] and thought that its extreme
aesthetic position, its fusion of trash, horror, and polit-kitsch, was not uninteresting. We
He used Katzilein, a film by Otmar Bauer, the Viennese Actionist, for that. I told him that
that thing wouldn’t be on my stage, I would forbid it. He scrambled the scenes I deemed
unacceptable, and during the second, third, fourth performances he exposed me on the
got to talking, and I said to Schlingensief: “Do something!” Up until 1999, he created eight stage as a censor and Stasi man. He may have been right—in any case, at the time I
productions at the Volksbühne. It was important to him to have an institution for his pecu- didn’t want to see that film in my theater. That was one instance of profound discomfort.
liarity, his eccentricity. We maintained a friendly hostility or a hostile friendship based on an Or Tötet Helmut Kohl [Kill Helmut Kohl], which caused a giant uproar in West Berlin’s
attitude of fundamental friendliness. ultimately very provincial Christian Democratic Union. I think Kohl himself adopted a
much more self-possessed or tolerant or perhaps also slightly ironic attitude. Actions of
When I met him in Vienna in June of last year, he looked very tired and very depressed. this kind were something in which you really noticed that there’s a defensive response
He wasn’t happy during the work on the last project he created there, not happy in the way within yourself, and you find yourself saying: there’s a line here, and that is perverse. I think
he used people or, for that matter, himself. He didn’t want to be broken, but the break that experience was important to him: that you have to take the theater that far, that you
within the man that was Christoph Schlingensief was impossible to overlook. … On Au- don’t impose an internal censorship. These limits we set for ourselves—I’m from East
gust 21—I was coming back from Cuba, had landed in Tegel, and was passing Virchow- Germany, after all, from a country under dictatorship—need to be breached time and
Klinikum, the hospital where he died, on my way home—Matthias Lilienthal called me and again. Schlingensief is one of the very few people I know from the West German context
said: “Christoph is dead!” I would never have thought that someone like him could die. who breached the limits with this degree of relentlessness. …
Someone who always lived and worked to excess, always in a state of emergency, who
could not conceive of himself in any other way. I had hoped that his will would be strong The only truly great and stirring art experience, to my mind, was Kunst und Gemüse [Art and
enough to override the laws of nature. Exceptional characters like him—like Heiner Müller Vegetables], featuring a woman who was suffering from this incurable neurodegenerative
or Einar Schleef, too—have become rare in our ever more marginal segment of the disease, ALS—nothing moves anymore, there’s nothing left but her head and eyes. She sat
culture business. … in her bed or coffin, like Snow White. I talked to her, she communicated with me using a
language computer, and there was this radiant desire for life—unreal and beautiful, as with
Schlingensief was an exceptional character, a breaker of barriers who relentlessly called Snow White in her coffin. That was incredibly moving, the collision of possibly fairy-tale-
the rules of the game we impose on ourselves in question. That was his happiness, his like kitsch with the brutality and relentlessness of a lethal disease, accompanied by
technique of happiness. He always had a piece of cultural revolution in his head, and a cul- Schönberg’s music. And facing that you also face the question: How do I deal with this,
tural revolution is what he permanently performed to the end of his life: not in the con- how do I respond? You’re utterly alone with this question, utterly on your own. He really
sensus that has us zealously adopting every trend emerging across the Atlantic, not in the set something in motion with that synthesis, which the theater virtually never accomplishes;
mainstream, not in the pull of what is politically or morally correct, but rather far away accomplished it by generating what we call, a stupid term, “concernment.”
from them and against them. Suspending political correctness: that was important to him,
and that’s how I experienced him. … The path from the political provocateur of Tötet Helmut Kohl to someone who says there
is so much dirt in this world when that world ought to be equal, free, and just; who says
I also think that Burkina Faso is more a metaphor; that Schlingensief wanted to do some- more must be done to achieve it than just going onstage and creating images of reality—
thing more with it than using this necessary useless activity that is art to think about that was Schlingensief’s path from life to dying. That theater must be more than entertain-
people and turning it into something like art, something that makes you wonder more than ment, no, more must be possible! And that is a challenge. … A small number of people,
once: who really needs this? And perhaps Burkina Faso is a metaphor for doing some- and Christoph Schlingensief first and foremost, are responsible for others who say: no,
thing with the means of art that approaches a notion of usefulness. And that might be, for not this way! Count me out. We’ll do our classics, our Ibsen and our Chekhov, and lean
instance, the building of an opera house in a poor country in Western Africa, from ground- back. You go do it, comrade, I’ve got a family! You go first! That’s our depoliticized age.
breaking to the day the artists take possession of it. That, too, required a quite literal act of And touching the sore spot with such insistence; that is Schlingensief’s lasting accom-
border-crossing, and not just one. … Using art as a way of crossing borders at some point plishment. He asked the question of guilt.
became synonymous with Christoph Schlingensief. He was very hesitant about it initially,
and in fact did it at his most brilliant in the beginning. Nobody knew how to react: Is this In this regard, the theater is no more than a mirror image, a gloomy stocktaking. It takes
art now, should we now leave the event? Will there be a final applause at all, does that someone who will repeatedly and insistently put our own bad conscience—which we
even make sense? How do I respond to this shockwave of provocations, of challenges, needn’t have—to the test. In contradistinction to the medium of television and the pressure
of art terror? to increase ratings, in contradistinction to the need for newspapers and books to aim for
large print runs, we in the theater are free to do, and even politically free to do, what we
The first work at the Volksbühne was 100 Jahre CDU [100 Years of CDU], then Kühnen want, to say what we think. It’s just that we take this liberty and become ever more timid.
’94—Bring mir den Kopf von Adolf Hitler! [Kühnen ’94—Bring Me the Head of Adolf Hitler!]. That’s one tendency. Luc Bondy says: this German idealism, it always needs heroes against
FRANK CASTORF 167

which to work off its own petit-bourgeois instincts. That is true, and it is sad. Schlingensief
was an artist of the momentary. He was such a genius, after all, because he reacted with
such precision to the moment in which he lived, always responding instantaneously. And
so this African project was something he used in order to think about a form of sustainability,
perhaps even to think strategically about what can be done with the theater, what will
remain? … What remains of Christoph Schlingensief is, more than anything else, he him- THOMAS DEMAND
self, between the horrible fate that befell him so early and the will to fight, to take up the
fight against this theater of nothing-but-art, this performance, whatever we may call it. That
doing so lets you be someone who becomes very important to others, who really uses
art to convey a project for humankind, these are ideas he persuasively championed. This
yearning for a cultural revolution, after all, was also something that united us. I some-
times think it’s very simple and better to just make babies. They, too, are something that re-
mains. But he chose a different path, always focused on the fighter in his mind. His
performances, his players, were his family, and they still are. …
But the fighter that Schlingensief was could also reveal a side of himself where he was a
total asshole; in the way he dealt with the apparatus of the theater, but also with people.
He would also behave as someone who was incredibly obtrusive, incredible friendly and
charming in order to push through what he thought was important, egotistical to the
point of terrorizing others; unjust in his fight for a just world. I would not exempt certain
people, Schleef or even myself, from the same charge, so in that regard, too, we resemble
each other. And perhaps it is important that one has to be this way. But at the same time,
when we met, these encounters were very friendly. He also knew what he had in this
institution, the Volksbühne, which is, after all, not just Castorf, it is a gigantic apparatus he
fought, and an apparatus that needs to be fought. … Somehow this hatred also turned
into a love affair. He did around fourteen productions with us starting in 1993, the most
recent one was five years ago. And so then it was good, too, that he left, that he took
an interest in other things. In his recollection, this house was certainly also a milestone to
him, including the fights we had here. He knew no bounds in his “Give me!” But he
relied on those who gave not just to augment his own surplus value, he transformed it into
an essential artistic substance that had something to do with our time. And the more
strongly someone asserts himself, even to the point of egocentricity, the more conspicuous
he will be to our time of superficiality and rapid fluctuation; the more memorable he will be.
And memorable he will remain, for quite a while!
FRANK CASTORF
“I feel as I presume the great majority of you do. We are all modern people who move
mistrustfully and awkwardly in public. Caught up in our modern prejudices, we think that
only the ‘objective work,’ separate from the person, belongs to the public; that the person
behind it and his life are private matters, and that the feelings related to these ‘subjective’
things stop being genuine and become sentimental as soon as they are exposed to the
public eye. […]
In order to speak to the point here we must learn to distinguish not between subjectivity
and objectivity, but between the individual and the person. It is true that it is an individual sub-
ject who offers some objective work to the public, abandons it to the public. The subjective
element, let us say the creative process that went into the work, does not concern the public
at all. But if this work is not only academic, if it is also the result of ‘having proved oneself
in life,’ a living act and voice accompanies the work; the person himself appears together with
it. What then emerges is unknown to the one who reveals it; he cannot control it as he can
control the work he has prepared for publication. (Anyone who consciously tries to intrude his
personality into his work is play-acting, and in so doing he throws away the real opportunity
that publication means for himself and others.)
The personal element is beyond the control of the subject and is therefore the precise opposite
of mere subjectivity. But it is that very subjectivity that is ‘objectively’ much easier to grasp
and much more readily at the disposal of the subject. (By self-control, for example, we mean
simply that we are able to lay hold of this purely subjective element in ourselves in order to
use it as we like.)
Personality is an entirely different matter. It is very hard to grasp and perhaps most closely
resembles the Greek daimon, the guardian spirit which accompanies every man throughout
his life, but is always only looking over his shoulder, with the result that it is more easily
recognized by everyone a man meets than by himself. This daimon—which has nothing de-
monic about it—this personal element in a man, can only appear where a public space
exists; that is the deeper significance of the public realm, which extends far beyond what we
ordinarily mean by political life. To the extent that this public space is also a spiritual realm,
there is manifest in it what the Romans called humanitas. By that they meant something that
was the very height of humanness because it was valid without being objective. […]
Humanitas is never acquired in solitude and never by giving one’s work to the public. It can
be achieved only by one who has thrown his life and his person into the ‘venture into the
public realm’—in the course of which he risks revealing something which is not ‘subjective’
and which for that very reason he can neither recognize nor control.”
From Hannah Arendt, “Karl Jaspers: A Laudatio,” in

THOMAS DEMAND Men in Dark Times (Middlesex: Harmondsworth 1973), 75–76. 171
CHRIS DERCON
COMRADES
August 2010 Werner Nekes and What Really Happened Between the Images
“August is a dangerous month,” the famous German filmmaker, writer, and television The trilogy is the immediate outcome of the training he received from one of Germany’s
producer Alexander Kluge wrote in the August 5, 2010 edition of the German weekly Die leading experimental filmmakers, the collector of optical apparatuses, and connoisseur of
Zeit. On August 21st of that same dangerous month, Christoph Schlingensief, whom early cinematography, Werner Nekes, whose most important insight is probably that film
Kluge, his senior by many years, called his “young comrade,” died. Why died? “Christoph ought not to be conceived as a rigid unit. Schlingensief first met Nekes in 1982, in Mülheim
Schlingensief is not dead,”1 Kluge wrote in an obituary that was not supposed to be an der Ruhr, the next town over from his birthplace, Oberhausen. Just twenty-two years
one. “Christoph often played hide and seek, but this time he has hidden especially well,” old, he became Nekes’s assistant in various functions. He maintained Werner Nekes’s am-
Schlingensief’s wife, Aino Laberenz, said during the memorial service in Oberhausen ateur film archive, whose holdings included many documents of the Viennese Actionists.
on August 29th. The title of the first film in whose production Schlingensief assisted Nekes is emblematic
of the older filmmaker’s significance in Schlingensief’s own work: Was geschah wirklich
“August is a plane, a surface; we might also say it is a stagnant pond, the month when the zwischen den Bildern? [Film Before Film: What Really Happened Between the Images?,
bustle of activity quiets down, when a sort of universal recess is held. […] In its very name, 1982]. “I knew Christoph from when we were both with Werner Nekes at the University
August is a month of longing. […] In 1989, August played an important role, it was when of Art and Design Offenbach. I was a student there, and he was an assistant. […] Nekes
the mass exodus from the GDR began. […] That is a typical August event, everyone is on inspired in all of us this curiosity and the interest in the magic of filmmaking. The curious
vacation; it is a phase when nothing is ready for a counterstrike. […] The agreement that exploration of the principles of the camera obscura (recording) and the laterna magica
everyone takes a break at the same time, everyone decides to lower the stress level together, (projection), that was the childlike drive propelling the realization of his work. Be it in
that is what makes August dangerous,”2 Alexander Kluge wrote, as though he already the realm of art, in that of film, or on the stage. Nekes was the quiet and modest teacher
sensed that Schlingensief would use that same month to break free of his illness in order and the self-effacing paragon. […] The Nekesian curiosity about phenomena of per-
to come back, though in a very different guise, to the most animated life. ception and their technical realization, recording, or projection is something that stayed
with Schlingensief throughout his life. Christoph’s Animatographs attest to that, a sort
Alexander Kluge and Saying Farewell to Yesterday of oversized zoetrope or praxinoscope. Without Werner Nekes’s influence, Christoph
would never have taken an interest in this form of presentation and integration between
Schlingensief had known Kluge since the fall of 1993, when they first met at the funeral of his films and his theatrical projects,”3 writes the lighting designer and cameraman Voxi
their mutual friend Alfred Edel, where both delivered eulogies. Edel had been Kluge’s com- Bärenklau, who was a close collaborator of Schlingensief’s from the film Mutters
panion and an important mentor to Schlingensief. In Kluge’s milestone achievement of New Maske [Mother’s Mask, 1987] until Schlingensief’s death. With Bärenklau, Schlingensief
German Cinema, Abschied von gestern [Yesterday Girl, 1966] , Edel had played an ambi- developed complex silhouette and film projections on the stage, as well as the rotating
tious scientist, which was in fact what he was in real life. With Abschied von gestern, Kluge stage as a central cinematographic element, which gave rise, in 2005, to the Animatograph,
drew his conclusions from the manifesto “Papas Kino ist tot” [Papa’s Cinema is Dead], to a sort of “Actionist photographic plate.”
which he was a signatory. Penned on occasion of the 8th West German Short Film Festival
held in Oberhausen in 1962, the manifesto called for a renewal of West German film culture Werner Nekes probably thought that Menu Total (1986), which Schlingensief himself called
with respect to content as well as form. Schlingensief, not even two years old at the time, his “best film,” was rather fascistic. Like Nekes’s own parodic film comedy Johnny Flash
grew up in the same city of Oberhausen. In Abschied von gestern, Kluge, adopting an almost (1987), Menu Total was a “Ruhr flick.” Helge Schneider—another assistant and disciple of
documentary style, tells the story of Anita G.’s attempts to gain a foothold in West German Nekes’s—plays the leading roles in both films: sons screaming at the world in helpless
life after escaping from the GDR. For Edel, Abschied von gestern meant the beginning of his rage; in Nekes’s film he is the frustrated pop singer Jürgen Potzkothen, in Schlingensief’s,
career in film; to Kluge it brought an award at the Venice Film Festival. Almost twenty years a frustrated Hitler youth. Although Schlingensief was still Nekes’s assistant when Johnny
later, Edel played an “avant-garde researcher” in Schlingensief’s Tunguska—Die Kisten sind Flash was made, the two gradually grew apart after the younger director’s own films began
da [Tunguska—The Boxes Have Arrived, 1984], his first feature-length film and the most im- to garner some success.
portant contribution to his “Trilogy on Film Criticism” (1983–4). The two other—shorter—parts
are entitled Phantasus muss anders werden / Phantasus Go Home and What Happened to Come On, Mom, We’re Shooting a Film
Magdalena Jung. As the titles suggest, Schlingensief’s “Trilogy on Film Criticism” is a com-
ment about the situation—which is to say, effectively, the end—of New German Cinema. Still, there are echoes of Nekes’s ideas and his fascination with film technology throughout
Schlingensief sharply rejects filmic realism and provokes new visual experiences. The boxes Schlingensief’s own remarks about film: “According to Godard, a film consists of twenty-
the so-called “German avant-garde researchers,” dragged into view in Tunguska, represent four pictures per second. He says, ‘twenty-four truths per second.’ But Godard is wrong, that
each individual filmic image. They can be filled with new content only if the visual language is at least six pictures too many, because humans begin to see fluid movement at eighteen
and the projection surface of the filmic image are expanded. pictures and even almost at only twelve pictures per second. So please remember: twelve
CHRIS DERCON 175

pictures and up, almost fluid; sixteen pictures and up, quite fluid; eighteen pictures and up, extremely cooled or burnt-out “intellectual fuel rods” in their productions, appearances, or
fluid. But with twenty-five, that’s already superfluous, no dark phase intervenes at all any- essays, setting them forth as “true claims”; the filmic image often contradicts the filmic text
more, and the dark phase is decisive. Eighteen pictures per second is right.”4 or off-screen commentary, serving time and again to try out a new theory, a term that must
The most important text Schlingensief wrote about film is an essay about “The Criminal here be understood as a theater of thinking. “Exchanges with him always enabled his inter-
Pleasure of Making a Film,” 5 written in 1987 for the journal Filmwärts. “It reads,” locutor to forget about the pure functionalism of German cultural pessimism,” Schlingensief
Schlingensief’s longtime editor and “ghostwriter” Jörg van der Horst says, “like a sort of big praised Kluge in 2002 on occasion of the older filmmaker’s seventieth birthday. And he
bang. Schlingensief most importantly casts doubt on the rigorous logic of narrative ended his encomium with these words: “Would be nice if the day were to come when Kluge
cinema, which he feels is notorious, calling, as it were, for a (childlike) liberation of the and us younger filmmakers could jointly make a film for the entirely new New German Film.
medium of film.”6 Other important essays bear titles such as “Manifesto of German The title: Germany in Spring. For Alfred Edel.”13 Schlingensief is alluding to the omnibus
Underground Film”7 and “How Films Are Made!”8 film Deutschland im Herbst [Germany in Autumn, 1978]. A few years later, at the 2006 Hof
Film Festival, Schlingensief will describe Kluge’s contribution, the episode “Verlorene Ge-
In his writings about the “liberation” of German film, Schlingensief often pointed to the schichte” [Lost History], as a “portrait of im-morals, painted by the New German Film under
Oberhausen manifesto of 1962, which he believed had failed. Schlingensief wanted a lib- Kluge’s leadership, of a Zombie-Germany that, caught between the terrors of the Nazi era
erated cinema in the sense of Antonin Artaud’s “nonrepresentational theater,” transgres- and the Red Army Faction, tries in vain to bury its unloved history in hasty state funerals.”14
sive, drawing freely on reality and fiction, on the conscious and the unconscious, open to
popular culture, impure, dirty. Time and again Schlingensief also used religious motifs, Jörg van der Horst says about the relationship between Kluge and Schlingensief: “What
offering to “sacrifice” himself to save German film. In 1988, writing under his full name, interested and sometimes fascinated Christoph in Kluge was not the rigorous consistency
Christoph Maria Schlingensief, he published an essay on “How to Restore One’s Balance. of a defined theory Kluge championed vigorously, a theory one might deduce and elabo-
A Religious Contribution,”9 in which he remarked about the keyword “genius”: “Retaining rate in logical fashion. A purely theoretical superstructure would not have been all that in-
my puberty might be my hope, were I not indeed compelled to walk the path of genius.” teresting to Christoph, because to his mind it would have entailed the risk of losing all
connection to practice, to life. It seemed more interesting to him to concoct his own theo-
It was a sort of childlikeness, namely “the innocent eye of the child that interested him ries on the basis of (mundane) fragments of knowledge and flashes of insight, or to put
most. He thought that we should approach things the way a child would,” Schlingensief’s it differently: to adapt theory to his practical purposes. In this sense, the abovementioned
widow, Aino Laberenz, noted.10 Schlingensief himself repeatedly spoke of “pubescent” Alfred Edel once attributed to Schlingensief ‘brilliant superficial knowledge.’”15 The first
ideas, confronting both his team and his viewers with the curious and inquisitive eye of concrete collaboration between Kluge and Schlingensief took place in 1999 as part of the
a teenager. In his exhibition “18 Images per Second” on display at Haus der Kunst in 2007, “2nd Social Evening: Toolbox of History” at Berlin’s Volksbühne, where Schlingensief
for example, he presented cabins—the so-called “Sauna Boxes”—containing utensils and had been a guest director since 1993 at the invitation of the theater’s dramaturge, Matthias
film reels from the filmic oeuvre of his teenage years. In 1972, he founded the Oberhausen Lilienthal. Schlingensief put a live “German evening” on stage that featured some
youth film team; until 1978, the team, working under his leadership and a variety of names highly contentious characters in recent German political history; Kluge had his own cam-
(Club of Seven, Altmarkclub, Amateurfilm Company 2000), produced seven Super 8 fea- era team on the stage, commissioned by his television production company dctp, to
ture films. His film Mensch Mami, wir dreh’n ’nen Film [Come On, Mom, We’re Shooting create a documentary record of the event.
a Film, 1977], whose title alludes to the Oberhausen manifesto’s “Papas Kino ist tot,” is a
satire about an ambitious hobby filmmaker; it was broadcast on Westdeutscher Rund- A New Germany?
funk [West German Broadcasting, WDR].
In an essay written for the Hamburg Institute for Social Research and published in 2009
Alexander Kluge and True Claims under the title “A New Germany? The Federal Republic, Twenty Years After the Fall of
the Wall,”16 the British historian Perry Anderson claimed that Germany was no longer a
After Werner Nekes, Alfred Edel and Alexander Kluge were Schlingensief’s most important country of ideas and instead a country of images in painting, photography, and film: “no
mentors. Alfred Edel vomits his way through the entirety of Schlingensief’s film Menu Total; other contemporary European society can boast a comparable palette.” At the same
in Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker [The German Chainsaw Massacre, 1990], he plays time, however, “the economic sphere has shifted to the right. The political sphere has not
a butcher, “the principal heir to the German tragedy.”11 Schlingensief depicts the first hour yet moved very far from the center. The social sphere has performed a subliminal move-
of German reunification as a blood-soaked act of cannibalism in which the West ingests the ment to the left, the intellectual sphere, in the opposite direction.” Anderson concludes:
East. After Edel’s death in 1993, Kluge and Schlingensief were accomplices, regularly “art had its premonitions, even if they are not always correct.” He professes to have felt
meeting or speaking on the phone. If there was anyone who had a sustained influence on the beginnings of change as early as the mid-1980s, after Habermas’s Theory of Com-
him, Schlingensief admitted in conversation with Max Dax, it was Kluge.12 The chroniclers municative Action (1981) and Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason (1983). One of
or archaeologists of the new German era, Schlingensief and Kluge, have no problem reusing the two thinkers, Habermas, adopts a defensive posture; the other goes on the offensive,
CHRIS DERCON 177

if primarily in the register of literary style. These are the years when Schlingensief makes of materials, their workshops and assistants, they are self-reliant entrepreneurs.”22 He wished
his “nasty” films. that his “Schlingensief Office” and his team had had the same financial means, the same
networks and possibilities at their disposal.23
Schlingensief, however, scratches the surface of the German present, unearthing it with
the help of various media. He is neither interested in the territorial claims of different One might say that “we should speak not so much of a Schlingensief factory but really
genres of art, nor in dissolving the lines of demarcation between them. How often did he rather of the permanent experiment of a Schlingensief family, a community in process; and
not maintain: “I am not a filmmaker anymore.” On another occasion, he feels much more at the term is not meant to romanticize at all but rather intended in the sociological sense:
home in a museum than in the theater: “I come from movie. But art is easy to make. as a social system in artistic production. ‘Family’ was an important concept to Christoph,
There’s just so incredibly much you can do.”17 Toward the end, he wanted to return to both in the private sphere and in his work.”24
film after all: “I am totally ill, don’t have a lot of time anymore, give me money now, I have to
shoot a film.”18 Is he contradicting himself? No, he just will not be told what to do. He acts The Metaboleus
and transacts.
What might have driven Schlingensief to imitation and even caricature in the form of pa-
Good Boy Bad Boy rodies? Schlingensief’s protest is directed not against Paul McCarthy or against the social
components his works convey. Schlingensief challenges the artist personally and in his
In the visual arts, too, Schlingensief “acted.” He liked to be on the scene. And in this field, personality as an artist. The etymological origins of the concept of parody lie in the Greek
too, he had several venturesome “accomplices.” Admittedly, there were not many, but still: word “parodia,” a compound of “para” or “next to” and “ode” or “song” we can translate
Klaus Biesenbach, Catherine David, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Stefanie Rosenthal, Ulrich Wilmes, into English as “side-song” or, more pertinently, “counter-song.” It is a paradoxical ex-
and a handful of other curators. Most “art professionals” regarded Schlingensief as no pression, designating something that is similar and alien at once. Parodying something
more than “pleasant”; in the world of professional curators and collectors, that is actually or someone, we generate a comedic effect. So it is initially difficult to avoid the impres-
an invective. Schlingensief was nonetheless very proud of his appearances at docu- sion that parody mocks its original. Yet by eliciting laughter, it not only criticizes the original,
menta 10 (1997) and the 50th Venice Biennale (2003); at Museum Ludwig, Cologne, in it also identifies with it.25 This perspective also allows us to understand Schlingensief’s
2005; and at Haus der Kunst, Munich, in 2007. But at bottom he didn’t know his way marked penchant for “remakes”—a method he repeatedly and publicly owned up to—in
around the art world. And why should he? Of course there was a lot for him to discover his films, theater plays, and visual art projects.
that was useful and desirable, mostly in the works of artists who had bid farewell to “the
cleanness of art”: Otto Mühl and the other Viennese Actionists’ vomiting, Joseph Beuys’s To Schlingensief the Catholic, are such parodies or side-songs not also an expression
dead rabbit and his “expanded concept of art,”19 Dieter Roth’s emotion machines and the of brotherly love? Especially since he time and again identifies with the “other”—in his
fluid ideas of Fluxus, the concept of the action as translated through Kaprow, Paul Thek’s collaboration with mentally disabled people, whom he shows not as “freaks” but as ab-
processions, Paul McCarthy’s ketchup massacre, Martin Kippenberger’s fortitude. More solute “equals,” admiring them for possessing a certain very particular form of “child-likeness.”
generally, the only artists Schlingensief found worth engaging were those whose works It should come as no big surprise that Schlingensief would write about the Munich-born
presented themselves to the world strung together like chains of images. Exhibitions of comedian, balladeer, author, and film producer Karl Valentin (1882–1948): “Karl Valentin
isolated pictures with lots of white wall between them didn’t strike him as productive. is, to me, one of the greatest!, is, to me, something like the German Buñuel and of
course a perfectly logical mirror-image of Adolf Hitler. Waging war on the greatest scale
It is strange that Schlingensief would so often challenge the artists he admired by ap- by means of disruption on the smallest one. […] Might it be that Hitler permitted these
proaching them through appropriation, imitation, and parody bordering on the infantile. In films because he recognized himself in them, I asked my father. And he responded, there
2005, for example, his work I destroy Parliament. You destroy Parliament. He destroys were two things Hitler wanted to be: Wagner and Valentin. So I studied him when I was as
Parliament. She destroys Parliament. It destroys Parliament appropriated the litany from young as fifteen, but not until I was twenty-two did I find him again in Helge Schneider.”26
Bruce Nauman’s video work Good Boy Bad Boy (1985). He claimed during a 2005 sa-
tirical talk show at Munich’s Haus der Kunst: “I want to prove that anyone can be a talk- Alexander Kluge, too, makes use of Helge Schneider’s satyr plays. In the television pro-
show host in Germany.” Addressing Paul McCarthy, whose independence he greatly ap- ductions in which he talks to the comedian, his interlocutor adopts various roles, including
preciated, he said: “I am delighted that Paul McCarthy is also here to talk about art. And I that of Hitler, as a relief from the gravitas and pathos of the documentary register. “Some-
am now imitating your work or you imitate me. I am with the same gallery as you.20 Now the times you have to have an eye on the ratings,”27 Alexander Kluge, who was often described
problem is, as some people say: There is a young man who wants to be like Paul McCarthy.” 21 as ratings poison, remarked on one occasion. Under Kluge’s direction, Helge Schneider
What he admired very much in Paul McCarthy and other visual artists he himself famously repeatedly played a sort of haggler or metaboleus. Schlingensief, too, employed the me-
celebrated, and also how he treated his longtime team: “Independence is something you taboleus, a character with roots as far back as antiquity who never adapts to his environ-
have to be able to afford. Like Paul McCarthy or Matthew Barney. They have their stores ment, always acting without any respect for the feelings of others. He is the haggler, after
CHRIS DERCON 179

all, a master of rhetoric, and no pretext is alien to him. Like the heretic, the metaboleus is a 1 Alexander Kluge, “Die Toten sind nicht tot. Kein Nachruf,” dctp.tv, Düsseldorf, August 26, 2010.
2 Alexander Kluge in conversation with Ursula März, “Der August ist ein gefährlicher Monat,” Die Zeit, August 5, 2010.
spoilsport, disturbing our peace of mind. A good example is Martin Kippenberger’s crucified 3 Voxi Bärenklau, letter to the author, February 9, 2011.
4 Christoph Schlingensief, Kaprow City, Volksbühne Berlin, September 13, 2006.
frog, entitled Was ist der Unterschied zwischen Casanova und Jesus? Der Gesichtsausdruck 5 Christoph Schlingensief, “Die verbrecherische Lust, einen Film zu machen,” Filmwärts 7 (May 1987): 4–7.
beim Nageln [What is the difference between Casanova and Jesus? The facial expression 6 Jörg van der Horst, e-mail to the author, February 14, 2011.
7 Christoph Schlingensief, “Manifest des deutschen Underground Films,” Filmfaust 54 (September–October 1986): 35.
when being nailed, 1990]. The work, carved in wood in the style of traditional religious sculp- 8 Christoph Schlingensief, “Wie man Filme macht!” in Filmförderung in Selbstverwaltung. Die kulturelle Filmförderung
ture, demonstrates the metaboleus’s insane transformational artistry. The ultimate demon des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen (Mülheim: Filmbüro NW, 1988), 86–91.
9 Christoph Schlingensief, “Wie man wieder ins Gleichgewicht kommt. Ein religiöser Beitrag,” in Kino-Fronten. 20 Jahre
must be in play here, or at least a sort of extra-natural being with animal features, a Pan. One ’68 und das Kino, eds. Werner Petermann and Ralph Thomas (Munich: Trickster, 1988), 150–68.
10 Aino Laberenz, in conversation with the author, February 11, 2011.
of his most conspicuous marks is Pan’s mad laughter: he thinks that he is Casanova and 11 Christoph Schlingensief, in conversation with the author.
Jesus. But the ancient immortal gods do not take Pan seriously, and finally they turn against 12 Christoph Schlingensief in conversation with Max Dax, “Überwindung des Theaters,” Spex 328
(September–October 2010).
him with cruel violence. On the one hand, then, we see endless haggling and laughter, on 13 Christoph Schlingensief, “Kluge wird 70. Der Denker,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, February 13, 2002.
the other, a fatal demise.28 14 Christoph Schlingensief “Der Zeitmaschinist Alexander Kluge” (laudation on occasion of the award of the Film Prize
of the City of Hof to Alexander Kluge).
15 Jörg van der Horst, e-mail to the author, February 16, 2011.
16 Perry Anderson, “Ein neues Deutschland? Die Bundesrepublik 20 Jahre nach dem Mauerfall,” Mittelweg 36 18 (2009): 4
Kippenberger: Yes, Yes, Art Is Always Part of It 17 Christoph Schlingensief, unpublished recording of an event featuring Christoph Schlingensief in conjunction with the
exhibition of Paul McCarthy’s work at Haus der Kunst, Munich, July 9, 2005.
18 Matthias Lilienthal in conversation with Franz Wille, “80 Prozent Eigendynamik,” Theater heute (October 2010): 18.
So we should not be astonished that Schlingensief has a major appearance in Jörg Kobel’s 19 Christoph Schlingensief, unpublished recording, Haus der Kunst, July 9, 2005.
Kippenberger—Der Film: Dieses Leben kann nicht die Ausrede für das nächste sein 20 Christoph Schlingensief and Paul McCarthy are both represented by Hauser & Wirth, Zurich.
21 Christoph Schlingensief, unpublished recording, Haus der Kunst, July 9, 2005.
[Kippenberger—The Film: This Life Cannot Be the Excuse for the Next One, 2005], which 22 Christoph Schlingensief in conversation with Eva Behrendt, “Kunst, Bühne und Videotapes. Ich liebe es, abends den
shows how important observing Kippenberger’s works was for Schlingensief’s own art. Grill aufzubauen,” Theater heute (August–September 2007): 17.
23 Jörg van der Horst, e-mail to the author, February 14, 2011.
The film begins interestingly enough with a general and yet highly revealing remark about 24 Jörg van der Horst, e-mail to the author, February 20, 2011.
25 Eva Wattolik, Die Parodie im Frühwerk Roy Lichtensteins (Weimar: VDG, 2005).
Martin Kippenberger that might be applied to Schlingensief as well. Kippenberger’s 26 Christoph Schlingensief, “Maximal ziellos zur Attacke,” Die Zeit, literary supplement, November 2002, 67.
widow, Elfie Semotan, says about her husband, who died in 1997: “He really put himself as 27 Conversation about the radio play and film, Alexander Kluge at Haus der Kunst, September 16, 2009.
28 Paul De Vylder, “Een monsterlijk Perspectief,” De Witte Raaf 113 (January–February 2005).
a person in front of his work, as it were. And people couldn’t see his art. Because he stood 29 Elfie Semotan, in Kippenberger—Der Film by Jörg Kobel, 2005, absolut Medien GmbH.
in front of it, and it wasn’t him they wanted to see. Because he was too much for them.”29 30 Christoph Schlingensief, in Kippenberger—Der Film.
31 Alexander Kluge and Christoph Schlingensief in conversation, “Eule und Ratte,” Vogue (May 2004).
Semotan also wonders why Schlingensief has so much of interest to say about Kippenberger;
she in fact believes she recognizes a certain similarity between the two. When Schlingensief
showed the First International Pole-Sitting Competition of the Church of Fear (his first
collaboration with the gallery Hauser & Wirth, Zurich) at the entrance to the Biennale grounds
in Venice in 2003, he tried to explain why Kippenberger was so fascinating to him: “But I
am not as courageous as Kippenberger.”30 Those are the final words spoken in the film
about Martin Kippenberger: they seem full of admiration—or is it jealousy? “Yes, yes, art is
always part of it.”
Postscript
Kluge: Where does the soul reside?

Schlingensief: I felt it here (points at his chest) just now when you asked that question …
Kluge: In the breath, yes?
Schlingensief: Yes, it resides here, I think, where the pylorus is.
Kluge: Which is to say, a little above the diaphragm.
Schlingensief: And that doesn’t obey anyone.
Kluge: In the vicinity of the diaphragm and moved by the breath, yes? That is why the soul
is so closely associated with laughter. And with freedom. And with love.
Schlingensief: And with happiness.31
CHRIS DERCON 181

COMBATING DISCURSIVE SCAR-

CITY, FUTILE INTENTION, AND THE
NEGATIVE GESAMTKUNSTWERK:
CHRISTOPH SCHLINGENSIEF AND
HIS MUSIC
T he “readymade opera” Mea Culpa featured an actor, Joachim Meyerhoff, who repre-
sented Christoph Schlingensief. In the Vienna version, which I saw during its first
complete run, this actor appears in a function similar to the one Schlingensief himself fulfills
is proffered forever only to the extent that pieces of information and decoding interpretation
are withdrawn elsewhere. Where a commentary offered possibilities of biographical and
personal attribution, the rug would be pulled out from under the same attribution in another
in many other plays (and an off-screen voice, sometimes Schlingensief’s, fulfills in place; also in order to attain general and perhaps even universal validity. In any case,
some films). He seems to guide the spectators through the action, offering explanations and personal information about performing artists or those who devise works was not as widely
ostensibly meaningful and instructive arguments that tie fantastic and absurd moments available in the pre-bourgeois phases of the development of the arts as it is now, in the
back to what is happening in the real world, be it the big political picture we all share, or post-bourgeois period. In appearing onstage, writing, or sketching, an artist was equally
be it the artist’s own biography. In this play, Schlingensief’s illness and illness in general at liberty to simulate improbable attributions and to dissimulate probable ones.
plays a large role; the biographical as an interpretive template has been cranked up pretty
far, even if it is repeatedly disrupted and subverted. After the intermission, the character Yet even the conditions of contemporary self-display are not simply boundless. The ever-
Schlingensief then explains the Burkina Faso project in a long, detailed, and plausible growing supply of, and demand for, anecdotal-biographical readings of works of art—the
monologue, but other events push into the foreground strongly enough to signal to the strenuous search for, and identification of, individual trademarks and the reconstruction of
audience that this pursuit and explication of a project known to be close to the director’s personal signatures—has always occupied only one dimension of the old artistic divisions
heart is an automatism running its course, something that belongs to a sort or stratum of labor: has occupied, say, the figure but not the ground, or then again the ground but not
of reality we may ignore in favor of more important processes. the figure. In so doing, however, it condemned the other dimension or dimensions of
artistic representation—for there are always at least two—to conventionality, to supportive
A little later, the real Christoph Schlingensief takes the stage and delivers a very different self-effacement. One price that must usually be paid for the hegemony of expressive
speech. Although my memory of the impressive gray hair, standing on end as though individualism is the simplicity and banality of the supportive artistic constructions, the nar-
charged with electricity, and the bearing of an artificial human being with which Schlingensief ratives, visual languages, theatrical production, etc. The transgressions in the name of
appeared, is more vivid than my recollection of what he said, one thing was perfectly egos that have grown beyond all bounds are then recognizable no longer in the form and
plain: the aim, on the one hand, is to make clear that no certainty is to be had regarding construction plan of the works of art, but have developed precisely out of the liberation
the ontological status of someone who appears on stage. The character Schlingensief from overly rigorous form and elaborate guidelines in pop music, performance art, or certain
is more prone to speak germanely of the plans and intentions harbored by the artist Christoph forms of directors’ theater against a backdrop of simple and fairly undefined structure.
Schlingensief than the latter’s full and physically present voice now filling the cavernous
depths of the Burgtheater. True, there is no doubt that the speaker down there is Christoph It is at this point that Christoph Schlingensief’s specific idea of art as a war on discursive
Schlingensief, whereas the guy in the back is a “mere” actor. Yet in addition to its conse- scarcity attacks. One of his role models, Fassbinder, extracted greater personal commitment,
quences for the theory of performance and the philosophy of the subject—what or who of- more drastic acting, and a higher density of authenticity by inventing the fairly stable stylistic
fers the best physical representation of a human being who harbors plans and acts ac- backdrop called Fassbinder-film, effectively employing a bipartite logic of constant and vari-
cording to intentions?—the issue now acquires an existential component. Schlingensief is able; another role model, Beuys, achieved the same effect by promoting the artistic persona,
confronted with his own mortality, and he relates that mortality not only to his physical the explicit center of his art, to the status of the grand constant. Schlingensief, by contrast,
existence but also to the innumerable interconnections and effects in the complex productive casts both components as variables from the very outset. Even his earliest films take on a
apparatus that is the theater; an apparatus that knows no obligatory formats of recording seriousness in terms of cinematography—the lighting goes haywire, the camera refuses to
and only very indirect traditions of preservation. While on the other hand, participants in- occupy a vantage point that would offer a panoramic view—as well as on the plot: the love of
cessantly lay claim to genealogies, legacies, and kinships, so that the very absence of an extremisms, grand themes, and personal obsessions. The elements of avant-garde and ex-
authoritative culture of recording, the questions of recollection, preservation, and future vital- perimental filmmaking that have informed his approach on the one hand, the traditions of New
ity, and—a closely associated issue—the relation between intended and contingent aspects German narrative Cinema after Oberhausen on the other hand: he lets them have at each
(of life as much as art) time and again become the focus of artistic decision-making. other, as it were, putting them to the service of a mutual critique. Schlingensief draws on
two—mutually contradictory—admired traditions while also waging war on both: the “whiny”
That artists speak about themselves is not a matter of course, though that is how it must New German narrative Cinema that has grown old, the self-centered esotericism and inef-
seem in an era in which the social type of the young narcissist is so pervasive that people fectiveness of experimental film. The Fassbinder actors he loves, from Volker Spengler to Irm
cannot imagine the meaning of any art other than as tied to the extraction of personality, Hermann, as well as types like Alfred Edel, who represent the anarchic past of German
of distinctive individuality and self-identification, a resource that is becoming ever more film, and Udo Kier, who embodies a certain less highbrow international fame attained by the
indispensable in the economic context. By contrast, classical arts such as the theater, same tradition, are confronted with bizarre plots and, most importantly, with the constant
painting, sculpture, epic and lyric poetry, or music often employed highly structured divisions violation of stabilizing unities of filmic language and technique.
of labor and generic rules to keep the selves of their authors far away from the line of fire
of the presumption of immediacy. Biographical meaning, and indeed meaning more generally,
DIEDRICH DIEDERICHSEN 185

In the economy of the arts, the withdrawal of material does not always or even, as is generally schedules provided for intensity and exhaustion, a childishly and somberly unfettered camera
assumed, predominantly serve to avoid disambiguation, heighten suspense, and impel the sustained the balancing act between grand crazed pretension and brute irony; excessively
audience’s imaginative faculty to fill blanks according to its own fancy. Much more frequent- well-known themes and stories culled from the nasty bottom of popular culture pulled the rug
ly, artificial discursive scarcity is an instrument serving the construction of unambiguous- out from under self-involved experimental strategies of pleasure.
ness—a false unambiguousness. There is much we could say at this point, the censorship
authority seated at the center of artistic decision-making thinks, but if we did, what we offer But it was only in the theater and in public interventionist actions such as the Chance
the audience would become too confused and contradictory, people would not follow with 2000 appearances at Berlin’s Prater that the principle of simultaneous and mutually super-
the same enthusiasm they bring to simple statements and constellations, which are, for imposed actions was developed into a deliberate and refined device. There were still dis-
the time being, on the ascendant. We decide to relate only the dialogue in the foreground continuities and sudden changes of register, now usually achieved by destabilizing the on-
and to summarize what is going on in the trees and shrubbery behind the speaking cha- tology of the stage situation: thus when real neo-Nazis (who had received instructions)
racters in a single sentence that informs the audience about the season and the weather. stormed the stage of the Zurich Hamlet, or when Kunst und Gemüse, A. Hipler—Theater
Shooting a film, we position the microphones such that the birds remain background, ALS Krankheit [Art and Vegetables, A. Hipler—Theater A(L)S Illness] featured an actual
just for the general feel, and set the focal length such that the leaves of the birch trees be- patient suffering from severe ALS who rested on a stretcher in the auditorium and gradually
come a blurry green surface, the better to bring out the bodies of our darkly-clad prota- became involved in the stage action. But in addition to such ambiguities, a perfectly nor-
gonists. According to Deleuze, film since 1945 has also known the opposite strategy: the mal Schlingensief evening saw the accumulation of so many references, hints at action,
reinforcement of contingent backdrop elements, the strengthening of atmosphere—yet and events taking place in front of each other that the organization tying them together at
few filmmakers rival Christoph Schlingensief’s explicit commitment to the permanent inter- some point inevitably became musical in character. We will return to this point in a moment.
penetration of foreground and background, of event and commentary, of the reinforce-
ment and the destabilization of the impression that has just emerged. Yet the two kinds of disruptions and multiplications installed to counteract one another
—lofty pretension and black irony, the garish pathos of art and an acute diagnosis of con-
Since his productions at the Volksbühne in the early 1990s, his work in the theater has temporary states of affairs—not only make it impossible to fix what is going on, to pin
achieved this effect by means of a principle of superimposition of action and commentary; it down to a semantic continuum narrated in the logic of constant and variable; they are
the commentary, the intervening or interpreting of speeches delivered by stage charac- exposed, moreover, to another form of pressure, an external goal of Christoph Schlingensief’s
ters, often by Schlingensief himself, far from helping to clarify or lend pointed emphasis to work that he himself repeatedly emphasized and demanded: an effect on the society out-
the scene, as they had done in Epic Theater, make the stage action more difficult to read side the theater. Such efficacy is not to be had in simple and mechanistic fashion, and is
and translate. When a funny wig had just been recognizable as parody, as associated with often not even legible as the objective motivating artistic decisions; but that does not
traditions of clowning, the next interpretive appearance would be bitterly serious and ad- change the fact that we must, from the standpoint of society, render the sort of judgment
dress specific issues of contemporary politics. The aim of such interventions, however, on art that calls its lack of efficacy failure. Such failure—which Schlingensief, in a much-
was not yet recognized to prevent any sort of meaning fixing the action; it was motivated, quoted slogan, famously apostrophized as chance—marks the relation to social reality of all
rather, by a trust in forms of polyphony that were ultimately good when they remained anar- artistic endeavors that exert themselves in the pursuit of intentions. Their helplessness
chic and chaotic. in the face of any social mission, however, becomes apparent not so much in their direct
relation to their audience, which hardly knows any different anyway, but instead in the
Earlier on, in his work in film, there had been obscuring comments as well, stylistic devices actions and behavior with which the agents on the stage, within the white cube, beyond
such as close-ups or musical crescendos that were employed against their normative the fourth wall, and in other symbolically protected art spaces &encounter one another.
function in narrative film; but their use was organized not so much by superimposition but Intention carrying on in the void—a stage action set in motion by nothing more than stage
rather by succession. Schlingensief was importantly not a magician of the deep focus directions, the practicing of routines, memorization, drill—looks so desperate, so help-
serving to mobilize backgrounds, not a portraitist of strange summer days. Instead, his less because it achieves nothing. And that ultimately goes against everything intention stands
films switched registers successively and at varying tempos. The camerawork, the di- for; it is not something it can live with.
rector’s work with the actors, and the lighting heightened the confusing complexity, forever
generating obscure corners in an architecture that would never become transparent. If Christoph Schlingensief sees a chance in this fundamental failure of artistic action, the
The films presupposed a single abyss—Terror! Hitler! Germany!—but within this abyss the failure must first be staged as such, it must be exaggerated and revealed: yet exaggerated
tones, the acting styles, the identifiability of logical consistencies switched between and revealed not in a stylized representation of its symptoms but as the clearly recognizable
the grotesque and the serious, between the ridiculous and the Goth-pious: not as a show sound of a profound dissonance. Art really might make a difference. Let’s not kid our-
of virtuosity or as flowing from the artist’s overfull heart, but in order to suppress, from selves: it’s not going to make a difference. And let’s also not kid ourselves: let’s not try,
the very outset, any unambiguousness of mood, of points of reference, of registers. The again and again and forever afresh, to do something that really ought not to come to grief
means to this end were quasi-theatrical even then. Fast, intense, and tight shooting in this attempt at intervention; let’s try instead to find out what is attractive at the core of

this failure, attractive to its producers as well as its spectators. Why is this dissonance of linguistic and artistic standards. The excessive conventionalization the 1980s exemplarily
beautiful—beautiful not as an exception from the world, as a destination for escapist expe- perpetrated in his (and not only his) beloved New German narrative Cinema was a phe-
ditions, but as a way to get by in the world, in the political world? nomenon of the era, after all, against which every single countermovement labored: jour-
nalism, the political debate, the majority youth cultures that still predominated in the
So what would this dissonance be? It is, in Schlingensief, never just an aesthetic impres- early years of the decade, the peace movement and other vestiges of the movements of
sion informing us about the relationship between art and the world it represents, but the 1970s, and the intellectual standards of one’s adversaries in the Kohl government,
time and again the result, actively generated in the stage action, of forces that, for very which did not necessarily work to raise one’s own standards—all these factors contributed
specific reasons of social fact and tradition, could not act in concert to advance the pur- to generate the widely shared sense of an incredibly confined and standardized cultural
poses of a particular artistic discipline. That is, getting the world of the arts to unite harmo- environment into which every oppositional discursive impulse from punk, feminism, newly
niously around one table in the theater is just as impossible as getting the real world to arriving French theory, and the visual arts was translated and thus curtailed and reduced.
come together in the political sphere. In the films, this basic idea appears as a counter- That not less but more would be more, that diversity and complexity would arise as
weight to the two (or more) channels of production that goad each other on without ever context-independent values, has to do with this initial situation in which Christoph
being reducible to the economy of figure and ground: the content with its drastic theme, Schlingensief, too, began to wage his war on discursive scarcity.
the grotesquely violent narrative plot, and the insane world-reference, against which
Schlingensief offers, on the formal level, the combo of brute lowbrow, historical catastro- On the other hand, even in that same situation there was the fear that any insistence on
phe, and twilight of gods. In the theater, by contrast, it is more and more the antagonism difference and difficulty would involuntarily help sustain the problem the dead cultural
of the arts. landscape of West Germany then posed to all those who had begun to articulate themselves:
the insufficient reach and ineffectiveness of political and cultural action. The preceding
I am referring not only to the conventional genres that defy attempts to integrate them into generation had apparently enjoyed greater opportunities to exercise influence, but instead
the Gesamtkunstwerk, but importantly also to the competing and mutually contradictory of using them had come to an agreement with its fathers in the mode of a democratic balance
conceptions of art Schlingensief himself champions; for they have only one thing in com- of interests. This public, which seemed paralyzed by its youthful semi-external audience,
mon: the vanishing point of (the failure to have any) effect. Among the most conspicuous appeared to have struck a relativistic deal with plurality: everything and everyone had the right
contradictions is that between a bearing that constantly seeks to seize the audience, to to self-expression as long as the public framework ensured from the outset that the position
grab it and influence it, and the hermeticism of a highly allusive, densely superimposed, articulated in such fashion did not lay claim to any validity beyond its subjective—or artistic
and often private way of conducting the action and mise en scène. This contradiction con- —truth. This diagnosis of a miserable state of affairs gave rise to the idea that artistic pro-
tinues in the gradual conquest of the depth of the scenic space we observed in recent duction in particular now needed to insist on dimensions of truth that went beyond the con-
years, at the latest since the Bayreuth Parsifal and its “art-theoretical” successor projects tingency of the subjective. The flirtation with the totalitarian aimed against the relativism
(ATTA ATTA—Die Kunst ist los [ATTA ATTA—Art Has Broken Out], A. Hipler …, the Ani- of mere subjectivity and the longing for the universal, the two thus converging in a grand
matograph, etc.), while Schlingensief simultaneously violates or rescinds the fourth wall paradox with the other great longing felt by artists who set out in the early 1980s: to have
protecting these expeditions: by having actors make excursions into the real space, justice done to the irreducible, the diverse, the different in a single grand destandardization
having other actors, who were filmed beforehand, intrude into the space of the stage, and attack against consensus and comprehensibility.
of course in numerous actions that are set outside the theater in the first place (Graz,
Vienna, Wolfgangsee, Berlin’s subways, etc.). The same contradiction then reappears in Reading the obituaries and recollections that have appeared over the past few months, you
the offers to contemplate complex structures, to quietly reconstruct them in the mind will find several that use the formula of the paradox to summarize the person and persona
(a form of aesthetic understanding for which the animation or significance of these structures of Schlingensief. It is not my aim here to take a different position: there is a paradoxical cast
plays no role), offers that are at odds with the insistence with which Schlingensief time to the construction of probably any productivity—the problem to be solved that must not be
and again asserts the external reference of his art. The insistence on necessarily polyphonic solved with a solution. There are, moreover, always the individual colors in which a living indi-
complexity, finally, stands in similar contradiction to the urge to understand in a way that vidual gives concrete form to this paradox. I merely want to add something to these para-
would have immediate consequences. doxes: how a given construction relates to artistic constructions. I have already argued that
there is a fundamental dissonance in his work, embodied in superimposition in the theater,
This antagonism between the arts and the conceptions of art on his stages, but also his in a certain selection of materials (trash, bad lowbrow culture), in the cinema and the theater,
insistence on the relevance of the raucously lowbrow in his filmic experiments, are ade- and in certain convictions regarding the aesthetic of production on the part of the author
quate translations of the fundamental diagnosis of Schlingensief’s aesthetic politics, which (failure, chance): but this dissonance now enters into a certain history. The same obituaries
is in turn based on an (immensely productive) internal contradiction. On the one hand, and recollections also spoke a great deal about the Gesamtkunstwerk, without remem-
Schlingensief’s aesthetic ideas took shape in the 1980s, and at that time he saw artistic bering the good reasons that led to the decision to shelve the reconciliation of the arts, and
practice, saw the impulse driving artistic production as a war on the emerging uniformity between the arts and non-art, as a bourgeois illusion. Still, these good reasons do not

relieve us of the obligation to address the perfectly justified questions to which the Gesa-
mtkunstwerk was the wrong answer.
We might say that Schlingensief raised these questions incessantly, and accordingly also
had to play to the public audience that was of such significance to a contemporary version
of the problem. Yet as early as the late 1990s, in a conversation about his conclusions from BORIS GROYS
the Chance 2000 project, he surprised me by using musical metaphors to describe the
grand dissonance, the culture of superimposition at the core of his theatrical productions WHEN WORDS FAIL
as well as the core of the relation of his art to reality. As became clear during this inter-
view (at the latest) and then ever more evident in the productions he directed during the
last ten years of his life, he needed to keep this dissonance, this disharmony, this failure
present and to elaborate it. “Music” was that elaboration. He mentioned the work of the
Sun Ra Arkestra—the ensemble of a few dozen musicians and dancers led by the mytho-
maniac, free jazz pioneer, and director Sun Ra, who died in 1993—as exemplifying the sort
of radical and disharmonious forms he was interested in, forms that nonetheless perma-
nently addressed social tension and kept it alive.
Staged in the home of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the production of Parsifal he directed in

Bayreuth, which was surrounded by scandal early on and soon drew the vehement antago-
nism of the Wagner clan, was in this sense the first appearance of a Schlingensiefian
negative Gesamtkunstwerk: a mise en scène of dissonance, of the non-reconciliation of
the arts and between the arts and their environment, but within a framework that de-
fined this non-reconciliation as its field of operation. That music as it developed in the free
and improvised formats of the past fifty years might be particularly apt to provide mo-
dels in which one might display, elaborate, and refine the necessarily inconclusive and
confrontational relation of artistic production to the production in its vicinity was the
guiding idea in Schlingensief’s later productions, up to and including the Luigi Nono para-
phrase, Via Intolleranza II, his last work, which would be followed by preliminary work
for an opera.
In the shadow of the other Gesamtkunstwerk, the Wagnerian one, this process indeed
began with the initial subjection of the non-musical elements of the production—the movable
stage design on a rotating stage, projections, the movements of actors—to the musical
tempo of the orchestra under Pierre Boulez; but then this very synchronization was blown to
pieces by the incorporation of all other registers, the registers of content first and foremost
among them. The second act already alighted in Africa, which Schlingensief then worshipped
in what was still largely a mythical fashion. The consequence, however, was the project of a
festival hall, an opera village in Africa, which subsequently took quite concrete shape in
Burkina Faso. For Schlingensief always threw the conditions of production and their history,
a politically unreconciled art, and its counterpart into the mix, particularly when working in
constellations such as Bayreuth that seemed to have achieved a purely aesthetic solution
—never generating a synthesis but always only fresh explosions. That the failure of art
would today, after the death of its initiator, continue to play his music as a project in the real
world is a failure of failure: strangely beautiful and perverse.
T he realization of any artistic project, as much as any scientific or technological project,
requires that its author command and control the means of that realization as compre-
hensively as possible. The true artist, is seems, is one who has achieved perfect mastery
of the intention of art. This is no longer about the transmutation of the mute world into lan-
guage, but rather about a transmutation of language into a thing. The artist has lost con-
trol of the flow of language—and so he stops this flow. And he stops this flow because he
of his material and trade. Failing that, the artist will remain just a powerless and impotent has learned that it can be stopped, that there are situations in which language fails for its
dreamer. A writer is supposed to have command over language; a visual artist, over colors own reasons—without the artist deliberately, purposely, and artificially stopping it.
and shapes; a musician, over his instruments. Now a director may be supposed to com-
mand many more of the so-called means of expression than any other artist, for he must In its normal “living” state, language serves us as a means to find out the truth about the
take control also of the actors, the other theater staff, the bureaucracy, the financial ba- world. But in so doing, language does not reveal itself to us in its truth. When language
ckers, and much else. A director such as Christoph Schlingensief, who not only directs fails and petrifies, by contrast, it appears before our eyes as it really is—without meaning.
in the theater but also makes films, organizes performances, intervenes in the public Illness and death engender a state of exception that makes language fail and thus reveals
space, and builds installations, must be particularly capable of exercising power effectively. it for what it is. Therein lies the peculiar cognitive chance illness and death offer us. We
The aim of the exercise of power on the part of the artist, it is generally believed, is to usually perceive both as nothing but disruptions—and as disruptions that concern no one
make things, such as colors, sounds, or spaces, speak. The artist, then, is one who trans- but ourselves. When illness strikes us, we are only too ready to submit to the prevailing
mutes things into means of expression and compels the material reality to convey his conception of the world and of language, to believe that the petrifaction of language is a
message. Yet it is indisputable that the transmutation of the world into one’s own message petrifaction only of “our language”—that the loss of all meaning is the mere correlate of our
can never be complete. How does the artist then deal with this insight into his own psychological state. It takes a certain courage to understand and to assert that what is
powerlessness? The modernist tradition in the arts is at bottom a series of attempts to at stake in this state of linguistic exception is not just our own language but rather language
answer this question. Schlingensief’s oeuvre is firmly rooted in that tradition. At the same as such. Hamlet demonstrated such courage when he maintained that it was not he per-
time, Schlingensief’s responses to the insight into the powerlessness of the artist are distin- sonally who was “out of joint” but in fact time itself. And Schlingensief, too, possesses this
guished by what is, even in the context of modernism, an extraordinary radicality. courage to make the state of exception caused by his own illness the subject of his art—
that is to say, to make it the image of the general state of exception language enters again
The most widely accepted interpretation of the powerlessness of the artist is that it is due and again. Yet it is an illusion to believe that illness and death have their positive sides.
to structural conditions. When the artist performs the act of transmuting the world into They have no positive sides, they are purely negative. Still, they offer us an opportunity to
language, this interpretation suggests, it is always already too late. Language is always al- identify with this negativity, to profess this negativity in a radical fashion—a negativity
ready there. And the languages of music and the visual arts, too, are always already that, beyond all possibilities of our own experience, perhaps turns into a positivity. But we
there. Language is always already up and running—and the artist can do no more than run cannot profit from this possibility. The transcendent, even when it uses our language,
along. The medium, as McLuhan has put it, turns out to be the message—deconstructing does so in a way that is incomprehensible to us—and thus eludes our hermeneutic control.
any authorial intention, to describe it in Derridean terms. This figure of the subversion of The language of transcendence is, to us, a failing language, a language without meaning.
authorial intention by language is by now widely familiar and accepted. It presupposes,
however, that language keeps on working, keeps on running—constantly displacing or “dif- It has long been noted that deeply religious people remain deaf and resistant to any
fering” the meanings intended by the artist. But what happens when language simply reasonable criticism of their so-called “belief.” That makes these people appear odd and
fails and comes to a stop? Neither the usual media theories nor the theory of deconstruction extraordinary, if not even obdurate and stupid. Yet this assessment fails to recognize the
envision this case, which we will accordingly need to subject to a brief theoretical analysis. essence of religious language. Such language is not the expression of a subjective opinion
immunized against all scientific objections. The word “belief” is misleading in this
For the failure of language is not in fact a rare phenomenon. Let us assume that someone is context. It deludes us into thinking that the believer believes in something where the knower
giving a speech as he receives the news that he suffers from a fatal illness and will soon knows something. The difference between religion and science is thus interpreted as
die. At that moment language fails. In this instance the failure of language does not mean that between two modes of individual engagement with a well-functioning, living language
that it breaks off, that it is interrupted and passes into silence. It may well continue to be which keeps on running. In reality, however, the language of religion is a failing, frozen,
heard, but it ceases to be a machine serving the production of meaning. Language instead petrified language. The believer uses the same language the scientist uses, but this lan-
freezes, becomes a mere thing, a readymade. Not by accident did Schlingensief describe guage is in one state in the case of science and in another in that of religion. Some-
what is, for the time being, his last play, Mea Culpa, which is about his illness, as a “ready- where in his notes, Wittgenstein remarked that it is pointless to assess a functioning, working
made” opera. His point is obviously not just that the opera’s text consists of a montage language as it is practiced during the week based on analyses conducted on Sundays,
of quotations from various authors. More pertinently, these texts are used as pure graphic at a time, that is to say, when this language is not working. It is just as pointless to attempt
and sonic things that have lost their expressive force. It is as such mute things that they to understand the Sunday language based on experiences one has had of it during the
are integrated into an action that for its part does not add up to any meaning—making the week, for on Sundays language does not work and live but instead freezes—it is as though
spectator freeze in incomprehension. What takes place in this opera, then, is an inversion dead. The Sunday language of transcendence is without meaning to us, and so we can
BORIS GROYS 193

only repeat this language word for word instead of subjecting it to the hermeneutic gener- In the past, temples and churches were where the suspension of all opinion took place—
ation of warped meanings. No critique avails against such transcendental failure, for no where language stopped expressing opinions and intentions and where people instead al-
critique can confute what does not mean to say anything. lowed language to fail and freeze. In modernity, it is art that creates such heterotopias of
language in a state of exception. Schlingensief’s artistic practice is unmistakably rooted in
Religion, it is true, can be conceived as a defined set of opinions, insofar as it is the role of the grand tradition of Dada and Fluxus, both currents in art that set themselves the goal
religion in the secular space that is at issue. There religions are associated with opinions of creating situations in which language, as well as all other so-called means of artistic ex-
regarding whether contraception ought to be permitted or whether women ought to wear pression, including music, painting, and later television, would fail. In Cabaret Voltaire,
headscarves. Yet for all religions there exists another space: the space of the transcen- Hugo Ball composed a performance that would become exemplary for posterity: he had
dent. And with regard to this space, the religions maintain a different attitude: the attitude several poets, himself among them, recite their poems at the same time so that the mean-
of opinionlessness. For the will of the gods or God’s will remains ultimately impervious ing of the individual sentences was effectively drowned in the general noise. We cannot
to mortal opinion. And that means that whereas man appears in our culture mainly as a even call this an absurd spectacle, for the effect of the absurd is engendered by a thea-
bearer of opinions, religion is by contrast a place where a reflection on this bearing, on trical production of a paradox. Ball, by contrast, did not allow for the emergence of any
man’s role as a medium takes place—and it takes place here precisely because religion marks meaning, not even a paradoxical one. He transmuted language into a pure sonic mass—
and describes the state of opinionlessness, the zero level of the freedom of opinion. Just beyond any meaning. The artists of Fluxus took the same route, not just subjecting all
as Malevich’s Black Square made the medium of painting its subject by letting all figura- meaning to systematic deconstruction but simply and utterly eliminating it. And anyone
tion disappear into it, the medium-character of man can be addressed in the sacred who has observed the performances held by Schlingensief can say the same about them—
places of the religions precisely because they are spaces in which man loses all opinions they strike us as highly efficient machines designed to obliterate signification, to
and finds himself in a state of opinionlessness. Being opinionless, he practices pure evacuate meaning.
repetition, a repetition, that is to say, that is no longer the repetition of a certain opinion but
instead a ritual evacuated of opinion. Now the experience of opinionlessness, which is a Schlingensief’s interest in religion, which grew recognizably in recent years, would seem
genuinely religious experience, is not necessarily tied to specific places. We find ourselves at first glance to be the immediate consequence of his illness. Yet there is no doubt that
in such situations of opinionlessness much more frequently, they are much more com- the logic of the art Schlingensief had practiced before he became ill would have led him to
monplace, than is generally thought. They emerge, for instance, whenever someone is the same outcome. Not by accident did the most determined representatives of Dada
confronted with circumstances in which all available opinions fail. But the same can and Fluxus sooner or later turn to religion. Marcel Duchamp described his famous urinal
also happen when someone does not want to harbor any more opinions, when he has as a “Buddha of the Bathroom,” and maintained that exhibiting it made him feel like he
grown decidedly weary of opinions as such, of the market of opinions, the procurement had stepped outside time and space. Hugo Ball spent his last days writing stories about
and dissemination of opinions. When he suddenly notices that all available opinions cancel Byzantine saints; Robert Filiou entered a monastery; Joseph Beuys was raised in a reli-
each other out. In such circumstances, man finds himself at the zero level of the gious tradition. At some point these artists came to the realization that the exceptional situ-
freedom of opinion—and he grows aware of his being a medium. The freedom of opinion ations they staged in order to make language fail and freeze derived from a tradition of
then becomes the desertion of opinion: man is equally free of all opinions, equally grand petrifactions of language engendered by the fear of God or the gods—which were
deserted by all opinions. later repeated in ritualized form. We might say, then, that Schlingensief does the same
thing his predecessors did—but he also evinces much greater distrust of traditional religions.
The cultivation of opinionlessness—individual as much as collective—requires a dedicated
place, a heterotopia, as Foucault called it. This is a place located outside the space of This distrust aims first and foremost at a widely held view according to which religion is a
opinion, the market of opinions. In this place the distinction between true and false as well “doctrine,” a social institution, an organizing force whose mission is to hold society to-
as that between good and evil is neutralized. Yet this very neutralization renders the line gether and give it lasting shape. The language of a religion conceived along these lines is
separating the everyday market of opinions from sacred opinionlessness so poignant. By an authoritarian and indoctrinating language that is even less adequate to the genuinely
championing defined opinions, we can easily position ourselves in the public space. But religious experience of the failure and petrifaction of language than our everyday secular
if we wish to persevere in opinionlessness, we need a different space, a sacred space, language. That is why Schlingensief organizes performances and installations—the
and a different time, the repetitive time of ritual. Nor can we then avoid returning to cer- Church of Fear is perhaps the best example in this context—that reenact the primal scene
tain places and rituals that have been defined in the past as other or sacred places, as of the failure of language. These performances and installations mix symbols from all
heterotopias. Stepping into such places, participating in such rituals, we leave our opinions possible religions with quotations from art history and everyday life, which are here held
standing and hanging at the door. The space of the temporary suspension of all opinions together by nothing but irredeemable disarray. Torn from their cultural and religious
requires an exterior boundary in order to guarantee its freedom of opinion, which is here contexts, all these symbols fall silent. They become mere movable pieces—frozen and va-
the freedom from any opinion. cuous readymades. And the spectator observing the whole thing knows only this: there
is nothing he can say about it—it simply leaves him speechless. In this way, Schlingensief
BORIS GROYS 195

stages the primal scene of the failure of language, which is at once also the primal
scene of all religion.
In a certain sense, all performances and theatrical productions Schlingensief has organized
look like repetitions of an unchanging ritual. And this ritual is repeated precisely because
it seems unrepeatable, spontaneous, uncalculated, ravaged within itself by ruination and CARL HEGEMANN
chaos, alogical, a pure event. The spontaneous, which does not permit anything to be
said about it but that it is spontaneous, recurs precisely by virtue of this failure of any sig- GERMANIA
EG O
nificance to materialize—by virtue of the pure fact that this spontaneity makes language
fail forever afresh and in forever the same way. Yet why does a failing and frozen language ART AND NON-ART IN THE WORK
nonetheless seem to offer us glimpses of insight into the higher truth, whereas a healthy, OF CHRISTOPH SCHLINGENSIEF
well-functioning, living language cannot but elicit our distrust? Why are we willing to be-
lieve, in language, in a state of failure—and not, in a powerful language, in the state of
success? It is because the concept of truth presupposes that anything subjective, anything
merely all-too-human, anything merely accomplished and fabricated by the will be re-
moved so that we can behold, immediately and without disguise, things as they really are—
beyond all subjective intention and manipulation. The failure of language thus emerges
as the only path leading to truth. And indeed: it has long been recognized that science is
merely a matter of convention, of construction, and social consensus. It has nothing to
do with the truth of things in themselves.
By turning language into things instead of turning things into language, modern art thus
holds out the sole promise of attaining a truth that does not put its name to shame. But
there is a problem that would seem to doom this modern project to failure from the very
outset: even modern art remains just that—art. If the artistic project consists in letting lan-
guage fail, it is ultimately yet another project the artist is free to realize or not. So we feel, if
not grateful, then at least obliged to an event that engenders an unintended, unplanned,
unmanipulated situation of linguistic exception. Illness and death, more than anything else,
are such rituals that ensue unintended, and seem to justify artistic rituals of the evacu-
ation of meaning. In his later work, however, Schlingensief responds with profound ambiva-
lence to the opportunity to appropriate such justification, evincing a high degree of
reflection and artistic maturity. He picks up on this justification, but at once relativizes it by
using it in his work as yet another readymade and thus silencing it. In one remark (inclu-
ded in Mea Culpa), Schlingensief even traces the sources of his illness back to his work on
Wagner’s Parsifal: he suspects that his body was infected by Wagner’s music—by the
yearning for death that sustains and shapes this music from within. Schlingensief’s illness
thus loses its organic, worldly sources and becomes the consequence of the impact of
art on his body. Art here serves not just to manifest the state of exception, it actually calls it
into being—and expresses it in the medium that is life. Art, then, is the very hidden and
“true” matter that manifests itself in life, instead of being, as is often thought, a medium in
which life manifests itself. As the Christians of a distant past believed that not only their
happiness but also their suffering could come solely from God, Schlingensief regards art
alone as the source of happiness as well as suffering. In his work, art conclusively be-
comes a religion—and does so precisely because it no longer needs a religion beside itself.
BORIS GROYS
0. “Everything Screams”
We can read Parsifal as a sublimated ritual, as a sublime or uplifting engagement with a serious
subject, or then again as a very earthly engagement with the real pain of mortal humans.
“Everything screams,” Wagner says, as Cosima notes; the work trails off into death—“every-
where the scream, the lament.” The suffering creature that cannot die, the shocking image
of the torments of Tantalus, of sufferings nothing can alleviate and only death can put an end
to. If we decide in favor of the first variant, we have displaced the pain into a higher sphere;
if we choose the second or, as I might say, the materialistic variant, we are immediately con-
fronted with the experience of pain and our own individual death, not as an abstract idea
Mein Filz, mein Fett, mein Hase, documenta 10, Kassel, 1997 Passion Impossible—7 Tage Notruf für Deutschland, Hamburg, but as a concrete event no living being can escape.
1997
Wagner’s “work of farewell to the world”—his own words—as a ritual of screaming rather than
sublime pain: that would be the attempt not to glorify pain and death, not to turn them into
vague and vanishing abstractions, but to render them concrete instead, to make them personal
and relate them to each individual spectator and actor. For no one is above these questions
however consistently we may pretend we are. Almost the only thing citizens of today’s world
still have in common is the fact that every hour they live brings injury, and the last one kills.
You can read it on many church clocks in Italy: “Vulnerant omnes, ultima necat.”
(“Everything Screams.” Notes on Schlingensief’s production of Parsifal in Bayreuth, July 2004)
1. “Remembering Means Forgetting”

Parsifal (act 3), Proto-animatograph, Bayreuther Festspiele, 2005
Christoph Schlingensief taught me what it means that although in art one can do anything,
not everything goes in art. For art must meet a paradoxical condition: it must look like art
and non-art at the same time. “When art looks like art, it is considered to be not art but kitsch.
When art looks like non-art, it is simply non-art.” (Boris Groys)
In 1993, Schlingensief, working at the Volksbühne in (East) Berlin, directed theater for the
first time. He was thirty-three years old when I met him, the famous director of infamous
splatter films. At the time, radical right-wing as well as left-wing groups were violently try-
ing to prevent the screening of Terror 2000—Intensivstation Deutschland [Terror 2000—
Kaprow City, 2006
Intensive Station Germany]. After the death of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, no director in
Germany was more controversial. His films already defied assessment according to criteria
such as art vs. non-art; distinctions such as those between serious and not serious or
between the glorification of violence and its critique were equally unhelpful. There were always
both at once, in unresolved contradiction: neither either-or nor both-and. It was always
“everything together.”
His works for the theater, which were almost never based on literary sources and from the
outset incorporated film and video materials, likewise moved within this constitutive paradox
of art. There was something “iridescent” to his work; Schlingensief effortlessly divided his
audiences in ways sociology was unable to explain, and often even split his fellow actors. He
prompted contradictory feelings in anyone he encountered. For his own part, he lived with
Film Production for Via Intolleranza II, Opera Village, April 2010 Mea Culpa (end of act 1), Burgtheater Vienna, 2009 the endeavor to overcome these splits, but that usually only served to reinforce them. And
CARL HEGEMANN 199

nonetheless—or perhaps precisely therefore—he became one of the most successful stage International Film Festival. The film caught fire during the screening—at the very moment the
directors. He was invited to participate in the showcase event of the German-language film within the film also caught fire. Which is to say, images of burning film were projected
theater world, the Theatertreffen in Berlin, three times; by the time he died, he had directed on onto the screen from a film that then really started to burn. To Schlingensief, the fateful coinci-
virtually every important stage in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, causing considerable dence of art and non-art, of aesthetic alarm and a truly alarming event, was a key experience.
agitation not only in the auditoriums but throughout the cities as well. He managed to do what
many artists and theater people dream of: being noticed outside the playground of the 3. “I Am Not the One I Wanted To Be”
feuilleton. Schlingensief popped up everywhere: in politics, in sports coverage, in the tabloids,
and even in the Christian Saturday-evening television sermons. Whatever he did, his works tested the limits of the freedom of art, but also spared no risk as
they chafed against and allied themselves with realities that no artist designed, that were
He made his debut as an opera director at the Bayreuth Festival in 2004 with Richard given to him. The radicalization and reinterpretation of television formats such as talk, quiz,
Wagner’s late grand work, the “festival play for the consecration of the stage,” Parsifal, horrify- and casting shows (Talk 2000, U3000, FREAKSTARS 3000, Quiz 3000), broadcast primarily
ing most old-style Wagnerians as well as the majority of the composer’s progressive critics on the music channel MTV; a program to help neo-Nazis looking to leave the scene that actu-
by inaugurating a new era in how we read Wagner; three years later, walking in the footsteps ally worked, part of his Zurich production of Hamlet, which proclaimed all of Switzerland a
of Fitzcarraldo, he would pursue this vision further in his production of The Flying Dutchman “rotten” state; the action Bitte liebt Österreich [Please Love Austria], held in front of Vienna’s
in the Brazilian jungle city of Manaus. Long before his illness, both productions engaged with Staatsoper, which staged the deportation of aliens, more precisely asylum applicants, based
death and dying, and not in any symbolic or allegorical or aesthetic fashion: they engaged, on the format of Big Brother and led half of Austria to disgrace itself; a public porn film shoot
quite directly, with Schlingensief’s own death and his own dying. In Manaus, he fused German (Seven X) in the lobby of Berlin’s Volksbühne that was so hardcore that even Schlingensief
operatic theater with carnival and the syncretism of nature religions and Christianity he couldn’t stand and watch; his art action Mein Filz, mein Fett, mein Hase [My Felt, My Fat, My
encountered there, a universe in which the Dutchman’s yearning was right at home: “When Hare] at documenta 10, Kassel, on the day Lady Di died in Paris, a performance where he
will the blow of annihilation resound which shall crack the world asunder?” was arrested straight off the stage by a large police detachment who wanted to charge him
with “slandering the memory of a dead person” and other misdemeanors: art and non-art
2. “Failure as Chance” collided in his spectacular actions and theatrical productions as well as during his semi-private
research trips to Africa, South America, and Asia. The dynamism these forever incomplete
Even in Bayreuth, he had drawn suspicion: was he trying to infiltrate the festival with a “reli- and highly consequential activities developed is almost unbelievable even in retrospect.
gious-terrorist sect”? Was he an adherent of the voodoo cult, as a famous critic believed
he could prove? After September 11, 2001, Schlingensief had indeed founded Church of The acclaimed world premiere of Bertolt Brecht’s “Rosa Luxemburg Fragments” at the Berliner
Fear, a group that sought to define an esoteric as well as materialistic perspective in which Ensemble in 1997; the “post-charitable” railway mission Passion Impossible, during which
the rampant collective fears after the collapse of Manhattan’s Twin Towers might be trans- Schlingensief first celebrated his own style of High Mass in the station concourse and theater
formed into art. Needless to say it was not a sect but, like almost all of his interventions, a people as well as members of the audience fraternized with the station’s homeless and
paradoxical art action. The political party Chance 2000 he had founded in 1998, which junkie population; the Lady Di performance at a London gallery featuring the “original car
brandished election-campaign slogans such as “Failure as Chance” or “Save Free Enterprise, wreck” from Paris; the Wagner Rally in Namibia and the Ruhr area, during which sound
Throw Away Your Money,” was an art action that ran for nine months, though citizens par- trucks brought the great composer’s music to the desert and every last corner, respectively:
ticipating in he German Bundestag elections held that same fall could also actually vote for these were all meticulously prepared and yet risky actions, unpredictable and improbable
it, and 56,000 of them did. In this particular instance, even Schlingensief’s actors and the to come about in the first place. According to Niklas Luhmann, the “low probability of its emer-
members of his team were often no longer able to tell theater from reality. Inadequate as an gence” is the only feature that defines art in contradistinction to all other social institutions;
attempt to translate art into politics, the project instead spawned Schlingensief’s endeavor though their emergence is improbable as well, they, unlike art, are always defined according
(which first drew Elfriede Jelinek’s support) to proclaim himself a nation of one; not bound to their purposes. Schlingensief’s art consistently defined itself by both features: by its
to any particular territory, the new state would restore the autonomy of the artist, whom utter purposelessness and simultaneously by its clearly delineated political, cultural, and
the democratic state had compelled to go into politics and bureaucracy. Sadly enough, this moral or amoral intentions—intentions, however, that collapsed the moment they first
state was quick to disappear, not unlike the party before it, which split up several times, found expression.
dissolved, but then reunited. When the candles illuminating the new nation’s second mani-
festation in Basel’s Badischer Bahnhof caused a fire that almost set the entire ballroom These plays were almost always realized by ad-hoc groups of professional artists—among
ablaze, Schlingensief apparently took the accident to be a sign and abandoned the endeavor. them the best actors, video artists, and stage and costume designers of the German theater
world—as well as so-called ordinary citizens and “special people” of deviant physical or
Much earlier on, fire had already been the decisive element when he presented his first feature- mental capacity. Schlingensief’s ability to hold heterogeneous groups together, to motivate
length film, Tunguska—Die Kisten sind da [Tunguska—The Boxes Have Arrived], at the Hof them and lovingly plunge them into such improbable activities, was the precondition for
CARL HEGEMANN 201

the realization of all these actions. Remarkably, he formed perfectly unconstrained and pain.” The “festival play for the consecration of the stage” was to be nothing less than
deep friendships especially with the disabled participants that would last for many years. Schlingensief’s own pre-constructed “near-death experience,” as it were. Afterwards, he
worked through his Bayreuth experience in an action entitled Kunst und Gemüse [Art and
4. “Cemetery of the Works of Art” Vegetables] that featured the fake Namibian “Bach Festival” and incorporated Schönberg’s
opera Von heute auf morgen [From Today Till Tomorrow]; under the subtitle Theater ALS
The way he launched his career in the visual arts, which seemed to have come to an early and Krankheit [Theater A(L)S Illness], it examined the neurodegenerative disease ALS (amyo-
sudden end with his 1997 arrest at documenta in Kassel, obeyed the same logic of non- trophic lateral sclerosis). For years before he was diagnosed with cancer, Christoph had
definitiveness that governed his other work. And it took only a short time before he regarded been almost constantly sick, or at least persuaded himself and others that he was. He exhibited
the art business with no less ambivalence than the theater world and the film business. His his boils on television and kept friends and the public on edge with the detailed description
works defied integration into the museum or the gallery, where the improbable is precisely of his progressive loss of eyesight. At least his fear of going blind left him from one day to the
what is probable. That’s why he thought of art in the museum as no more than “art.” His next when the cancer came, vanishing just like that.
own exhibitions, by contrast, often looked as though they had a built-in random generator
somewhere. They, too, drew their improbability not from aesthetic sensations but rather 6. “Without Darkness We Are Blind”
from their relation to their extra-aesthetic environment, with unpredictable consequences.
In retrospect it seems to me as though everything he did during the years before his cancer
The Animatograph, the rotating disk or sometimes, as in Kaprow City, a set of two counter- diagnosis only served to prepare him for the final public engagement with his illness and
rotating disks, equipped with movable screens and gyrating projectors that generated slow death. “Philosophy is learning to die.” But unlike Plato and Aristotle, whom the tradition
unforeseeable images, was perhaps the pragmatic invention for this production of contin- credits with this definition, Christoph was not a philosopher. By-the-book philosophical
gency: which images we see, and how they correspond, is left to chance. The film, as thinkers struck him as aloof showoffs; they scared him. On the other hand, he cultivated friend-
Schlingensief put it, edits itself. ly exchanges of ideas with philosophers such as Boris Groys and Peter Sloterdijk that went
on for years, and used ideas from Nietzsche, Luhmann, Deleuze, Žižek, and Nancy in his pro-
That was the astonishing thing—in everything he undertook he was literally autonomous, ductions where they seemed useful to him. If, as Wagner can teach us, art is something
like God. He would not accept anything but his own, often utterly unfounded, intuitions and like the continuation of philosophy by other means, if the theater allows us to philosophize
was at once completely open to anything his associates and actors brought to him. Only our way out of what Adorno has called the “icy desert of abstraction,” then everything he
when something struck him as routine and specious did he become restless and cranky, or produced was philosophical at its core. Thinking was important to him and became ever more
when it began to look like nothing but art or nothing but non-art. important, and precisely as what it ought to be according to Plato: as the practice of learning
to die, not as a detached intellectual sport where there are points to be scored, not as anemic
5. “Conquer Your Grave” speculation, but as a public and exemplary engagement with one’s own frail existence—in
accordance with Salomon Maimon’s motto, “My thinking originates in the activities of my daily
Given these paradoxical simultaneities of the incompatible, working with Schlingensief was life,” as well as Joseph Beuys’s categorical imperative: “Show your wound.”
always uncertain and a bit scary, but most of the time it was also incredibly funny. The pro-
cess never obeyed any “user’s manuals,” even if people consulted such manuals at work. It 7. “Prove That You Exist”
was a challenge to everyone who participated that seemed impossible to meet because
Christoph made a point of demanding more of himself and his comrades than anyone thought Artistic action defies simple explanatory patterns; the reference to external or internal circum-
feasible. He could be an extreme perfectionist, but then would also mess things up as stances such as a “traumatizing environment” or “pathological states” does not explain
soon as something seemed to have worked out well. That did not really change, neither in anything (and for all I know, Schlingensief’s childhood was a happy and “sheltered” one). Yet
formal terms nor with regard to content, even when he fell ill and realized how limited his the ambiguity of his work patently began to develop very early on. And perhaps it had some-
time was. Creaturely suffering, life in extreme situations, vulnerability, mortal fear, and the thing to do with his mother’s raising him to “almost compulsively tell the truth.” Telling the truth,
yearning for death: these, after all, had always been his themes. His second major feature film, however, is difficult for someone who has the constant sense “that there are two sides to
Egomania, already culminated in a funeral procession. The forty-five op-ed pieces he wrote every coin.” As Schlingensief remembered, “When my mother asked me whether I liked the
for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in 2002 bore the title “Intensivstation” [Intensive Care food, I could never say, ‘I do.’ I always said, ‘Maybe I do, but then maybe I don’t.’” The truth,
Unit]. The motto of ATTA ATTA—Die Kunst ist ausgebrochen [ATTA ATTA—Art Has Broken to him, was ambivalent, contradictory, and uncertain.
Out], his 2002 action about September 11th, was a variation on Aeschylus: “Conquer your
grave!” And his Bayreuth Parsifal, which he directed long before he fell ill, was not an edifying Schlingensief was one of the most normal people I have ever met, and at bottom he did not
opera of redemption but “an engagement with the real creaturely pain of mortal humans,” want anything but normalcy: “The normal is the highest gift we have been given, or taught by
as we then said, invoking Wagner’s own authority, “a ritual of screaming rather than sublime our parents. Use that! I still don’t know how to.” Yet his way of working through disappoint-
CARL HEGEMANN 203

ments and lies and getting his will, of maintaining normalcy, constantly required him to perform of survival—but renouncing them is dangerous. If we do not want to die we must be cautious,
actions that were far beyond the bounds of any normalcy, beyond all traditional norms. That act rationally, secure our advantage, our survival, yet when that becomes our only motiva-
is why he, probably like all artists, needed the place called art, what Schiller described as the tion, it can destroy our lives. So we must do both: calculate and not-calculate. The two are
“cheerful third realm where we are released from everything that is called compulsion, be it mutually exclusive, and neither works without the other. Either way, we are bound to fail.
in the physical, be it in the moral domain.” But there are differences between the ways we fail. Schlingensief wanted to fail splendidly.
“Hunt two tigers!” On several occasions in the 1990s and again later, in the Zurich Hamlet
8. “Living in Self-contradiction” and the Bayreuth Parsifal, he used these sentences penned by the Slovenian band Laibach
as a programmatic statement. Put succinctly, they meant: “Failure as Chance.”
In an essay published elsewhere (Theater heute, October 2010), I tried to explain
Schlingensief’s aggressive engagement with his own contradictions as rooted in his inability 10. “The Images Disappear Automatically”
to lie, with the strange fact—perhaps a product of his socialization—that he was literally
allergic to lies, getting a red rash all over his body when he did no more than employ harm- Shortly before his cancer surgery in 2008, Christoph Schlingensief bought a dictaphone.
less dissimulation or white lies on the stage, where such behavior is generally considered The observations he recorded on it before and after his operation and over the weeks and
“normal.” The only thing that helped at such moments was an injection of cortisone from the months that followed form the basis for his open and public engagement with the illness,
theater’s doctor. This allergy to lies perhaps forced him to profess the contradictions in the with the fear of death and the repression of the thought of his own mortality and the terrifying
realities of his life and his convictions. He was physically incapable, as it were, of feigning insight that “we cannot learn to die,” that we are utterly helpless, that the production of
a straightforward and coherent identity. Rather than hiding this impairment, he made it meaning fails, that death is contingent, that we can no longer even see ourselves as guilty,
public, just as he liked to present the allergic reactions of his skin to the audience. He was that we lose all autonomy. “And you don’t understand, ’cause it’s bigger than you.” From
a permanent provocation, not only to others but most importantly to himself. His own inner the same material he also compiled his book So schön wie hier kanns im Himmel gar nicht
contradictions, which he could neither eliminate nor ignore, which became bearable only when sein—Tagebuch einer Krebserkrankung [It Couldn’t Possibly Be as Lovely in Heaven as
he was able to communicate them to others, may have been the force that propelled his It Is Here—A Cancer Diary], which came out in 2009 and stayed on best-seller lists for
work. But of course that too is not enough to explain what was so special about him, what many months. It examined the way the author was dealing with his own impending death,
made him unique to so many people, myself among them. which, at least in the Catholic view, was supposed to be “quiet, silent, and speechless.”
Schlingensief’s public engagement with the process of dying was extraordinary, at least in
Everyone senses contradictions, after all, and we all tend to have illogical and incompatible our latitudes.
habits, but Schlingensief unselfconsciously exhibited his own paradoxes for the public to
see, whereas most people are inclined to camouflage and conceal them. To their environ- Even from the sickbed he began to direct again; his theatrical medical report Der Zwischen-
ment, they are then either the “ideal son-in-law,” for instance, or a “dangerous seducer.” stand der Dinge [The Intermediate State of Affairs] opened at the Maxim Gorki Theater,
For many years, Schlingensief managed to be both at the same time in the eyes of large parts Berlin, that same summer of 2008, with him making a personal appearance on stage. The
of the public. modest production, which mercilessly laid out the shock of the diagnosis and the desperate
experience of cancer therapy before the public, was something like the nucleus of the
The ability to maintain a performative self-contradiction, which logic wishes to prohibit and “grand goodbye” he then celebrated in a personal farewell tour, presenting himself as a most
which logical thinking nonetheless in fact engenders time and again, allowed Schlingensief effective comedian in around ten major German-speaking theaters in order to raise money
to fuse autonomous art (“I decide, I do what I want …”) and heteronomous non-art (“… but for his opera village in Burkina Faso and directing four large theatrical productions: Mea Culpa
under conditions that determine me”). This ongoing amalgamation of art and non-art gen- (see photograph), the Parsifal overpainting as a readymade opera, which opened at Burg-
erated forever-new improbabilities, things and occurrences we would have considered to theater, Vienna, in March 2009, and was a “glimpse of the beyond” and a “glimpse from the
be impossible. beyond” and ultimately a directorial refusal to die. The Zurich project Sterben lernen—Herr
Andersen stirbt in 60 Minuten [Learning to Die—Mr. Andersen Dies in 60 Minutes] took place
9. “Hunt Two Tigers!” on Zurich’s two leading stages as well as at the Kunsthalle and in the streets; a most ani-
mated Schlingensief showed up to storm the simultaneous premiere of his friend René
“If you calculate, you’re a coward. Calculation deals with gains and losses. To live is to gain, Pollesch’s work at the city’s Schauspielhaus, taking the actors along so they could keep Mr.
to die, to lose. If you don’t calculate, you die. If you calculate, you resolve not to die, but Andersen company as he was dying at the Neumarkt Theater: “There are more important
you die nonetheless. The hunter who hunts two hares misses both. If you are bound to fail, fail things than theater.” And in May 2009, his last production scrutinized his ambivalent relation
splendidly: hunt two tigers!” These sentences from the booklet accompanying Laibach’s to Africa: Via Intolleranza II, featuring many artists from Burkina Faso as well as Schlingensief
album Kapital (1993) cut right to the chase: we live according to our own will only when we do himself, which ran at the Bayerische Staatsoper, Munich, until early July.
not let ourselves be guided by calculation, which is to say, by purposive-rational strategies
CARL HEGEMANN 205

11. “Immortality Can Kill” So the pavilion now consists of these three separately accessible rooms. At the center stands
the church, with all the films, cultic objects, and images, as true to the original as possible,
A Church of Fear vs. the Alien Within, devoted to that over which we no longer have any although spatial limitations forced us to shorten the nave. The entrance on the right provides
power, forms the center of the German Schlingensief pavilion during the 2011 Venice Biennale. access to the movie theater, where Schlingensief’s films are shown every day at regularly
The films and the pews and the entire interior of the church are still extant; the actions that scheduled times, just like in a normal cinema operation. And the door on the left opens onto
took place inside the church are unrepeatable. Schlingensief liked to take friends to visit his Africa, the opera village Remdoogo; instead of a live panorama, the image projected on the
Fluxus church—not to be confused with the small single-member church Schlingensief wall is a fixed-camera shot documenting an ordinary day at the center of the construction site.
displayed on the Biennale grounds eight years ago—on evenings when there was no show; If we imagine that the biennial is the environment in which this room is set, and that the
there would be nothing but the film projections playing and the artificial light falling through festival itself is something like an aesthetic wellness center for friends of the arts and major
the church windows. He liked it especially well in a state of quiet, as a site of contemplation. events, then this Remdoogo room might even almost match Christoph’s original idea for
The church in the German Pavilion invites the visitor to pray or meditate, documenting the the pavilion.
indivisible union in Christoph Schlingensief of self-aggrandizement and self-humiliation and
memorializing an artistic movement from the past century: Fluxus. Even without the actions 14. “Germany Must Become Harder Again”
that took place in it, the church is a site of the engagement with our own deaths. “Learning
to die.” It welcomes everyone, including those who do not believe in anything, in keeping Egomania was one of Christoph Schlingensief’s earliest feature films. It is shown in the movie
with the “extended conception of we” from Schlingensief’s Bayreuth Parsifal, which encom- theater at the German Pavilion. The title’s ambivalence bespeaks Schlingensief’s artistic
passes not just Germans or Europeans but all people, and not just humans but also hares, program. It is one side of the coin. The other side, then, would be the “extended conception
for instance. That is Schlingensief’s “everyone together,” as we might loosely translate the of we” from the production of Parsifal. Egomania would be the sublation of “Germania” in art.
word “Catholic.”
12. “This Is the Story of a Family That Has Lost Its Father”
Sadly, realizing Schlingensief’s original idea for the pavilion was impossible. Using a satellite
link, he wanted to transplant Africa—a live panorama of the construction site of his opera
village in Burkina Faso—straight into the German Pavilion and to Europe. This video-link opera-
village panorama, he thought, would form the setting for a large “wellness and rehabilitation
center” open to the Biennale’s visitors, which was to take up the entire pavilion, observable
from outside and above through the pavilion’s upper row of windows. A pavilion furnished
in this manner might have documented the “healing” power Schlingensief had once hoped
“Africa’s green hills,” which are not in fact very green, would prove to possess. At the very
least it would have articulated his longing to muster a major effort to build something new in
Africa while also lying idly in a bathtub, as he had imagined in his last theatrical production,
Via Intolleranza II. But who should have realized this story for which nothing existed but an
idea without taking Schlingensief’s place and presuming to produce art at his postmortem
behest? Because there was no way to answer that question, we preferred to furnish the pavil-
ion with things that Schlingensief himself had designed, without turning it into a show of relics.
13. “Over the Next Hundred Years There Will Be Six Billion Dead. At Least.”
What we have set up are simply central sites of his life: the movie theater, where all the actors,
however alive they may be on the screen, are dead because in the finished film they can no
longer change, and what does not change does not live; the church where he celebrated his
own requiem mass and will never celebrate it again; and the opera village, which is under
construction in the vicinity of Ouagadougou and where the school will open in the fall of 2011
with classes in film and music—Remdoogo, which marks the future that will take place with-
out him and, in the slightly longer run, without us as well.
CARL HEGEMANN 207

IRM HERMANN
FROM BERLINER REPUBLIK

TO MEA CULPA
CARL HEGEMANN Special Edition of the Nordbayerischer Kurier, July 24–25, 2004
I first met Christoph Schlingensief in 1987, when he cast me for his film Schafe in Wales
[Sheep in Wales]. He was still fairly unknown at the time, and at first glance he struck me
as a good-looking young middle-class man who had manners; every mother-in-law’s per-
fect dream. Yet behind the bourgeois façade lurked a great seducer, who would use his
overwhelming charm to drive me into the craziest acts of self-abandonment, something I
had not experienced since my time with Rainer Werner Fassbinder. After Fassbinder, with
whom I spent a formative chapter of my life, from 1966 until his death in June 1981, and
to whom I owe my very personal “Éducation sentimentale” in matters artistic as well as per-
sonal, working with Christoph now cast a similarly fascinating spell over me that mixed
pleasure, fear, and curiosity. Taking part in one of his projects—he always needed to exert all
his charm to persuade me to do it—invariably meant embarking on a trip into the unknown,
meant leaping into chaos and hoping that one would eventually emerge unscathed. There
were no scripts but inspiring texts aplenty that were tried out and discarded, snippets of
film and conversations that developed into scenes and video projections and gradually con-
densed into a multimedia collage.
Berliner Republik, at Berlin’s Volksbühne, was his first play in which I appeared. He always
participated in the acting, was the motor and connector in a loose scenic aggregate. As
long as he was the animator, this sort of evening could never really go awry. Repetition
bored him, and so he came up with the idea of playing Berliner Republik backward. Five
minutes before the curtain would rise he jumbled up the entire sequence of the scenes,
and each actor had to see for himself how he would manage the transitions creatively.
There were holes that were painfully embarrassing—the audience suffered with us—but
also wonderful moments of realistic tension, something one cannot experience on any
other stage. Working with him was always most challenging, and we never stood on the
firm ground of a finished production. During the performances he would constantly come
up with new things that demanded a response, and woe to him who laughed about that,
something he did not like at all. He was a berserker and a magician at once. His surprise
appearance in ATTA ATTA, for instance, was magnificent: I am soliloquizing with a flower in
my hand, and suddenly he approaches me, covered in white powder and wearing a
gigantic set of antlers on his head, moving spastically, throws me into a bathtub on the
stage, and “rapes” me. When our mutual “feeling” on the stage was right, it was wonder-
ful. Much of it, after all, played out on the level of the unconscious—it was inexpressible.
This mixture of the Catholic pharmacist’s son and the “abysses” inside him often shocked
me. Sometimes I was afraid. When he worked with you, he would sense any weakness,
any lack of conscious awareness in you, and use it. “Show your wound,” that was the credo
he had adopted from Beuys, and after he was diagnosed with cancer, he worked mania-
cally, more alive than ever, calling himself into question as well and addressing his innermost
feelings head-on in Church of Fear and Mea Culpa. During the long time that I worked
with him, my view was often obscured by the hardships that being part of his productions
entailed, and he did not seem all that great to me, but now that he is no longer I see the
void he has left and realize that he was a giant. That is the one thing I would still like to tell him.
IRM HERMANN Mea Culpa, Hamburg, October 2010 211

JOHANNES HOFF
LIFE IN ABUNDANCE:
SCHLINGENSIEF’S
DECONSTRUCTION OF (POST)
MODERNISM
Camille. What do you say, Lucile? Lucile. Nothing, I love to watch you speak. Camille. Hence McLuhan’s theory-of-everything offered to the global village in the media age:
Do you hear me too? Lucile. Certainly! Camille. Am I right? Have you any idea what “The medium is the message.”1
I was saying? Lucile. No, none at all.
Lucile’s counter-word is neither an intentional nor a self-referential medium. The medium of
There are moments of when we do not pay attention to what people are talking about; her final words neither has a message, nor is it its message. It amounts to no more than a
when we do not hear but “see” them speaking. However, it takes a person of considerable brief moment during which the machine of ceaseless meaning production of meaning is
unworldliness for this attitude to become a permanent state of affairs; people like Lucile, halted. It is easy to create something meaningful:
for instance, the wife of Camille Desmoulins, a Jacobin whose own comrades-in-arms sen- But when there is talk of art, there is often somebody who does not really listen. More
tenced to death in Büchner’s drama Danton’s Death. Even beneath the barred window of precisely: somebody who hears, listens, looks … and then does not know what it was
her husband’s death-row cell, Lucile speaks the seemingly naïve language of unworldliness: about. But who hears the speaker, “sees him speaking.” […] Here where it all comes to
Listen, people are pulling long faces and saying you must die. I can’t help laughing its end, where all around Camille pathos and sententiousness confirm the triumph of
Lucile speaks as though the people with their long faces had nothing to “puppet” and “string,” here Lucile who is blind against art, Lucile for whom language is
do with her. But that does not stop her from being more in touch with the world of her tangible and like a person, Lucile is suddenly there with her “Long live the King!” […]
comrades than they themselves are. As early as the second act, when it seems as It is a word against the grain, the word which cuts the “string,” which does not bow to
though no one’s head but Danton’s was at stake, Lucile glimpses something barrel- the “bystanders and old warhorses of history.” It is an act of freedom. It is a step.2
ing toward Camille, which he, swept along by the enthusiasm of revolutionary frater-
nization, refuses to see: Celan’s analysis of the dramatic scene is persuasive. But it speaks the language of an era
Lucile. When I think that they may take your head and … Camille, it’s nonsense, isn’t that regarded the dawn of McLuhan’s global village with skepticism, even aversion. It makes
it? I’m crazy? Camille. Be calm. Danton and I aren’t the same person. it difficult to translate its “potential for negation” into the language of a village whose resi-
dents do not fear death if it provides an opportunity to congregate, in the manner of a herd,
Lucile sees clearly, from the very beginning. But at the end she refuses to translate what around an “event,” or to become its central protagonist if only for fifteen minutes. Andy
she sees into a message that would be adequate for the gravity of the situation. As Camille Warhol was paraphrasing McLuhan when he prophesied in 1968 that, “in the future, every-
declaims solemn phrases celebrating his own heroic death (“Gentlemen, I shall serve my- one will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” In the age of Lady Diana, I’m a Celebrity … Get
self first”), she hears the strokes of the clock. She wants to scream: Me Out of Here!, and al-Qaeda, even the most unworldly actions and words are transmut-
Lucile. And yet there is something serious in it. I must think. I’m beginning to grasp it. ed into poetic light bulbs that supply the placeless inhabitants of the World Wide Web
… To die. Die. Everything has the right to live, everything—the little fly there, that bird. with fleeting community experiences.
Why not he? […] Everything moves. Clocks tick, bells peal, people walk, water trickles,
everything—except in that one place. No! It can’t be allowed to happen. I shall sit on the It is impossible to produce a counter-word in a postmodern global village. That is why one
ground and scream until everything stops in fright and nothing moves any more. would look in vain for such a gesture in Schlingensief’s art-blind oeuvre. The faith in the
word is replaced, or so it would seem, by a “faith in embarrassment.” A paradigmatic example
Yet a blind scream is powerless to halt the ceaseless, clamorous creation of meaning. And of this faith is the theatrical happening titled Kaprow City (2006), whose prehistory goes
so all that remains to her in the end is what Paul Celan, in his speech on the occasion of back to Schlingensief’s action 48 Stunden Überleben für Deutschland [48 Hours Survival
receiving the Büchner Prize in 1960, called a “word against the grain” or “counter-word”: for Germany] during documenta 10 in 1997. During the documenta action, Schlingensief
Citizen. Qui va là? Lucile. [Reflects a moment, then suddenly decides] Long live the uncannily announced the death of Lady Diana before the princess had died. A few hours later,
King! Citizen. In the name of the republic! [The guards surround her and take her away] Kassel police arrested him for “slandering the memory of a dead person.” In Kaprow City,
this event recurred now overpainted in a way that turned the dead media princess into a
Lucile’s “Long live the King!” not only disrupts the logic of the intentional creation of thing, trivial and boring and embarrassing at once. Schlingensief’s arrest in 1997 could still
meaning—the desire to communicate of those who churn out pathos-laden messages even have been interpreted as an event of the “my fifteen minutes” type, but in 2006 the machine of
in the face of the scaffold. Her “counter-word” halts even the flow of the non-intentional event production simply broke down. The Kaprow City installation, a monstrous and laby-
production of meaning; that is the key point of this scene. rinthine complex the spectator had to enter alone, was not designed to prevent the audience
with any experience of community. The beholder had to find her own way through this moving
The Deconstruction of “Puppet” and “String” structure; rather than discovering the collective time of a virtual event, each step revealed
nothing but a lonesome present time.
According to Martin Heidegger and Marshall McLuhan, the transformative potential of modern
art is comparable to that of the modern light bulb. It opens up its own contexts of association Up to a certain point, this scenario was consistent with the postmodern trend: Beuys’s
and action; it function as a self-referential medium around which we can congregate. “Every human being is an artist” turned into Kippenberger’s “Every artist is a human being.”3
JOHANNES HOFF 215

Schlingensief’s art, however, was more radical. The dominant gesture, to the very end, was Schlingensief’s art played on the anti-humanist keyboard of a media economy that offers
that of an unworldliness blind to art. Instead of bowing, in an act of postmodern irony, to no visibility for those who shed tears without the commercial extraction of ratings gains.
the law of McLuhan and Lacan that the message even of a purloined letter always “arrives,”4 There is no key on this keyboard for sincere humanist messages. But that did not stop
his art made the spectator freeze in incomprehension. But more than that, it captivated the former altar boy from Oberhausen from using the means of art to let something emerge
the beholder even as the message never “arrived,” because there was something to see in into view. The decidedly unprofessional program of Schlingensief’s theatrical productions
Schlingensief’s art. Montaging the flotsam of a history of art, cinema, literature, and music is comparable to a “seriasure” that “serially” “drives” the spectator “into a corner” (the corner
that had lost all orientation and mixing in religious symbolism to create a Gesamtkunstwerk Jacques Derrida described as a “stricture”8) in order to afford him the opportunity to see
decidedly bereft of all meaning, his art allowed the spectator to see through the artifice of something the scenario of “puppet” and “wire” does not provide for—Achim, for instance, or
“puppet” and “wire” to what Celan’s art-blind person sees: the person-like, the perceptible, Helga, Kerstin, Frank, and Elfriede. Something seems to have driven Schlingensief time
the everyday. and again “to do art”; but to him this urge was part and parcel of an articulation of life that,
though it included the aspiration to art, included also something else—healthy and sick
The late Schlingensief’s Fluxus and readymade projects, dedicated to his own illness, are people, merry and sad ones, boring and embarrassing ones.
exemplary in this regard. For the readymade is precisely that: an object alienated from the
context of its use that presents itself to the beholder as a speechless and expressionless How serious, how blind to art this interest was became undeniable when Schlingensief’s
thing. Boris Groys has offered an excellent analysis of this strand in Schlingensief’s art: performances began to organize themselves around “the alien thing” within himself, the
This is no longer about the transmutation of the mute world into language, but rather cancer in his lung. According to Friedhelm Mennekes, his role at that point approached
about a transmutation of language into a thing. The artist has lost control of the flow that of John Paul II as he lay dying.9 Despite the billions of people all over the world who
of language—and so he stops this flow […] because he has learned […] that there are watched the old man’s slow death, there was one thing the event was not: a theatrical pro-
situations in which language fails for its own reasons.5 duction controlled by directors who play god without taking an interest in man. It was not
even drama, but instead the plain and simple celebration of what all Catholics celebrate on
Achim, or Life in Abundance Sundays and holidays: the Liturgy. On Easter 2005, for instance:
The empty window is taken up by the figure of a little old […] man struggling with the
Is that a sufficient interpretation? In Groys’s analysis, what allows “the thing” to become last bit of strength he retains. He puts his hand in front of his mouth, bursts into tears,
person-like in Schlingensief’s work recedes behind the experiences of negativity in illness can barely lift his arm to give the blessing, forcing the few words the ritual requires
and death or the petrified language of religious symbolism and its indifference to meaning. him to speak through a tube surgically inserted into his windpipe, producing no more
But Schlingensief’s readymades were about more than the gesture of iconoclastic negation than an unintelligible rattling sound. The head of the Catholic Church […] It is not a
—they were about the eighty-year-old opera-chorus singer Elfriede Rezabek, for instance, drama he is not involved in. Not a theatrical production. Rather […] it is suffering: suf-
singing the song of Isolde’s “Love-Death” from Wagner’s Tristan in her frail voice (“How softly fering before himself and the one in whom he believes, whose suffering, dying, and
and gently he smiles, how sweetly his eyes open—can you see, my friends, do you not see overcoming of death are just now being consummated down there, in the celebration
it?”),6 or about Achim von Paczensky. of the Eucharist.10
Achim was a patient at the state hospital at Teupitz in 1993 when Schlingensief cast him As the first pages of the program notes from Mea Culpa document, Schlingensief felt that
for his film Terror 2000. As the postmodern Botox and art market was auctioning puppies this event strengthened his resolve to catapult himself into the position of the “thing”
and teddy bears in the style of Jeff Koons’s balloon animals, Achim became the favorite (despite the defeatist attacks from the Catholic milieu against his experiment).11 And these
candidate of Schlingensief’s futuristic political party of the marginalized, Chance 2000. projects, too, were not about staging a drama of suffering. The merry-go-round of his
Achim then co-directed the TV project FREAKSTARS 3000 (2003), which displayed the productions revolved more recognizably than ever around a Biblical motif: “life in abundance”
mechanisms of postmodern talent shows by staging such a show at the Tiele-Winckler- (John 1:15, 10:10; Psalms 16:11).12
Haus, a residential home for disabled people. Finally, in the Fluxus oratorio A Church of Fear
vs. the Alien Within, Achim and Kerstin Grassmann shouted “Avant-garde—Marmalade! In A Church of Fear vs. the Alien Within, this motif reappears during the Reading from the
Avant-garde—Marmalade!” (see also the photographs of Achim in the Church of Fear under Fifth Gospel According to Joseph Beuys: “By virtue of his suffering, the sufferer who can do
Prozession zur Auferstehung as well as Geschichte der Kirche). When Achim died of a nothing at all fills the world with Christian substance.”13 Leaving aside the metaphysics of
heart attack on December 26, 2009, an editor at nachtkritik.de wrote: suffering elaborated by the Reformation and by German Idealism, this “substance” has no
What the show celebrated: a human being! And a human being with a disability to more to do with a masochistic mysticism of suffering than the crucified Christ of the Fourth
boot! At bottom, Schlingensief was making fairly cynical use of strategies of mass-media Gospel (John 19:34) does with Wagner’s Parsifal. The point here is not to celebrate suffering
staging to benefit himself and his cause; it was presumably all the product of cool and compassion as ends in themselves, but rather to celebrate life even in suffering.
calculation. And yet it made tears well up in my eyes. For Achim von Paczensky’s sake.7
JOHANNES HOFF 217

Schlingensief’s trenchant Tagebuch einer Krebserkrankung [Cancer Diary] gets to the with “life in abundance.” Abstracting from the Aristotelian terminology, this “act” could even
heart of this affirmative strand of the Christian heritage. Long passages in the book speak be called motion in the highest degree.16
the language of Old Testament invective: “Mine eye mourneth by reason of affliction. […]
Shall thy loving kindness be declared in the grave? Or thy faithfulness in destruction?” as Basing our discussion on this model, we can certainly compare Schlingensief to the
the Psalmist already proclaimed (Psalms 88:9–11). Schlingensief’s Diary pursues this line, “unmoved mover.” But Schlingensief’s motionlessness never contrasted with his “frantic
speaking the language of the Daily Prayer at the Church of Fear: “And yet Jesus isn’t there. activities.” He fell silent when life was effervescent; he became frantic when the creative
And God isn’t there either. And Mother Mary isn’t there either. It’s all completely dead. […] flux of life abated. And at all times he remained what he was—not a god, but indeed what
The whole petit-bourgeois shit is no longer there. […] Amen.” And yet even in Schlingensief Saint Thomas called imago dei. Schlingensief’s anticipatory self-obituary for himself in the
such invective has its context, as the title of Schlingensief’s Diary makes perfectly clear: welcoming address to the Church of Fear aptly puts this fundamental principle of the Catholic
It Couldn’t Possibly Be as Lovely in Heaven as It Is Here! We may revile God and the world; love of wisdom as follows: “He was who he was, no more, but even so: who can really say
but when we are done reviling, one certainty at least remains: the “here and now” is still that of himself?”
better than the “fairylands” that artists, philosophers, or theologians contrive. No “possible
world” can compete with this real one. According to thinkers as diverse as Saint Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Meister Eckhart,
Nicholas of Cusa, and Kierkegaard, a consequence of the Fall of Man is that the human being
The “Unmoved Mover” and Boris Groys’s Reading of Schlingensief is irresistibly inclined not to be who he is. We tend to make ourselves at home in a narcis-
sistic world of the imagination or in “possible worlds.” That should give us pause. Schlingensief
To dismiss the importance of this Catholic aspect of Schlingensief’s world in the interpre- not only gave thought to the matter; the reflection on the hysterical narcissism of our time
tation of his work would mean to miss the nerve of his art. To be sure, his aim was not to was the engine that powered his art. And so his art consisted, more than anything, in being
“make art”—“making” was alien to him, but neither was it his aim to take up the position of Christoph Schlingensief of his own accord—“anyone who has ever tried and seen how
an aloof observer vis-à-vis the spectacle of artistic activities. difficult it is to drink a glass of milk or write a symphony of one’s accord also knows: it is not
an easy thing to do.”17
That is why Boris Groys’s reading of Schlingensief strikes me as unsatisfactory, most
im-portantly because it falls for a distorted theology. According to Groys, God was a Beyond Activity And Passivity
director who created the world only to adopt the passive attitude of the “unmoved mover”
watching his self-moving creation. When this mythical “first mover” died, he left a void, The desire to learn how to drink a glass of milk of one’s own accord explains the appeal
and that is precisely the point, which, according to Groys, allowed artists to come into Meister Eckhart held for the late Schlingensief. In act four of his Zurich experimental ar-
play: artists like Schlingensief, for example, a director and action artist who sets gigantic rangement Sterben Lernen [Learning to Die, 2009], for instance, he engaged with Eckhart’s
Gesamtkunstwerke in motion in order to subsequently become an “observer of his own sermons, which became part of the production.18 But it was not just the Dominican’s
frantic activities.”14 paradoxical rhetoric that fascinated him in these texts, which did not shrink from verbal
provocation in order to call his overenthusiastic late-medieval brothers and sisters back
Groys’s reading is original in that spikes this deistic framework with a shot of Buddhism: down to reality. What fascinated him even more was that Meister Eckhart’s articulation of
“We have to work on not possessing any power, on not doing anything, not producing any- the idea of “motionlessness” was far more rigorous than those of postmodernist art theorists;
thing, not fighting against anything, and instead approving of everything.”15 That could for according to Meister Eckhart, even he who does nothing still does far too much.
sound as though Schlingensief stood back from life. But the true object of Groys’s reading Following the Meister Eckhart scholar Reiner Manstetten, we can illustrate the point of this
is of course something else: the radical unworldliness of Schlingensief’s art, which he paradox using the economic theorem of non-saturation.19 Loosely put, this theory assumes
shares with Büchner’s Lucile. The likening of the attitude of unworldliness to the perspective that our consumer behavior always follows the maxim that “more is better.” But what does
of an “unmoved mover” is utterly appropriate. What is problematic, however, is the way Groys “more” mean? More is always what we do not have. Human behavior is determined by
uses the technical term established in Western theology by Thomas Aquinas. preference decisions. The constant desire to have more is a logical consequence of this
principle. For any preference decision implies a negation: when I decide to do this (to
Aquinas’s concept of movement relied on the act / potency schema of Aristotelian physics. marry, to live, to buy an iPhone), I cannot have that (not marrying, hanging myself, buying a
A seed is a flower in the state of “potency”; and such a flower “moves” to the extent that it different smartphone, etc.). And so we always decide in favor of something (this) only to
strives toward the “act” of blossoming. By no means, however, does this imply that the flower realize soon enough that we do not have something else (that).
freezes into a motionless crystal at the moment of blossoming. Blossoming, thinking, or
loving: according to Aquinas, these were “unmoved” activities; only the path to the blossom As early as the fourteenth century, Meister Eckhart concluded that he who wants some-
was considered an instance of motion. However, this does not mean that the act of blos- thing wants nothing, for at the very moment he decides to want something there is
soming was regarded as passive—much less so God’s “pure act of being,” which coincided something else he does not want. There is accordingly only one way for us to break free
JOHANNES HOFF 219

of the unhappy consciousness of postmodern consumerist life: we must cease to want the world. […] In the theater one becomes mob, herd, woman, Pharisee, voting animal,
this or that and instead want nothing. patron, idiot—Wagnerian.25
So beware of conceiving of yourself as being this or that man in any particular way.
[…] Divorce yourselves of all “not,” for the “not” makes distinction. How so? That you To the late Nietzsche’s eyes, the nineteenth-century program of redemption through art as
are not that man, this “not” makes for distinction between you and that man.20 religion seemed a variation on the illusory promises of the Christian heaven: “These are
We must decide, as it were, to become “Men Without Qualities.”21 Meister Eckhart calls the consumptives of the soul: hardly are they born before they begin to die and to long for
the required characteristic attitude toward life “Gelazenheit” (equanimity or, more literally, teachings of weariness and renunciation,”26 Zarathustra already explains in a passage
the ability to “let” oneself and the world be) and the corresponding relation to the world, that takes aim not only at modern Christianity but also at Schopenhauer, the philosophical
“Abgeschiedenheit” (“detachment”). But such detachment by no means implies utter source of Wagner’s programmatic goals.
inaction. Someone who does nothing still does “something,” for he does this (being passive)
as distinct from that (being active). Against the Schopenhauerian “will to transcend life,” Nietzsche posited the “yes” to life.
But this “yes” became enmeshed in self-contradictions because, to the end, Nietzsche’s
Detachment, then, is not the opposite of “frantic activities.” “Gelazenheit” can mean all thinking clove to the modern conviction that saying yes, that assent had to originate in a
sorts of things; we must merely be able to “let them be.” In Groys’s analysis, by contrast, creative activity, and thus must negate “passive virtues.” Where Boris Groys, championing
the motion and bustle of life appears as an ongoing affair that competes with the detach- passivity, negates activity, Nietzsche championed an unrestrained activism that negates
ment of the “unmoved mover.” Thus he believes that the decision to “want nothing” coin- passivity. The “happiness of him who takes”27 was as alien to him as the amoral happiness
cides with a movement of transcendence that negates active life: “I see this will to tran- of unreserved assent—how else could he have hurled a moralizing “contra” at his former
scend life in Schlingensief. […] He observes life; he, as it were, does not live, he attempts comrade in Nietzsche contra Wagner?28
to take up a position that lets something take place and then he looks to see what happens.”22
Christoph Schlingensief was the happy counterpart to Friedrich Nietzsche’s unhappy con-
Of course, there is a more complex background to this lopsided image of the “unmoved sciousness. Neither did he eschew the “happiness of him who takes,” nor was his thin-
mover” in Groys. For his intention is to read Schlingensief as a preeminent representative king infected by the dialectic of saying no. “God speaks forever only yes; the devil, nay:
of the (post)modern religion of art. “Here, art conclusively becomes religion.” Sympto- whence he cannot be one with God, with him be aye,” says Angelus Silesius.29 The lan-
matic of this development, Groys believes, is a diary excerpt included in the program notes guage of Schlingensief’s art is no different. There is no delete key, no “no”—it has that in
for Mea Culpa in which Schlingensief interprets his cancer as a consequence of his common with the language of God and that of dreams. And that is why it would never
work on Wagner’s Parsifal. With this interpretation, Groys argues, Schlingensief transformed have occurred to him to respond with a “contra” to Richard Wagner’s beguiling music—
his own dying into a prop of a theatrical prop: “Schlingensief’s illness thus loses its Schlingensief’s father was a Wagnerian, after all. In his ears, the master’s “death-sounds”
organic, worldly sources and becomes the consequence of the impact of art on his body.”23 were associated with childhood memories: as the father was listening to The Valkyrie, al-
But this reading neglects Schlingensief’s ambivalent stance vis-à-vis the modernist most drowned out by the noise of the household vacuum cleaner, the tune from Walt Disney’s
program of art-as-religion. Schlingensief’s view of Wagner is paradigmatic of this stance, The Jungle Book could be heard blaring from the child’s room. … That sort of thing could
as the relevant passages from his diary show: not possibly be bad per se?
I have come to believe that it really is death-music, a dangerous music that celebrates
not life but death. It is venomous stuff that squirted out of Wagner. […] Open the But how can we put all of this together? The final act of Mea Culpa is indicative of
shrine, unveil the Grail! That’s quite enough. That really is plenty. I’m almost at the Schlingensief’s attitude toward the “Wagnerians.” As the father, who has already been
point where I would say, yes, the Nazis had a lot of fun with that, that was exactly dead for a year and a half, tries to drag his son to heaven, the cancer-stricken son,
their world. They could all march to that. […] That was their goal: one day they’d be in accompanied by the master’s death-sounds Nietzsche already denounced as “water
a little courtyard, a gas can under their arms and a cyanide capsule in their mouths, vapor,” exclaims:
celebrating death.24 I love you so much. But now you can leave, too. Get lost. Go away. Beat it. […] I’m
We should note, first, the convergence between this remark and Friedrich Nietzsche’s harsh so happy that I’m still here. I have no desire to sit on some cloud.
attacks on his erstwhile friend in The Case of Wagner, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols,
and Nietzsche contra Wagner: The modern fable of “the heavens”30 was no less suspect to Schlingensief than the green
My objections to Wagner’s music are physiological objections […] that I no longer hill of Bayreuth. To him, both smelled of “fairyland.”31 But that did not stop him from
breathe easily when once this music operates on me. […] Wagner makes people working with the material. Rather than negating Bayreuth, he subjected it to creative trans-
morbid. […] In Bayreuth people are only honest in the mass, as individuals they lie […] formation and metonymical displacement, to Ouagadougou, for example, where it be-
they renounce the right to their own tongue and choice, to their taste, even to their came Remdoogo. The green hill became an opera village in Burkina Faso, with a school
courage, as they have it and use it within their own four walls with respect to God and and a clinic, and teenagers playing soccer on the green lawn and disrupting the solemn
JOHANNES HOFF 221

ceremony of art-as-religion with their noise. Remdoogo: that is the Schlingensiefian montage
of The Valkyrie and The Jungle Book on a grand scale; the vision of a place firmly built in
stone and clay where life absorbs art rather than the other way around.
1 See Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994).
2 Paul Celan, “The Meridian,” in Collected Prose, trans. Rosemarie Waldrop (New York: Routledge, 2003), 37–56, here 39–40.
I am grateful to Ingrid Anna for pointing me to this passage. ANDY HOPE 1930
3 Harald Falckenberg and Frank Berberich, “Nach der Lust Kalte Gier. Die Konjunkturen des Kunstmarkts und die Chancen für
Junge Künstler,” Lettre International 89 (2010): 106.
4 See Jacques Derrida, “The Purveyor of Truth,” in The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass MATHEMATICALLY CARNIVAL
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 411–96.
5 Boris Groys, “When Words Fail,” in the present volume, 193. LABYRINTH
6 See “Mea Culpa,” http://www.mea-culpa.at.
7 “Eine Rose für Achim” (Nachtkritik), http://www.schlingensief.com/weblog/?p=479; see also Schlingensief’s own obituary for
von Paczensky, “Achim ist gestorben,” http://schlingenblog.posterous.com/achim-ist-gestorben-beerdigung-am-612010-auf.
8 See Jacques Derrida, “At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am,” in Re-Reading Levinas, eds. Robert Bernasconi and
Simon Critchley (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 11–48.
9 See “Schlingensief: ‘Grosser Zeuge unsere Zeit’,” http://www.domradio.de/aktuell/66811/schlingensief-grosser-zeuge-unserer-
zeit.html.
10 Gerhard Stadler, “Der Vorhang,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, May 31, 2005.
11 See Burgtheater, Christoph Schlingensief. Mea Culpa. Heft 194 (Vienna, 2008), 5–7.
12 John Paul II had already addressed the subject in 1984, in his Apostolic Letter Salvifici Doloris: “On the Cross, Christ attained
and fully accomplished his mission […] In weakness he manifested his power, and in humiliation he manifested all his messianic
greatness.” Apostolic Letter Salvifici Doloris of the Supreme Pontiff John Paul II to the Bishops …, http://www.vatican.va/holy_
father/john_paul_ii/apost_letters/documents/hf_ jp-ii_apl_11021984_salvifici-doloris_en.html (April 4, 2011).
13 See http://www.kirche-der-angst.de.
14 Carl Hegemann and Boris Groys, “Metanoia. Der Künstler als unbewegter Beweger oder die Welt als ewige Ruhestätte,”
Lettre International 90 (2010): 117.
15 Ibid.
16 See Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles, Opera omnia (Editio Leonina), vol. 13–15 (Rome, 1918–1930), I c. 13 n. 10.
17 Georg Seeßlen, “Mein idealer Künstler zurzeit,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 53, March 4, 2010, 38, as well as “Über
Christoph Schlingensief und das, was Kunst zur Zeit können, dürfen und wollen sollte,” http://www.filmzentrale.com/essays/sch-
lingensieflaudatiogs.htm.
18 http://www.temporaere-leichenhalle.ch.
19 See Reiner Manstetten, “Negative Theologie und negative Anthropologie – zur Aktualität Meister Eckharts,”
Theologische Quartalschrift 181 (2001): 112–33, c. 6.
20 Sermon 46 (“Haec est vita aeterna”), in Meister Eckhart, Deutsche Werke, Die deutschen und lateinischen Werke, ed. J. Quint
(Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1976), II 382,3–7.
21 The title of Robert Musil’s magnum opus derives from Meister Eckhart. As more recent scholarship has shown, the text also contains
numerous references to and excerpts from Meister Eckhart. See Niklaus Largier, “Robert Musil, Meister Eckhart, and the ‘Culture
of Film’,” in Religion: Beyond a Concept, ed. Hent de Vries (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 739−50. In recent Musil
scholarship, the theorem of “non-saturation” is also called “optionalism.” See Bazon Brock, “Über die Dramaturgie der Verknüpfung
von Anfang und Ende,” in Auf Leben und Tod. Der Mensch in Malerei und Fotografie. Die Sammlung Teutloff zu Gast im Wallraf,
ed. Wallraf-Richartz-Museum (Munich: Hirmer, 2010), 14. I am grateful to Christian Bauer for pointing these matters out to me.
22 Boris Groys, “Sprachversagen. Zur Arbeit des Künstlers und Theatermachers Christoph Schlingensief,” Lettre International 90
(2010): 116. [My emphasis.]
23 Ibid.
24 Burgtheater, Christoph Schlingensief. Mea Culpa, 20; Christoph Schlingensief, So schön wie hier kanns im Himmel gar nicht sein!
Tagebuch einer Krebserkrankung (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2009), 171.
25 Friedrich Nietzsche, Nietzsche contra Wagner, in The Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, vol. 3: The Case of Wagner, Nietzsche
Contra Wagner, The Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, trans. Thomas Common (London: Fisher Unwin, 1899), 67–69.
26 Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Preachers of Death,” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Graham Parkes (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2005), 39.
27 Ibid., “The Night-Song,” 92.
28 For a deconstruction of this self-contradiction, see John Milbank, “Can Morality be Christian?,” in The Word Made Strange.
Theology, Language, Culture (Cambridge, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 1997), 219−32.
29 Angelus Silesius, Cherubinischer Wandersmann, in Sämtliche poetische Werke in drei Bänden, vol. 3 (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1952), II 4.
30 The premodern concepts of theosis (deification) or visio dei (vision of God) were focused not on an alternative “possible world”
but on the intensification of the present time. “This life” was considered to be unredeemed only insofar as we have lost the gift of
existing before God with unquestioning confidence here and now (or put another way, to drink a glass of milk without longing
for something else). It is the obsession with “possible alternatives” to this world that has turned it into a “fallen place.”
31 See Christoph Schlingensief, “Die Kirche ist ein Märchenpark,” Cicero (January 11, 2010), http://www.schlingensief.com/
weblog/?p=481. An unabridged German version of this essay is in preparation, which relates to the genealogy of the (post)modern
religion of art, and includes a critical discussion of Carl Hegemann’s romantic interpretation of Schlingensief.
JOHANNES HOFF
ANDY HOPE 1930 225
ANDY HOPE 1930 227
ANDY HOPE 1930 229
ANDY HOPE 1930 Extinct 231
ELFRIEDE JELINEK
THE SQUANDERER
S omething affected this man, affected Christoph Schlingensief, that made him positively
hurl forth anything he absorbed, made him pour out all his good gifts—from such a
pouring-forth comes the word profuse. He always gave away everything within him. And no
one understood how so much had ever gone into him in the first place. Perhaps because
he had already given it before it could even really take its place in him (perhaps also be-
cause he was already occupied, already possessed by other things he would probably
also have given away again at once?). A man everything tore through as though hurled up
into the air by a storm, and across to us. That’s how I see him. He couldn’t possibly take
as much as he gave. Letting everything in as though in a fever, the evil germs as well; ev-
erything, everything was welcome to Christoph, since that’s what it was supposed to be
good for, to make something out of it and then, with his friends, collaborators, to steer it
back across to us. The Animatograph, a sparkling carousel of life that invited everything
and gave it all away again as a gift. But there cannot be so many gifts given, someone must
pay for it all. We paid for no more than an admission ticket, and often not even that.
Christoph picked up the whole bill. He gave it all away and then paid the bill on top. It was
impossible to him that he would have everything he sucked in to himself, keep it as
insight, as the result of something, as spirit, as whatdoIknow, to consider it a sort of profit
and cash in on it, for himself alone, he could not hog it, he always had to hurl it away at
once, not in the sense of throwing it away, he hurled it toward us, and so became ever more
effective for us without becoming any less for himself. Only something began to rave
within him over which he then no longer had any power. He probably squandered himself
in giving. The more he gave in his art (or whatever you want to call it), the more imbued
by life he would comport himself, and then there was no longer any recognizable difference
between inside and outside. A rich man who always made others ever richer. Christoph
didn’t lock himself up, he did the opposite, he unmoored himself from himself in his work,
he thrust out into a lake as children thrust a stick into an anthill or indeed as mariners
put out to sea. He freed that sea of its shores and cut the ropes. And in the end he was life
itself, and life became he, literally transformed into him; he could identify himself with life
in his work, and his life was destined by his giving everything away that would have let others
live ten lives, provisions included. But it was expropriation as appropriation. One hopes
that he got all of it back and is still getting it. He was the one who gets and the one who has
given everything, and it was by this one-to-one that he defined himself, that was his life.
That, in fact, was that. Was precisely: everything.
ELFRIEDE JELINEK 235

SCHORSCH “TUFFI” KAMERUN
THAT’S PROBABLY WHAT THEY

CALL FREEDOM
“C hristoph’s at the station, picking up the German Nazis.” So the press lady at Zurich’s
Schauspielhaus told me when I asked. The town was up in arms. A clear-cut case.
Typical. Hmm, but is that actually political? Those who wanted to know more precisely right
away had failed to understand the moment. For the methodical examination of this sort of
Schlingensief action amounted to a slowing of his creativity. Conversely: that was his per-
manent advantage. Because he permitted virtually no dissection of his work. That was
how he always remained one step faster, ahead of those who thought they had finally come
close, were finally right on it. Fiddlesticks. Because those moments were exactly when
the twist came. Intuitive, hardly conceptual. And the mistaken belief of being on the same
level with him thanks to “solid preparation,” that was even more wrong. Because then
people needed to work off the ballast of their analytically approximate approaches when
something altogether different was suddenly at issue.
Once we were all sitting on the rehearsal stage, waiting for the arrival of the starter. All
brimming with things to offer. Then Christoph came in and showed us his first film—which
we were all familiar with—and the next thing he announced to us was that he was going
to start off by doing nothing for a week. Major alarm! Never have so many very good dra-
maturges been seen (in one place) whipping themselves into a (perfectly unnecessary)
frenzy. Instead of regarding the gap that had opened up in the daily theatrical grind as an
opportunity, immediate measures were taken to “save the project,” and masses of addi-
tional materials were carted in with even greater urgency, materials condemned to assured
uselessness. It wasn’t until I took part that I realized that only a certain amount of dis-
tance (at work, not in private life) created the possibility that one would be “part of it.” For
in the Schlingensief cosmos, full immersion meant simple absorption for those visible in
the light next to him. The others, the loyal fellow creators and fellow combatants, received
special rewards, the highest of which was clear membership in the team or family. That
was certainly why all the amateurs, the disabled people, and the ones who had their own
major narcissistic disorders, were the only authentic possible people in the Schlingensief
show trial. Because they ran along their own parallels, and so remained miraculously free.
And the writers of reports likewise had an interesting aerial view of the whole thing only
when they described the phenomenon and not the quality of the particular foreground,
such as a successful/unsuccessful performance or an exhibition space featuring rota-
ting-stage recollections (the Animatograph). His theater was permanent. And always inten-
tionally all-encompassingly consistently inconsistent. And yes: Christoph Schlingensief
was not a political artist! That diminishes him. He played in many simultaneous spaces.
These were society, fucking up, childhood dreams, anti-ideals, childhood curses, ultra-
direct philosophy, daring-oneself-in-not-bearing-it, love for art, existential sentiments, and
“life” as much as “non-life.” And in his super-agility he was the super-fastest one, which
made him a constantly interesting media artist.
“I’ve proven to you that there’s no way to stage this play,” he said after a dress rehearsal.
Major ala … !! And once again “the project” was “at risk.” I told him, well, he didn’t have
to be part of it, there were enough others. We ended up doing it the next day. With him
right in front, of course. He just needed to have briefly indicated the possible exit, only
the more vigorously to barge right in through the entrance. “Perhaps I’m not going to show
anything this time.” And that is his greatest achievement: to demonstrate that it is possible
Schlingie and me, Attabambi-Pornoland,

Schauspielhaus Zürich, 2004
Schorsch and Christoph, Botanic Garden,

SCHORSCH KAMERUN Rio de Janeiro, 2006 239
to cancel art. The famous “chance” in failure. The idea “really” initiated was much more im-
portant to him than its orderly implementation. And that’s what they then call freedom. But
freedom nonetheless brings the human being to an end, and so this insight was useful to
Christoph Schlingensief the bearer of himself forever only for a very brief moment. So stay
on it. Standstill is detachment. Better to smack the next fat piece into the greedy maws of
the project providers as they tremble with joy. Heating the stew is still how you set it in motion. ALEXANDER KLUGE
And I am so grateful to have seen it. How there were fresh and daring ventures. How new THE COMPLETE VERSION OF A
things were tried out. With the most direct dedication. It was, in the more recent past, BAROQUE INVENTION BY
the last culmination of a gigantic contraption of ribbons in which the individual threads de- CHRISTOPH SCHLINGENSIEF
rived from the greatest moments of experimentation. And it was laid out completely openly
for all to see, everyone was free to join in and have a look. In a daydream. We miss that im-
mensely. The gap between our real days and Christoph’s fantastic constructions of them
won’t be closed for a very long time. And that was what my aunt Anke sensed when, together
with innumerable people he had touched, she felt an intimate loss when Christoph died,
even though she had only read his book from a safe distance.
Fuck that silence.
SCHORSCH KAMERUN
J ewish tombs in the twelfth century bear an emblem: a hare. In 1943, the symbol on the
stones attracted the attention of Oberrottenführer Hartmut Mielke when his convoy
was bulldozing Jewish cemeteries in central Germany so that the sites could be used for
the construction of water tanks for fire trucks. The motif returns on tombstones from
the seventeenth century: outstretched, prone hares “sleeping” or “slain.”
The Oberrottenführer, who was a dedicated local historian in his spare time, knew that
this use contrasted with pagan depictions of hares in Celtic areas south of the Rhön
Mountains, where hares are documented as appearing on sacrificial stone altars, but not
on tombs.
In an article in the Zeitschrift für deutsche Vorzeitforschung [Journal of German Prehistoric

Studies], vol. 14 (1809), 143ff., Alfred-Erwin Jahn, cousin of Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, the
“father of gymnastics,” had already described the collision between the “hare” as a symbol
of fertility (in a spring myth associated with the goddess Ostara) and the “theatricality of
Golgotha”: the “somber departure of the son of God, who will not return for a long time.”It
was from this passage that Richard Wagner drew inspiration for the Good Friday spell he
inserted into the third act of his Parsifal. The suffering of the cross and the mirth of “nature’s
vernal laughter”: the contrast seemed to him an apposite expression of the “taxing burden
of compassion.”
Christoph Schlingensief now seized the scene Wagner had conceptualized through this
perspective when he was working on his production of Parsifal in Bayreuth. He had
long searched the score and the texts associated with the opera for something that would
touch his heart.
A slain hare, bought from a business specializing in game meat, was taken to a basement
at Berlin’s Humboldt University, where it was given over to the process of putrefaction
for several weeks. At the behest of Kairos-Film, Walter Lenertz set up a 35mm Arriflex
camera equipped with a time-lapse motor. The lighting was arranged. Care was taken
that there would be flies in the chamber. The camera recorded the decomposition of the
carcass at regular intervals for a number of weeks.
The experiment confirmed an insight from Walter Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic
Drama. Benjamin discusses a metaphor that everyday consciousness finds hard to bear:
the hairy animal body bursts open, broken apart by living and liquefied forces, so-called
worms, at work on its inside. The skeleton comes to the surface. It was of such “necro-
tizing nature” in which “new life” is already “forming zealously” that the time-lapse camera
gave account. It turned out that Benjamin was right when he called “the intensity of
maggots of various sizes breaking out all over the ruined landscape of the former hare” a
cause for consternation.
The sight of the decomposing hare, displayed in a large-format projection during the
“Good Friday spell,” was profoundly discomforting to the festival audience in Bayreuth.
After all, what they saw was not the “resurrection” of a hare but the “continuation of
life in the forms of decay”: others live on what has died. In the end, the hare had under-
ALEXANDER KLUGE Decomposition of the Hare V, Bayreuth, 2004–7, Film Still 243
gone liquefaction; worms teemed in it, they, too, “doomed to die,” for after consuming the
hare they were left without further sustenance in their basement compartment. That was
HARD TO BEAR AS A MEANS OF EVENING ENTERTAINMENT, but quite apposite as
a contribution to the establishment of the truth.
During the international press conference after the dress rehearsal, Schlingensief rejected DIETRICH KUHLBRODT
the charge of “pessimism” leveled against his concept. He found himself incapable of
seeing the greed with which the maggots captured by the camera clung to life as either A CHANCE ACQUAINTANCE
pessimistic or optimistic. Rather, he said, it was positive that the camera could record
such things, enabling the process to be repeated ad infinitum in the minds of future observers.
If that wasn’t something like “rebirth”! “Conquering the conqueror.” The seriousness of
the music, he said, proved it; there was no presenting it without giving offence. Wagner’s
music, tamed by Pierre Boulez, proved incapable of mitigating the shock.
ALEXANDER KLUGE
B y 1984 I had grown tired of meeting market deadlines when writing about films. No
launch date? No text! So it was welcome news that the people at Hamburg’s Abaton
Theater had put together the series, Unknown Films by Unknown Young German Direc-
Menu Total, and I, the staid public servant, was blown away as I heard how he had tried to
take up his studies, had failed, and only then saw the big opportunity and seized it.
tors. I went, curious to see a film, any film, without the constraint of having to deliver a re- The beginning was Venice. The early ’80s. The film festival. Schlingensief went. Not for
view. Tunguska—Die Kisten sind da [Tunguska—The Boxes Have Arrived], by a guy the films, but so he could bump into Wim Wenders. The two had never met before.
whose name I would learn to pronounce over time without stumbling. Schlingensief. I was Wenders, this was the opportunity Schlingensief saw, was to write a letter of recommen-
greatly impressed by the film. The expressionistic implication of film history was apparent dation: Schlingensief, a twenty year old no one had heard of, would apply to the University
in what seemed like a natural combination with the extensive quotations of avant-garde of Television and Film in Munich. Wenders complied. And, against expectations, Venice
techniques (Oskar Fischinger, 1934), all produced with an air of mischievousness. Young was not the opportunity. Schlingensief’s application was sneered at and rejected. No uni-
people behind and in front of the camera. Alfred Edel, who was my own age, among them. versity degree, then? What is someone like Schlingensief to do? He decides to skip uni-
The film played with its viewers—and with the movie theater employee who operated the versity and become a professor straightaway, or at least an adjunct, of Film Studies at the
projector. The flick caught fire, with a circular hole eating its way from the center to the University of Art and Design in Offenbach. And that’s what happened. Drawing on the
edges. That’s what it looked like. But we were all brave. The screening wasn’t discontinued, university’s resources and recruiting its students, he shot Tunguska—Die Kisten sind da,
and finally we got to discuss the film. the film that so enlightened me. And Wim Wenders saw Menu Total at the 1985 Berlinale,
and it made him totally sick within ten minutes. He was the first to come running out of the
Schlingensief, who was twenty-four, smiled a little nervously. He told us that people in Delphi Theater.
other theaters had actually interrupted the screening and looked for the fire extinguisher.
Not one of the viewers laughed. The mood was that of a high school faculty meeting, In retrospect, Venice had not been the opportunity to do it by the book and go down Wenders
although Schlingensief exuded the oversized charm typical of someone his age. “But Avenue. But that was probably exactly what made it the greatest opportunity for the path of
that’s all just so pubescent!” someone carped. I was outraged: “Why is pubescent Schlingensief’s genius, vaulting over all obstacles and conventions. So thank you, Lido!
negative? Rimbaud wrote The Drunken Boat when he was in puberty! And it wasn’t like
bad stuff followed once he’d grown up—nothing at all followed!” I called Mr. Schütte It turned out, however, that not everyone was enthralled by the talented Christoph Schlingensief.
at the Frankfurter Rundschau. “I’ve seen a great film no one knows about!” The cool A provocateur! In the early 1990s, spots now legendary ran on television, in a show hosted
question: “How many columns?” “Four!” “Photograph?” “Yes!” And thus appeared the by Friedrich Küppersbusch. ZAK, two, three minutes each. Broadcast on the regional station
first Schlingensief review. Under the headline: “Schlingensief, the Rimbaud of New in North Rhine-Westphalia, which includes Oberhausen, where Schlingensief’s father had
German Cinema.” his pharmacy. And the neighbors! Savagely satirized by Schlingensief. Der Stasihund [The
Stasi Dog], Pornos für Russland [Pornos for Russia]: Brigitte shone in these films. We
Schlingensief called me and asked if I wanted to be in his next film. I did. The shooting for met for a parent-parent conference in Oberhausen. Schlingensief’s parents told his elective
Menu Total started only a few months later. Brigitte Kausch, my wife, and I became parents of their woes. “Isn’t what he’s doing horrible? And the neighbors are saying so as
members of the Schlingensief family. For two decades. We were a generation older than well!” They treated us as their equals, appropriately, given our age. We shared their worries,
he. “Dear Parents,” he began his e-mails and text messages, “your son Christoph.” We since we had two children and knew our way around parent-teacher conferences. But
had our roles. That was an ambivalent experience, though an enriching one. In the very first didn’t being friends with Schlingensief’s parents now put us on a different level? No prob-
films we discovered qualities in ourselves that were the opposite of who we thought lem! I had read the German translation of Foucault right when it finally came out in 1983.
we were. I need to be more explicit. I had a job, after all. Prosecutor in Hamburg. And I had Multiplicity of identity; that was pure enrichment, certainly not some kind of psychological
to squeeze the shooting schedule in the Ruhr area into my work schedule, taking time split! So it was with great pleasure that I accepted an invitation from the nationwide televi-
off from prosecuting Nazi crimes. And here’s the thing. As Schlingensief’s father I acted sion station RTL and joined Schlingensief for an appearance on the show Der heiße Stuhl
in Menu Total and then again as the Nazi father, in uniform, bawling Nazi songs. Finally, [The Hot Seat]. That must have been in 1990 or 1991. On said seat sat the new minister for
in Terror 2000, I played the neo-Nazi father, dressed in an SA uniform complete with swas- youth, family, etc., Kohl’s girl, Angela Merkel. Our assignment was to attack her.
tika. Why did I do that? Why did Brigitte let things out I would never have suspected
were in her? The answer: in Schlingensief’s family, we were under the influence. And we “What is your stance regarding the extreme right-wing skinheads in the newly acquired
let it happen. To this day, we haven’t seen a therapist. And it’s good we haven’t. accession states, and how do you counteract their violence?” – “I went to meet them,
and we talked.” – “Did you also talk to their victims?” – “No, but I may well do so in the
Back to Schlingensief’s magnetism. By 1984, he had been making films for sixteen years. future.” The audience jeered. After the show, Merkel approached us, smiling, and wan-
High school films, then exercises from the time when he dropped out of the university ted to know: “Are you guys a bubble?” We didn’t contradict her, although I still don’t know
before his first semester was over—he studied philosophy—and decided to go for a pro- what sort of bubble she meant. It can’t have been anything too terrible, since she continued:
fessional career in film. He told me about that time in his life as we were shooting “You absolutely have to visit me at the ministry, will you?” She looked into Schlingensief’s
DIETRICH KUHLBRODT 247

eyes. How so? We had provoked her, after all! What had happened? It must have been some- able to operate. I had practiced rules no. 1 and 2 before. In the circus. A real circus, inte-
thing like Schlingensief’s charisma. grated into a Schlingensief production at the Prater, this time in Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg.
The show was live. “Get on the horse.” “Hold on to the high bar.” “Hang by your knees.” I
Charisma cannot be explained. But it brings people to do things that upon careful consid- hung, hoisted up beneath the vault. Holding a microphone. “Give a speech.” I gave one,
eration they wouldn’t do because they wouldn’t have come up with the idea. That makes unprepared, but with enough adrenaline coursing through my veins. I know that the current
the charismatic both shady and creative. If you’re generally regarded as shady—say, as a trend is to prevent actors from reciting their lines by playing soccer before rehearsals or
provocateur—you have to come up with something that’ll earn you respect, that’ll draw not badminton during rehearsals. It’s just that with Schlingensief I had no lines. What I said, I said
just attention but perhaps even praise. Schlingensief, who was shady, knew what needed off the top of my head, and it was my business.
to be done. We met at the Frankfurt airport to fly to New York, where we would stage a per-
formance to drown Germany and her evil history in the Hudson River. Schlingensief showed
up wearing peyot, an ultra-Orthodox hat, and a caftan. In the cabin he demanded kosher
food. He got it. In New York, the Goethe-Institut’s chief press officer received us—or was it
the consulate’s? In any case, he turned pale and predicted that Schlingensief, wearing this
get-up, would be shot today or the next day. The three of us drove to Times Square, where
we parked the car directly beneath a no parking sign. My job was to stay there and watch out.
Walter Lenertz hoisted the camera on his shoulder, and Schlingensief walked up Broad-
way in the middle of the street, between the lanes. As he reached the first cross street, a
yellow cab came his way and slowed down. An arm shot out the window. Bang? No—the
driver spread his fingers to signal victory. Schlingensief held up his picket sign: DON’T BUY
GERMAN GOODS. Germans, don’t buy from Jews. In Manhattan, if you’re not a press
officer, you understand.
Schlingensief’s appearances, I think, always worked because he was always fully aware.
Strictly speaking, he didn’t even make appearances, he was simply there. And since I was
often part of his work, I came to understand what he wanted from me. “Be yourself,” he
said in the great 1990s at the Volksbühne. And to the actors, seasoned professionals, he
would say no less frequently: “Don’t playact!” And so it came about that we, the parents,
were called to Vienna’s Burgtheater for the penultimate rehearsal weekend for the Jelinek
play Bambiland, to break the actors of the habit of acting. Brigitte was excellent at that,
I wasn’t sure that it would help the group dynamic. Even today, we’re friends with some of
those actors. That, indeed, was Schlingensief’s rule no. 1: Be yourself. When Sophie
Rois, standing on the stage, began to declaim, Schiller-style, he sent one of her disabled
fellow actors up to her to cut her off in the middle of a performance. Sophie stopped,
waited, and said: “Schlingensief, if you need me, I’m in the staff cafeteria,” and off she went.
That exit was a real Rois, the woman herself.
Rule no. 2: If you’ve made a mistake, talk about it. Never gloss over a slip of the tongue, for
instance. Go for it, right into it! Was it a mistake to do the container action in Vienna?
Ausländer raus! [Foreigners Out!] How am I supposed to do that, “talk like Haider”? “Talk
the way you think Haider talks!” That was two days before I stood atop the container in
front of the opera and thanked the ladies and gentlemen of Vienna for sending their wood-
en navy into the North Sea in 1861, toward the mouth of the Elbe River, to break the
French blockade of the river and free Hamburg’s merchants. They were freed. And then
this: to prevent a blockade of Austria, the chairman of Hamburg’s Christian-Demo-
cratic Union has traveled to Brussels today. He sends his greetings to all of you! Great ap-
plause. From the wrong side. But I was in the middle of it. In the Haider mistake. And
DIETRICH KUHLBRODT 249

AINO LABERENZ
AINO LABERENZ 253
TORSTEN LEMMER
CHRISTOPH WORKS!
Working with Christoph Schlingensief when you’re an extreme rightist music producer?
Can it be done? Yes, it can be done!
In 2001, Christoph was looking for neo-Nazis willing to renounce their affiliations for his
production of Hamlet at the Zurich Schauspielhaus. The actor Peter Kern, whom I knew
from Düsseldorf and who was a member of the Hamlet cast, invited me to Zurich and intro-
duced me to Christoph. Christoph persuaded me and half a dozen of my right-wing
buddies to participate in the theater project. The rehearsals at the Schauspielhaus and the
actions held in town were enormously taxing. In the beginning, both sides had their ongo-
ing doubts. Christoph asked himself: Are they really willing to get out, or are they just
trying to ride my coattails to fame? And we were asking ourselves: Is Christoph really serious
about this, or is he only showing us off to garner even more publicity? He was serious. On
the other hand, we actually just wanted to provoke the leftist culturati.
Opening night was coming closer and closer, and the nervousness mounted. Christoph’s
inimitable style, his constant desire to find a way to come together, the nightly discussions,
the rehearsals to the point of exhaustion, and last but not least, his unshakeable trust in my
people and myself were the crucial factor that prevented the situation from escalating. And
it engendered the ever-growing desire in us to leave the right-wing scene behind. On the
one hand, there was Christoph, a strong personality who allowed people to see his weak-
nesses; on the other hand, was us right-wingers—weak personalities pretending to be strong.
At some point, we had come to an irreversible decision: we would get out.
Christoph works!
He quite personally paved a way for me to return to the “center of life.” Without him, I might
still be the same producer of stiflingly stupid and, most importantly, xenophobic music
even today. It is only because of the push Christoph gave me that I am now married to an
Arab woman and we have a little son.
My other right-wing Hamlet comrades-in-arms all got out as well. One example I might
mention is my friend Jan Zobel, who is now married, has a child, and works a good job for
an international company.
I am grateful to Christoph; he was my star in dark times, showing my buddies and me the
way to a new life.
TORSTEN LEMMER Nazilein.komm [Little-nazi.come], Zurich, 2001 257

MATTHIAS LILIENTHAL
EIGHTY PERCENT INTERNAL

DYNAMICS
MATTHIAS LILIENTHAL IN
CONVERSATION WITH
FRANZ WILLE
Franz Wille: Matthias Lilienthal, you discovered, or rather, and even better, instigated Lilienthal: His estrangement from the publicly funded repertoire theater consisted more in
Christoph Schlingensief for the theater. What was it like at Berlin’s Volksbühne in 1993? the need to find his own role in it. And he deeply detested professionalism. Whenever—
this was true later on as well—a production started to approach perfection, he would smash
Matthias Lilienthal: Dirk Nawrocki, Frank Castorf’s assistant, got there first. Dimiter it all apart. For 100 Jahre CDU I drove to the psychiatric clinic in Teupitz with him, where
Gotscheff canceled on us at short notice, and then we read a report in the Berlin city mag- he had already been for Terror 2000, visiting his friends. That is where the clique, the family,
azine, Tip, about Schlingensief’s Terror 2000 and we watched his films. That’s when we consisting of Achim, Kerstin, Helga, and others involved with many productions had formed.
approached him. The idea was initially that he should produce a remake of his film on the To Christoph, they were all much more normal than I was. That’s how it was in life as well
stage; the result was 100 Jahre CDU [100 Years of CDU]. When Christoph started, he as in aesthetics.
didn’t have the slightest clue about the theater. Even then his directing style was very bold and
simple, but you had to be somewhat close to things to understand what he was driving at, Wille: The professional dramaturge at a repertoire theater, by contrast, was …
since a camera zoom is of very limited use in the Volksbühne’s grand hall. The production
premiered and drew huge attention, but few people really liked it. Things that were brazen and Lilienthal: … a neurotic idiot, and Achim, who needed ongoing psychiatric treatment, a
impertinent in the films sometimes slid into mere satire on the stage. After the third perfor- real friend. He also organized the weddings for this family, they attended every birthday
mance, I said to him: “You’re very different from the show, please join your actors on the party; it was affecting to see how he always took care of them, they were almost his first
stage.” Initially he just delivered an introductory speech; during the next performance he went priority. They also all attended the memorial service. I think he could also only bear the
on, had the lights turned off, a song was played, and he talked about the death of his uncle actors—Margit Carstensen, Irm Hermann, Sophie Rois, Bernhard Schütz, or Martin Wuttke—
and that he was so desperate that he now needed to shoot up. This private and petit bour- when they were there as well.
geois family story and his desperation, with which he cast a spell over the audience, au-
thenticated everything that came before and after it in the show. That was the moment Wille: Here is something Schlingensief said early on: “An actor who works with all his strength
Schlingensief was born for the theater. to become completely caught up in a role will in my eyes always remain a pitiful figure.”
Wille: A moment of personal conviction that covered all allegations. Lilienthal: Exactly.
Lilienthal: But of course that too included merciless dissimulation; it goes without saying he Wille: How could the professional actors bear that?
didn’t actually shoot up. The situations he played with, after all, very often came from his
closest biographical context. Just now the memorial service brought me to Oberhausen’s Lilienthal: At first there was of course a great deal of insecurity about what it was they had
Altmarkt Square for the first time, with his parents’ pharmacy in that sort of tiled 1950s been summoned to, and there would also be people time and again who didn’t feel like
building, with the church where he was an altar boy for twelve years, the Caritas office on working with him a second time. An old warhorse like Joachim Tomaschewsky, who was
the left, a band of boozers on the right—the entire filmic and theatrical world of Schlingensief almost eighty at the time, didn’t have a problem with a style that went against everything
was really already there in one piece. You could positively imagine the six year old with his he had done before. There was the sense of a vital family, a great energy. A new metaphor,
Super 8 camera, capturing and collecting these situations. a new invention every thirty seconds that conveys a power that spreads from one to the
next. Of course there were also disappointments. There were no more than vestiges of what
Wille: When Schlingensief came to the Volksbühne he was a fairly experienced and quite actors know as “directing.” Meltdowns, too, were a regular occurrence, and he wouldn’t
professional film director; he had also been unit manager for Lindenstraße for several show up for the rehearsals for five days, and someone had to carefully pilot him back in.
years and knew the trade. Which you wouldn’t necessarily have known from his films …
Wille: The first productions were almost unanimously slammed by the critics at the time,
Lilienthal: … nor from his theater. That was a deliberate and calculated aesthetic choice. including myself. Where did the theater take the power of conviction to persevere and
In terms of his mastery of the trade, he could easily have made an ordinary film. Die letzte keep working with him?
Stunde im Führerbunker [The Last Hour in the Fuhrerbunker], for example: shot in a single
night in some bunker in the Ruhr area, and the question of what happens when you ex- Lilienthal: After Kühnen ’94 we resented the critics, because we always thought, you can
pose yourself to this situation. These were conscious decisions, after all: fucking bunker, dislike Schlingensief, but it’s not like he’s not coming out of a tradition. Viennese Actionism,
fucking darkness, Volker Spengler, Hitler, and a long night. Nitsch, Beuys, Kenneth Anger—it was all in there, and people had to see that.
Wille: Calculation also in the theater? Wille: But many people felt that it was heartwarming Actionism from the museum of 1960s
avant-garde theater, work that by the 1990s seemed to have long been shelved in the
basement of theater history.
MATTHIAS LILIENTHAL 261

Lilienthal: But Schlingensief knew exactly which artistic contexts he was referring to, and Lilienthal: Eighty percent internal dynamics, accompanied by desperate attempts to pre-
that at least went a long way toward refuting the charge of arbitrariness that you could pare that always failed one way or another. For the early productions he always wrote
always also overhear in many reviews. As a dramaturge, you also allow yourself to be cor- scripts, in the case of 100 Jahre CDU, it was a modified version of the Terror 2000 book;
rupted by the person, since the person is a promise of the future; the hope, at least, that Kühnen ’94 was actually meant to be a film, but after Terror 2000 he simply couldn’t get
that promise will be made good on. So we in the theater are at a major advantage, because the financing together for the production. Terror 2000 had been co-financed by the public
we’re living with that person, whereas the critics have no more than the two or three hours broadcasting station WDR, but it was never aired, which hurt Schlingensief deeply.
of the performance. Still, in retrospect, if you now look at the old DVDs, I think that a lot of From Rocky Dutschke onward there were no scripts anymore, and the complex series of
it makes a great deal of sense. events on the stage instead tended to be pieced together during rehearsals. When he
did Ausländer raus! [Foreigners Out!] in Vienna, there was this great widespread enthusiasm
Wille: But the critics weren’t the only ones at the time to fail to see the background in the- for Big Brother, which became the initial situation inside the containers, and then Jörg
ater history; Frank Castorf, too, thought that the early stuff was pretty horrible, didn’t he? Haider and his FPÖ [Freedom Party of Austria] joined the government for the first time in
Austrian history, and there was the situation with the asylum seekers, and he put the two
Lilienthal: I don’t know exactly what Frank thought. things together. The objective was that the asylum seekers would sit in the containers and
the Austrians would vote them out. Christoph then also studied the rhetoric used by the
Wille: Beyond his aesthetic procedures, Schlingensief’s theatrical appeal has a lot to do FPÖ and found out why people offering rational arguments on talk shows had such a difficult
with his personal qualities as a performer, with that charming mixture of the rabble-rouser time with the FPÖ’s people: because the latter never gave arguments, but instead made
and the Boy Scout troop leader. a claim true simply by repeating it often enough. And when Christoph then sat on a talk show
with the FPÖ’s spokeswoman for cultural policy, who said that what he was doing was
Lilienthal: One good example is Tötet Helmut Kohl [Kill Helmut Kohl]. Among other things, political agitation rather than art, he yelled: “Ms. Unterreiner, you’ve never even been to the
it was about the second manifesto of Surrealism, which includes the proposition that the theater.” A claim that was most probably incorrect, but, in its Dadaist idiocy, threw the
fundamental Surrealist act is to walk out into the street, take a gun, and shoot the next guy debate off-track far enough where the FPÖ itself didn’t know what to do anymore. Christoph
you see. Christoph freed this proposition of its generality, got on the subway at Rosa-Lux- yelled that sentence ten times in a row and walked off the set as the great winner. The
emburg-Platz with eighty spectators—all wearing paper hats—and then he recited these impression people were left with was that Ms. Unterreiner had never even been to the theater
sentences from the manifesto with the spectators. There was also a scaffold like the one and so was in no position to presume to decide what theater was and what agitation was.
from the Grand-Guignol, and he asked, “Do you want Helmut Kohl to die?” And everyone
enthusiastically shouted, “Yes.” Any CDU voter would have jeered along with the rest of Wille: How vulnerable or sensitive was Schlingensief to criticism?
them during that show, and wouldn’t have had a problem. The signs of Dada and the carni-
valesque were clear enough. It wasn’t until four days later that the Berliner Kurier ran a press Lilienthal: Oh, totally. He would memorize a bad review by heart and get depressed. He
photograph showing the banner KILL HELMUT KOHL, and that’s when the scandal broke. was far from indifferent.
Wille: What was Schlingensief’s charisma? Wille: That’s an astonishing need for affection in someone who was, in his work, always
looking for conflict.
Lilienthal: He was totally hyped-up, was permanently bubbling over, and at the same time he
was like a medium that let everyone get to him. He looked at the world as though it were a Lilienthal: There was a profound need to be loved. The absurd thing is that many reactions
film and then translated this film into a screenplay, playfully overdrawing its features … to his death are now in fact satisfying the hope he had always felt. I am sure it has a lot to
do with his relationship with the parents, this quest for recognition. That played an ex-
Wille: … and built a sense of immediacy and closeness to his spectators, even though they tremely large role. And parents and society are then somehow one and the same thing.
didn’t know him very well as a person—which is ultimately a fundamental theatrical situation.
Wille: So then he was the good boy who wants to be praised by his parents.
Lilienthal: He was also permanently in touch with everyone. No doubt the person with the
highest texting frequency I know. A permanent communicator with whom input and output Lilienthal: By all means, yes: in every talk show he would be the nation’s favorite son-in-
were only fractions of a second apart. law—good-looking, eloquent, brilliant, intimate, intelligent, energetic, surprising.
Wille: How much was planning in his productions, and how much was internal dynamics? Wille: How would you agree on new productions with him? Was there a master plan? Or
was a new project usually largely a product of chance and opportunity?

Lilienthal: We always simply agreed on the next date. So there was the slot first, then ideas be discussions afterwards, no doubt a wild mixture of interpretation and idiosyncratic
would be developed. The fact aside that it had nothing to do with the canon of plays usually adaptation; I’m sure that was an important source. He hardly studied at a university, but he
staged at repertoire theaters, it was perfectly regular repertoire planning. picked things up in many places. In Munich, he lived in the same building with Thomas
Meinecke, and they also had important intellectual arguments.
Wille: Controlled from a highly efficient Schlingensief office.
Wille: How did he see himself?
Lilienthal: There was no real office at the time of Ausländer raus! The office phase didn’t start
until around 2000. Before then, his computer and his cell phone were the office. The large Lilienthal: As a filmmaker. After his first bout with his illness, there was also the idea of
office with associates and assistants had always been one of his ideals: Andy Warhol and making a film again. He asked Oskar Roehler, with whom he had co-written the screenplay
the Factory. The other point of orientation was of Fassbinder. That was evident, for example, for Terror 2000, to write the book, and he called a long list of producers and told them, “I
in his hiring of Fassbinder actors. After Oberhausen, where he grew up, he first went to am totally ill, don’t have a lot of time anymore, give me money now, I have to shoot a film.”
Munich and applied to the film academy. Didn’t get in, lived in Schwabing; that, too, an attempt
to emulate Fassbinder. Wille: What remains of his work?
Wille: Another point of reference was Beuys. A similar mixture of the artist, the charismatic, Lilienthal: I think people will see the films in new ways.
the shaman, the media character …
Wille: And in the theater …
Lilienthal: … and don’t forget the politician: Schlingensief’s Chance 2000 was an exten-
sion of Beuys’s running as a candidate for the Green Party. Lilienthal: … he has established dilettantism as a positive force. In combination with an
intelligent way of thinking about the world. The more explicitly the evenings were actions,
Wille: Schlingensief, who despised professionalism, was a great professional when it experimental arrangements, the safer he felt.
came to his image in the media. As a person of public interest—the reactions after his death
demonstrated this as well—he was a media star, outshining everyone else in the German Wille: Did he feel safe in front of an audience?
theater world.
Lilienthal: He enjoyed it. When we opened Hebbel am Ufer, he blessed the building with a
Lilienthal: On the one hand, I’m sure that has to do with the different genres in which he performance. Things were getting out of hand in several places because there were way
worked: film, theater, opera, the visual arts. They reinforced one another, and then there too many people, and as the orchestra pit was already shaking menacingly, we had to push
were the numerous talk show appearances. He was one of the few artists who affected people away so the situation wouldn’t get dangerous. So he said to me that that was not
many people in profoundly upsetting ways in these formats. Toward the end, there was the way to do it: “You have to love the audience, they have nothing against you, treat them
also his battle against his illness, which he turned into a grand spectacle. There was a time, as friends.” Even when he felt most miserable toward the end, he completely thrived in
after all, when Frank Castorf likewise drew the attention of a wider public as an East communication with five hundred laughing people.
German who many people felt spoke for them. Back then they were equals. Christoph was
also an absolute virtuoso in the way he used press releases, media appearances, blogs,
articles in newspapers. And he maintained his website with the utmost professionalism
before many of us even figured out what that was all about. When I went to Cameroon
with him, he took a picture of us at the airport in Paris, and ten minutes later the photograph
was up on the website.
Wille: Schlingensief was very present on a variety of levels and ventured into contexts
that others would shy away from. You don’t direct a Wagner opera in Bayreuth off the cuff.
How competent was he in fields like that, and how much did he know about what?
Lilienthal: He was a brilliant collagist who read up on certain fields in great detail. He was
an absolute specialist in matters relating to Viennese Actionism. The year and a half during
which he maintained Werner Nekes’s archive was important—he showed films, including
many documents from Viennese Actionism, at weekly screenings in Mülheim. There would

JONATHAN MEESE
JONATHAN MEESE IS MOTHER

PARSIVAL
Jonathan Meese is Mother Parsival
JONATHAN MEESE Performance, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, Berlin, March 28, 2005 269
MICHAELA MELIÁN AND
THOMAS MEINECKE
READ TEXTS BY CHRISTOPH

SCHLINGENSIEF FROM MODE &
VERZWEIFLUNG AND SING A
SONG BY VIER KAISERLEIN
T he idea really came up around ten days ago at the memorial service in Oberhausen
when Chris Dercon asked us: you already knew him back in the day, very early on,
whether we shouldn’t do something here in this exhibition—you, Michaela, also attended
the opening, didn’t you, and saw him for the last time. And then we remembered, he wrote
these texts. At home we then realized that there were exactly three, so there aren’t that
many of them, but there was a time when he moved—I think I was living with Sanne at
Bergmannstraße 48, and I was twenty-four, Sanne was twenty-two—Christoph by chance
moved, though it wasn’t quite by chance, because his parents had made arrangements
for him to move to a place with a pharmacy below, and they knew the pharmacist as well, I
think; he moved into the building where we were living and tried to get into the film academy.
And that didn’t work out. And then he registered at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, to
study I don’t even know exactly what, was it philosophy and something else maybe, but he
ended up not really going to school, and what he actually did was this magazine—we
founded this magazine Mode & Verzweiflung in 1978, and he joined us, wanted to contribute.
There was this band, F.S.K., in which Michaela and I have been playing in for thirty years,
and he then became some sort of permanent support, he always went on tour with us and
played on this little home organ, Helge Schneider-style art was really what it was, he
played standards on this little home organ on his thighs, with this sort of arpeggio turned
on, and it was a kind of solo-entertainer music at a time when the possibility of perceiving
something like that as ironic hadn’t been established, so in that regard it was a radical act,
and he always came on tour with us, and that’s how, on tour with F.S.K., he met his music
mates, including, actually, the singer Tobias Gruben, who then unfortunately also died a few
years later, but who then started a band with Christoph that was called Vier Kaiserlein
that then toured with F.S.K. and so on. And he was also over at Sanne’s and my place every
night really, listening to records, or hauling his most recent acquisitions—lots of musical
instruments or equipment—up into the attic, film cameras, too, this Super 8 camera that was
subsequently flung down from the Bavaria statue, still running and recording as it was
falling. In any case, we really spent some very intense time together for several years. And
so then he wanted to contribute to Mode & Verzweiflung, and wrote these texts for it, which
I think are the only ones. He wasn’t one to write, generally speaking. And when we came
home from the memorial, we realized, oh, there are only three. There was an issue of Mode &
Verzweiflung that looks like this, it was actually finished in 1981 and then came out in 1983,
and the city of Oberhausen, where Christoph was from, comes up throughout the issue.
And we all had this idea, everyone would write something about the city of Oberhausen,
and we repeatedly read these texts to each other so they would correspond: Rekord in
Oberhausen, by Christoph. Duisburg Communists Play Contemporary Classical Music in
Oberhausen, by Berg Lauchstaedt. Idiot as Model: A Cheerful Mood of New Beginnings
in Oberhausen, by Thomas.
Rekord in Oberhausen, by Christoph Schlingensief.
12:45 p.m.: Gotta get the hell home, he thought, bolted from the building on Lothringer
Straße at the corner of Elisabethstraße, ran across Kaplan-Küppers-Weg, repeatedly
looked through the slightly iced-up driver-side window at the choke as he was still breathing
on the door lock, and soon opened the driver-side door.
The motor started right away, too.
An event held on September 11, 2010 during the exhibition

“Patti Smith & Christoph Schlingensief” (June 25–September 18,
2010) at Galerie Sonja Junkers, Munich, recorded by
MICHAELA MELIÁN AND THOMAS MEINECKE Franz Bergmann. 273
This was not the first time he was driving. there was sure to be a third or a fourth possible solution as well.
He was now on Helmholtzstraße at the corner of Stöckmannstraße and needed to go to He was, moreover, not yet quite clear about the meaning of these investigations; he was deal-
Grevenstraße. ing, after all, with a dark brown—the color was achieved by adding milk—and slightly bitter—
He first drove up to the light, where he then turned left in the direction of Marktstraße. After he had run out of sugar—liquid that just happened to have this habit of wearing a little foam
several congestions and a yellow Taunus that had taken his right of way on Friedrich-Karl- lid during the first seconds after its arrival in the coffee mug, the way others among his
Straße at the corner of Marktstraße, he kept to the right, crossed Bebelstraße and then acquaintance were likewise in the habit of wearing a hat, a cap, a scarf, or gloves when first
Concordiastraße, which leads immediately past the VOT Motormarkt, making it a shortcut arriving at his apartment.
for its parallel, Goebenstraße. That morning, in any case, he let his coffee provoke him to such a degree—he had once again
Now he was on Straßburger Straße, which, as is well known, leads directly in the direction of failed to get the little lid into his mouth before it burst apart, to slug it down and get it out
Buschhausen and offers an easy turn he had taken on several occasions onto Mülheimer of harm’s way—that he refused to drink the coffee and resolved to force down the two rolls
Straße, after passing the building of the Oberhausen civic center on the right and having to from the day before, the hardboiled egg, the sausage, and the leftover piece of stollen
turn right away onto Grillostraße. without taking any fluids.
From Mülheimer Straße it was now another ca. 800 meters to the freeway entrance ramp to- He would rather choke than be in cahoots with his coffee and have to take responsibility in
ward Sterkrade-Königshardt, which has not only been widened to two lanes but is also in the face of a matter he hadn’t wanted in the first place.
some places separated by 2–3 m-high acoustic fencing from Rolandstraße, Freiherr-vom- No, he wouldn’t make things quite so easy for his coffee.
Stein-Straße, Alsenstraße, or the abovementioned Buschhausener Straße, which run behind Christoph Schlingensief, “Krönung,” Mode & Verzweiflung. Thermometer der Zeit 6 (Summer 1983).
it. He was now approaching the freeway entrance described a moment ago: but instead of
going straight ahead, as he was wont to do, in the direction of the sewage treatment plant, he And now I’m also going to read Christoph’s text from the issue after that, no. 7, which came
made a right in the direction of Osterfelder Landstraße, a route he was as yet unfamiliar with. out in 1984, it’s called Morgen ist auch noch ein Tag [Tomorrow Is Another Day], and at
Oh yes, he liked to drive! the time we were in the habit of writing a brief intro for every contribution, which reads in this
He had been driving for some time on Kaiserfeldenstraße, had crossed Monningerstraße case: The conflict between two creatures serves Schlingensief as an opportunity for a
and Nohlstraße, and now turned left onto an unnamed street that passed by the Osterfelder fabulous Oberhausen forest piece.
and Bottroper collieries.
The sky was a luminous red, everything looked impressive. Now the road petered out. He Tomorrow Is Another Day, by Christoph Schlingensief.
stopped to look for a place to turn around, such as was always at his disposal, say, along
the Landwehr or in the Flockenfeld. Silence had fallen.
When he had gotten out of the car, he saw the five vehicles more clearly, which he had And only the wind was rushing through the lofty treetops of the Breckerfeld forest.
been observing for a considerable period of time in the rearview mirror. They must have Here and there a small branch would fall to the ground, and the old and decayed trees could
followed him. He got back in, turned as discussed, and drove past the other cars in the be heard groaning.
direction of Grevenstraße. The sun was still shining, warming the damp and fragrant forest soil. Yet evening would de-
He paid no attention whatsoever to the drivers of the vehicles that had stopped behind him, scend soon—and the animals of the forest would then congregate and retire to sleep,
instead resuming his trip. warming each other—and only the owl would fly about with its highly developed eyes and
Christoph Schlingensief, “Rekord in Oberhausen,” Mode & Verzweiflung. Thermometer der Zeit 6 (Summer 1983).
keep watch until the next morning.
“What am I going to do?” the little lark asked the great wise owl. “Just look at me … I have
Now I’m also going to read Krönung. become so scrawny and delicate that I can no longer even find my way back into my home
and now seek your protection and advice. Only a few months ago I was frolicking with the
Krönung, by Christoph Schlingensief. other animals of the forest. We flew all the way to the valley. Past peasant Gröhner’s little
farmstead, past his shepherd dog and the great pasture, all the way to the paddock. There
It never ever ceased to fascinate him how the little whitecaps on his morning coffee would we would rest, and everyone would have something to tell.
swim in the center as a little round lid only to leave their trajectory in a sudden and perfectly But now I am more scrawny and delicate than ever before. I barely make it to the first meadow,
unmotivated act that was almost provocative, hitting the rim of his coffee mug, where they at and everything around me seems to have become big and menacing. Even my friends now
once split up into thousands of individual little foam lids and spread as though they wanted abandon me and just keep on flying. Oh, owl, what is all this supposed to come to.”
to keep the coffee alive by maintaining a certain distance from the coffee mug rim. Then the owl opened its large wide eyes, turned its head back, and took a long and probing
Or it might also be that the coffee simply wouldn’t brook any little lid, urging it toward the exit, look at the lark. “Well,” the owl said after quite a while, “just look at you. How often have I
where it would be torn apart upon arrival into thousands of particles. sat here and gazed after you. How fast and nimbly you flew about, and you in particular were
He was as yet incapable of deciding in favor of one of the two solutions at his disposal, since one of the fastest laraks in the entire forest. But now you are sitting here and asking for ad-
MICHAELA MELIÁN AND THOMAS MEINECKE 275

vice. Well, I will advise you, since I have also known for a long time.” Vier Kaiserlein, Einsam.
Hearing this, the lark calmed down a little. For it had been so very excited and anxious the
entire time. I froze when I saw her, I took a second look to make sure, but suddenly she turned around
“Whenever you flew about in the forest,” the owl continued, “whenever the birds rested and looked at me and so there we stood.
and conferred, you were one of the most boisterous and garrulous. And you never
noticed when your friends briefly stopped here and there to nibble on a berry or a piece (Baba bababa ba ba) I instinctively walked toward her (ba ba bababa ba), it was as though
of root. she had never left me. This face, this flesh, this silhouette (baba bababa ba ba), that never
No, you would then turn to someone else and talk to him. Now you are gaunt and weak, and stops haunting me. (Ba ba bababa ba.) Sensations were racing through my brain, I wanted
your eyes show you nothing but mirages and lies, so that you overlook all the red juicy berries to touch you, kiss you, hug you. And I walked toward you, trembling, when something
and must continue to go hungry. stopped me in my tracks.
One or two more weeks, and I will have to bury your lifeless body so the voracious ants will
not find it and, zealous workers that they are, gnaw it down to the bones.” Lonely through the streets (the streets), alone through the night (through the night), I will never
The lark had turned very silent and pale. No one had ever criticized her so harshly. So what forget you (never forget), you killed me (killed). Say why (why), say why (darling why why), say
was she supposed to do now? why (why why why why why), say why, say why.
“Well,” the owl continued, “if only you had a little more strength, you might try to eat a berry
and would immediately feel improved. But now you are sitting here and once again wasting I immediately knew what was up, a feeling, a mixture of rage, hatred, and desperation boiled
time. Time that will cost you your life, unless you act soon.” up inside me. (Baba bababa ba ba.) Yes, of course, his suit was the most expensive brand
“But now it is dark and all berries are invisible,” the lark groaned. “You may be right,” the owl to be sure, but did you not see who he really was? I wanted to give you love, tenderness, and
whispered sagely, “but tomorrow is another day!” understanding (ba ba bababa ba), but you never wanted anything but money. Never anything
Christoph Schlingensief, “Morgen ist auch noch ein Tag,” Mode & Verzweiflung. Thermometer der Zeit 7 (Fall 1984).
but money. It did more for you. Ha, but so I was utterly over you. I don’t want to listen to your
lies any longer, girl, you just don’t deserve me.
And now the only thing we’ve really got left is this one song that then came out on this sampler
called Wunder gibt es immer wieder [Miracles Happen Again and Again] produced by the Lonely through the streets (yes, now you are walking lonely through the streets), alone through
Hamburg-based label ZickZack, it features many bands, doesn’t matter, for example, one band the night (and you are walking through the night, ha ha ha). I will never forget you killed me
that you would today know from different contexts is Tom Holert’s. Well, you wouldn’t really (you never want to forget that I killed you and you’re not supposed to forget it either). Say why
know it, but you would know Tom Holert today. Tom Holert is someone a person may know. (girl, you with your endless questions). Say why (and why why why). Say why (now you’re
There are bands called Tempelfreuden, Knusperkeks, Radierer, etc., but F.S.K. is featured asking why). Say why (you could’ve thought of that earlier, couldn’t you). Say why (I wanted
on it as well, and so is Vier Kaiserlein. And about Vier Kaiserlein you might say, I don’t know to give you love, wanted to give you tenderness, you wanted nothing but money). Say why,
whether they had more than two gigs. They probably did. But these two gigs were in Munich; say why (you’re stupid is what it is, you’re stupid).
one time they were our opening act at the Academy of Art, in 1982 or 1983, and the other
was at the Alabamahalle in Munich. Christoph’s solo-entertainer act then quickly expanded
with the addition of a woman who also lived at Bergmannstraße 48. A hotbed that house,
so to speak. Claudia Hauser, who was actually studying ballet, sang in that band. Tobias
Gruben, who was really still in high school in Starnberg then also sang, and someone who
was also a student in Munich named Christoph Gerozissis played the guitar. Christoph
Gerozissis now works at Anton Kern Gallery in New York. Matthias Colli also played the guitar,
and Matthias then later worked as an actor and screenwriter on Christoph Schlingensief’s
first films. Claudia Hauser, I don’t know what became of her. Neither do I.
Should I sing the refrain … ? The thing was that it was actually Tobias speaking the lyrics,
and Christoph would then always just press some key on the home organ, setting off these
automatic arpeggios, and Claudia sang in her very high soprano voice. Since I cannot sing
soprano … I’ll sing it. … I’ll read the lyrics, and he’s going to sing the female role. The song
is called Einsam [Lonely], lyrics and music by Christoph Schlingensief, recorded by the
band Vier Kaiserlein.
MICHAELA MELIÁN AND THOMAS MEINECKE 277

KLAUS MERTES
REQUIEM FOR CHRISTOPH

SCHLINGENSIEF, OBERHAUSEN,
AUGUST 30, 2010
Homily on John 11: “I am the resurrection, and the life …” 2. Resurrection and Life
Logged from memory after sermon delivery
We just sang: “Jesus, mein Freudenmeister” [“Jesus, Master of My Joys”]. What, then, is
Dear Aino Laberenz, dear mother Schlingensief, dear relatives and friends of Christoph—I Jesus, and before he begins to speak? “Resurrection and life” are the two words that,
will take the liberty of keeping to his first name, especially since Christoph, the great I-sayer, together, stand for a single matter. I translate both as “festival.” Wherever Jesus appears,
has united all of us here in one We—dear sisters and brothers. he is cause for a festival. Every man exudes what he is: one enters a room and exudes
reproaches. The other alarms me with his mere being. In Jesus, the fundamental mood he
1. I am exudes is that of a festival. Wherever he is a festival ensues. His very birth is cause for a
festival among the angels in Heaven. The shared meal and drink epitomize the festival:
Christ does not say: “I proclaim unto you the resurrection, and the life.” The word he chooses wherever Jesus is there is eating and drinking—and not just a little, as we know from the
at this moment must be taken exactly. “I am the resurrection, and the life.” A man speaks archive of defamation the gospels also preserve for us: “Behold a gluttonous man, and a
through what he is more than through what he says. He speaks through what he is even before winebibber.” His presence sets a festive mood and especially among those who are not
he can speak: as a baby in his mother’s arms, as a lover in the arms of his beloved, as a man invited to the festivals of the righteous and noble. That is also why his festivals are scandal-
who marvels and is deeply moved, who celebrates and dies. To be means to speak before one ous. They are perceived as a provocation. No doubt about it—they do provoke; but they
speaks. What brings a man suffering, what brings joy—in these he surely speaks. What are not celebrated with the intention to provoke. To the contrary, these festivals gather us,
annoys and upsets him, what appeals to him and delights him, in these he says something. they reconcile and strengthen us.
Yet courageous is the I that says: “I am …” Christ articulates his own being. He steps out- This is not about a perennial good mood. To Christoph’s mind, Jesus was the one who
side the speech of mere being by deliberately putting what he is into words. Then every- invented “the whole suffering business.” The death sentence was the attempt of his
thing depends on his telling the truth—on his not staging anything in order to conceal, to enemies to put an end to the festival because it confused and discomfited them. The
distract, to embellish, to shine. The staging that then takes place serves the purpose of conflict Jesus incurred by saying “I” came to threaten his very existence. Grappling with
showing what is. To do so is hard work and at the same time a gift when it succeeds. “Show Jesus, we must grapple with the suffering, must delve even into the agony at the Mount
your wound,” show your joy, show what moves you. of Olives, into the abysses of mortal fear, into the struggle between resistance to the en-
croachment of death and submission its power. The celebration of life must prove itself
My being urges to articulate itself—my fear, my grief, my rage as well as my joy, my exul- before the reality of mourning and death. “It couldn’t possibly be as lovely in heaven as
tation, my gratitude. But when I do so, when I show my I to the world, I expose myself to it is here.” This sentence, which I can also imagine Jesus as saying, is true only if it can
a risk—to self-doubt as well as the doubts of others: “He is a self-publicist, a narcissist, a stand in the face of the brutal reality of violence, pain, and death, which are also parts
provocateur.” Try as we might, we cannot vanquish insinuations, the logic of suspicion, of this earthly life.
and misgivings of all sorts. They are something we must bear when we articulate ourselves.
By articulating my being, I, in any case, enter into conflict—with myself, with my family 3. Do You Believe It?
and friends, with the public. Yet experience teaches me that there is no going back once I
have begun to articulate myself. To fall silent would be to take back—and take back not What I remember from the Church of Fear is the grand closing scene. Christoph, imper-
just something I have said—for that I can always do; we can apologize for, and correct, our sonating Christ, stands at the altar, the altar of this church, recreated for the production,
mistakes and errors. My articulate self, by contrast, I cannot take back, for in doing so I and distributes the host. As he does so, he plays with the Words of Institution spoken by
would take myself back in false humility. Jesus, “This is my body”: “This is not my body.” “This is your body.” It is an iridescent
identification with the person of Jesus; it is taken back, but not in a way that would take it
Today we must complement the “I am” of the gospel with an “I was.” We are bidding farewell back. It is a play with something with which we cannot play, skirting blasphemy or even
to Christoph Schlingensief. Only now, in his death, does his life stand before us in its en- crossing that line. A risky transgression. To speak of Jesus, in any case, also means to speak
tirety, does it speak to us as a whole, abruptly cut down and at once complete in itself—for of oneself. “Take and eat what you are,” Saint Augustine writes.
even succumbing to the brutal demon that is cancer can be done in one way or another, and
Christoph chose a particular way of dealing with it so as not to merely succumb to it. What The Last Supper—Jesus celebrates it as a festival on the eve of his death. Death does not
this life means to every single one of us is not something we can put into words now; it will undo the festival. Jesus dies a believer: “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.” He
become apparent. It will be a voyage of discovery to understand ever better who showed dies his death in a way that makes it a profession of life, of the devotion to joy, of the trust
himself, what showed itself to us in him. Many a thing will surprise us, when an encounter, in God’s open arms. By letting go of myself, by allowing myself to fall into the ground of
a word, a facial expression of his comes to mind; many a thing will appear in a new light, all celebration: God. For this was, from the very beginning, the occasion of the festival: the
many a thing, perhaps, will make sense for the first time. love of the Abba in Heaven for his Son, and through his Son, his love for men, and in par-
KLAUS MERTES 281

ticular for those who believe themselves to have fallen out of all love. To allow oneself to be
drawn in by this love is the challenge of the gospel.
“To believe” has become a weak word in our usage: to take propositions to be true that we
cannot know to be true with certainty. But in Scripture, “belief” or “faith” means more than
that. The term describing the opposite of “faith” is “fear.” “Why are ye fearful, O ye of little EVA MEYER-HERMANN
faith?” Jesus asks his disciples on the Sea of Galilee. Faith is a power. I do not feel it al-
ways, but I can let myself be infected by believers that articulate their I as believing even A BARBED SEED
unto death—as in the case of Jesus. Belief leads people to do what is impossible, to leap
over bounds, to pursue their goals undeterred. Belief is the power that keeps Jesus him-
self alive even unto death; that enabled him to let go entirely in death and to throw himself
into the arms of the Father in Heaven, wholly and without reservation, neck and crop, filled
with the hope of life. Belief makes life arise from death—makes that it is not only passively
resurrected, but that a man is not utterly debased even in death, not a mere victim even then.
“Do you believe it?” Can you believe that in death you will be wholly preserved? That you
are being expected—by Jesus, who is the resurrection and the life, by Mother Mary, by
those who have gone before you? That the night of death is illumined by the light of God?
I leave the question unanswered, but add: no man has the right to judge another man’s
belief from outside—nor to judge another man’s lack of belief. Be that as it may: in this hour
of farewell, we gaze full of gratitude at the life of Christoph Schlingensief, from beginning
to end, and prepare ourselves for the prayer, the Church prays for Christoph in the Eucharistic
Prayer: “In baptism he died with Christ: may he also share his resurrection.”
KLAUS MERTES
I was flying from Los Angeles via Panama to Manaus. It was April of 2007, in the middle
of Brazil’s rainy season. During landing, the plane bounded up and down like a puppet. We
could already see the jungle, soaked with the humidity of the last rain that sat above it in
wafts of mist. As we flew through the roiling air masses, lightning repeatedly flashed through
the rapidly shifting cloud formations. The turbulences amid the heavy thunderstorm were
so menacing that I prepared myself to bid farewell to it all. A crash and our deaths seemed
imminent. Yet our aircraft bravely fought on, seized and violently shaken by gusts of wind,
forced from its path and yet regaining its course time and again. Only the raw and almost
inconceivable beauty of what I saw beneath consoled me in my growing sense that the end
of times had come. The word “primordial” came to my mind, a concept I hadn’t even known
I knew. Far and wide there was nothing to be seen but shimmering bodies of water and areas
of deep green. Water and earth seemed to exist in inviolate union, and the white shreds of
cloud floating above the forests further veiled their formlessness. “Land” and “river” were
virtually incomprehensible notions in this chaos “before creation.” And yet the gigantic body
of water now slowly approaching must be the Rio Negro, the river that converges with the
yellow waters of the Rio Solimões in Manaus, a striking confluence that creates the Amazon
River. In trying to describe this intense and existential feeling during the approach from the air
(it is almost impossible to reach Manaus any other way), I am tempted to use the image of
a “primeval soup.” It was as though we were so soaked, so saturated with humidity that body
and feeling became almost indistinguishable from place and existence. I felt myself and my
body to be at one with the world—which was far from the world I had previously known. It was
a world “before” the world, a “primordial” world. What we usually call landscape seemed to
be a union of all elements. Water, earth, and sky welcomed and devoured me.
I had come to Manaus, a city of around two million people, for no more than a few days to
attend the premiere of the opera The Flying Dutchman, which Christoph Schlingensief had
been commissioned to direct. During the preparations, Schlingensief, a.k.a. “Chriszeraldo
Samenohr” [or “Chriszeraldo Seed-ear”], had kept me posted about what was happening
with the production in Brazil: “[…] and a seed has already flown into my ear. that’s when the
amazon tried to fuck me. and so two days later i had to go to a clinic. where mr. ear spe-
cialist, seated at a camping table with stone-age instruments, some very sharp and guaran-
teed not to be disinfected, picked the inside of my ear for thirty minutes before removing a
thorn, and when i thought that that was it he said that there was something much larger.
and i can show it to you. he then pulled a seed measuring a full centimeter out of my ear. it
had barbs and had already started to soak. i almost fell over. […] i am increasingly losing
sight of the text. and pictures just speak louder.” The production photographs on his website
were indeed as promising as they were confusing: instead of showing, as one might expect,
the stage of the grand old Teatro Amazonas, they captured orchestra musicians dressed in
shirts and tailcoats in the depth of the jungle. I also recognized actors from earlier produc-
tions Schlingensief had directed, such as Karin Witt, who was now enshrouded like a bride in
a cloud of white gauze. Her scintillating counterpart, it seemed, was a dark-skinned beauty
dressed in a sparkling bikini and a lavish headdress. And everything was set before the
backdrop of rampant tropical vegetation. But how would this dovetail with the plot of The
Flying Dutchman, an opera set on the seashore? It is about a revenant, a sailor doomed
to restlessly cruise the seas, seeking redemption ever since he committed blasphemy. The
contradictoriness of his hope is evident in his aria from act one: “Long though the earth may
Nocturnal excursion into the jungle after dress rehearsal and

procession for The Flying Dutchman, directed by Christoph
EVA MEYER-HERMANN Schlingensief, Manaus, April 20–21, 2007 285
put out new shoots, it yet must perish.” But his redemption requires that he find “a wife on the fact that, as was inevitable in such climatic conditions, the sensitive classical instruments
earth who’d be true to him till death,” and it is for this purpose that a father sells his daughter were increasingly out of tune—and yet the entire performance seemed a mirage, a perfect
to the Dutchman—a peculiarity about this Wagner opera I have always wondered about. The synthesis of image and sound. The entire audience finally got up as though entranced, cheer-
opera seemed very text-heavy to me, and the line, “My child, will you bid this stranger wel- ing and applauding while numerous bands of traditional samba drummers marched in,
come?” with which the Dutchman is recommended to Senta’s loyalty has struck me as one bathing the artist, the conductor, and the soloists with their deafening noise and carrying
of its most moving passages. But Schlingensief wrote that “the text was becoming ever them off. In their wake, some in the audience and several musicians grabbed wheeled and
less important”—and my memories of my days in Manaus, which I now reconstruct from portable stage props and formed a procession. We marched through the entire city, and
the distance of a few years, prove him right. It is pictures, it is sounds and emotions that as the formation gradually turned into a general street carnival the rhythms grew hotter, we
stay with us, and it was with pictures, sounds, and emotions that his production in Manaus danced until our feet burned, our throats were parched, and the last pieces of fabric on
made such a profound impression on me. our bodies were drenched in sweat. Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman, the samba bands, local
desperadoes who mingled with the reeling procession: that night they all met in a single
Schlingensief had directed his first opera in 2004, a production of Wagner’s Parsifal in magnificent fusion of continents and mentalities.
Bayreuth that remained in the repertoire for four years and that I would not see until 2007,
after the Manaus The Flying Dutchman. When I embarked on my little excursion to Brazil, A few hours later, I stood with Schlingensief at the rail of a typical double-decker Amazon
I had only recently met the artist in person, having been introduced to him in connection with steamer gliding quietly through the pitch-black night toward an unknown destination. One
an Allan Kaprow retrospective I curated. In the late 1950s, Kaprow, an American artist, might have expected to catch a whiff of fresh air, but the balmy breeze was hardly enough
had made a decisive contribution to the emerging art form of the happening. Schlingensief to cool our heat-flushed skin. Much as we strained our eyes, there was no light to be seen
paid close attention to what new scholarship on the subject brought to light, and based on anywhere; the surface of the water seemed endless. We had long left the harbor of Manaus
Kaprow’s revolutionary 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (1959), he rapidly developed a play behind. And as there was no recognizable current, we didn’t even know whether we were
of his own, which was staged at Berlin’s Volksbühne in 2006 under the title Kaprow City. crossing the river, or traveling upstream or downstream. There was no way to orient ourselves,
Yet far from imitating or appropriating Kaprow’s conception of art, the play represented no recognizable goal. Only now and then a few treetops appeared, reminding us that the
a congenial adaptation to the changed circumstances. Kaprow City took the play of simul- waters of the Rio Negro rise by several meters during the rainy season, nearly drowning many
taneity and dissimultaneity and the impossibility of multiple human perception, themes plants. Most of our fellow travelers had fallen silent, everyone dwelling on his own thoughts,
contained in the American model, to extremes. The play performed a striking balancing act when one of those quiet and delicate dialogues unfolded that we cannot repeat or retell,
between the individual artistic trigger and a form elaborated in a grand collaboration uniting though they bring us the fleeting sensation of happiness. It was as though the melancholy
the actors and their audience. Rather than merely sitting in the audience room, the specta- mood that had set in after the emotionally charged music and the exuberant celebration,
tors would also come to the back of the stage in small groups, where they were permitted as well as our extraordinary situation, our being nowhere in particular, called for unreserved
to step onto the revolving stage and to move freely amid the labyrinthine segments of space honesty. Later on we would sometimes remember our exchange in the middle of the night on
and between the actors’ and participants’ actions. I left the show in Berlin with the happy the dark river. It is impossible to recount how we spoke about death and what we said
sense that I had not only witnessed moving moments in a play but also learned a great deal about it. Schlingensief’s father had recently died, and I too had lost my mother as well as a
about creativity, individuality, and society. close friend that year. There is no quintessence we draw from such conversations, but
perhaps we gain confirmation of the consequences death has for our own lives. At that
During the public “dress rehearsal” in Manaus, a firework erupting against the deep blue moment, the thought of the omnipresence and closeness of death seemed to justify to us
starry sky of the tropics—its wreaths of light flashing up in the dark seemed as foreign to the both the uncompromising spirit with which we pursued our own work. When the artist,
setting as the wads of smoke released by exploding gunpowder—jolted me out of my medi- one year later, learned of his own cancer, he began to broach the subject of death quite
tation on Kaprow and Schlingensief. But the firecrackers were not the only noise drowning directly in his productions, and in retrospect he interpreted his work on Wagner, and on
out Wagner’s music; the rhythmical sound of drums that had gradually risen eventually Parsifal in particular, as a harbinger of fate: “I am glad I did it, even with all the vexations it
became so powerful that it utterly supplanted Wagner’s imperious imitations of nature by also brought. I am sure my intense study of the constant closeness of death in the Parsifal
musical means. For the past several hours, hundreds of guests had attended the romantic plot also gave me ideas I would have been better off not thinking. But at the time it seemed
operatic spectacle on the large square outside Teatro Amazonas. In the fashion of pop more important to me to probe the depths than to stake the project on surfaces or on
concerts, the organizers transmitted the appearances of soloists and choruses to video bringing the opera up to date. To me, Parsifal was a work about bidding farewell to the world,
screens and loudspeaker systems around the building. Nothing was static about this perfor- and I took that seriously. Perhaps too seriously.”
mance; the props and extras were in constant movement or developed their peculiar parallel
rhythms, such as the rapid jerking beat of a samba dancer atop a float decorated with a The steamer’s docking maneuver struck me as more than adventurous. How was the ferry-
blue cow’s head. The air was unbearably humid and hot; we sat in soggy dresses on wet man even supposed to navigate in pitch-black night and between trees rising from the deep
plastic chairs. The audience had gotten used to the tinny pitches of the grand orchestra and waters? We did not see even a hint of a riverbank anywhere. I doubted that I would ever feel
EVA MEYER-HERMANN 287

solid ground beneath my feet again. Yet a slender wooden pier appeared almost miraculous- irritated some; but I no longer wondered why samba dancers and bands of drummers
ly, and after a few insecure steps down a slippery plank we were back on land. It took a paraphrased Wagner’s natural imagery, or why rotating cones of natural rubber were used
little while until the props we had brought along, totems on long poles, had been unloaded as symbols of prosperity in act two instead of spinning wheels. The films projected onto
and we set out on our journey. To my horror, we walked deep and ever deeper into the sheets of white cloth, many of them products of multiple exposures, showed episodes from
jungle, a long procession, one behind the other, and the light of a camera or cell phone the rehearsal phase, when Schlingensief had led the entire orchestra out into the jungle,
flashing up here or there showed no more than bits and pieces of the ground on which we set as well as very recent material from our nocturnal excursion. Even things I had seen or been
our feet, clad, mostly, in only the lightest footwear. I do not know how long we walked through told about during my touristic tour suddenly seemed to me like a dream as they flickered
the tropical vegetation until we finally arrived at a half-ruined building. One after another across the cloths: the dancing group of indigenous people as well as the strange fish that
we entered the house, climbed about in it, scrambling up almost invisible stairs, over fallen possessed the ability to survive for a long time on dry land. Suddenly, all these fresh im-
trees and broken steps. Again and again there were moments of absolute darkness, moments pressions from a faraway land made sense, fusing with the opera’s mythology—which had
of blindness during which we could have stumbled over walls or fallen from landings. In until now felt profoundly European to me—to produce a new image. I witnessed a state
retrospect, the uncertain situation on the water seemed almost more bearable than this jungle that rebuffed conventional notions of art. Or is it conceivable that the “primordial” and art
adventure in a former monastery whose rooms no longer had roofs, where trees and climbing might coincide, that “before creation” there is creation? The highest (artistic) fulfillment
plants grew rampantly into the sky and into the ground at the same time, where our naked would then be virtually indistinguishable from regression. These are discomforting thoughts
legs were utterly unprotected, exposed to any creature living on the earth. Only the music I cannot follow to their logical conclusion; they bring Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo to my
I heard now and then, tinny tunes from a boom box someone had brought along, calmed mind, in which another man conceives the absurd idea of taking romantic opera to the jungle.
my nerves. After the overture to The Flying Dutchman, I recognized the memorable chords Schlingensief no doubt built on this figure. Yet where Fitzcarraldo’s monomaniacal ego trip
and melodies of the grand choruses and arias. Sometimes someone would sing along. highlights the endless travails of a creative act, Schlingensief, it seems to me, sought to
Then the music would suddenly be accompanied for brief moments by flares, dazzlingly bright overcome this individualist and egocentric view. The enormous feat that is his The Flying
and pure white light that turned us into gigantic silhouettes, transforming every drop of Dutchman not only involves the audience in various ways, as so many earlier productions
dew into a diamond; the subsequent plumes of fog, too, would be briefly lit up by signal had done. As the action proceeds, the concrete site of the performance itself intrudes upon
rockets. Like the music itself, the curt directorial instructions resounding from everywhere at the European work of art. The “dress rehearsal” had already taken place in the public
once echoed in my mind, human voices that betrayed fear as well as the spirit of adven- sphere; the samba drummers and dancers gradually took over the theatrical leadership in
ture. People filmed, took photographs, or simply sat quietly, gazing and wondering, until finally the opera, their percussions drowning out the Wagnerian swells, and finally led the action
we all stood around a great fire that slowly burned the largest totem, draped with photo- from the stage of the theater to the stages of the street. Robbing the opera of its end, the
graphs and crowned with a cow’s head, to ashes. Schlingensief and his Bolex camera were production spun the thousand ramifications into which Wagner’s ending dissipates into
time and again clearly recognizable in the light of the fire; there was no doubt he was the the tropical reality. In the medium of an encompassing music that, as it were, no longer had
protagonist of this event. a single author, we received intimations of a sense of community.
Dawn was coming by the time we returned to the harbor of Manaus, our minds full with what What grew in Manaus into a multifaceted art event and festivity would soon be implement-
we had experienced, our bodies exhausted. Without any involvement of the artist, I then ed in the reality of social practice and cultural politics in Schlingensief’s project of an
spent Saturday and Sunday working through the usual tourist program. A trip by ferry across opera village for Africa. At the rail of the ship on the Rio Negro, he had talked about music
the Rio Negro and then, in little diesel-powered boats, on smaller rivers leading straight as a keynote shared by all human beings across linguistic and cultural boundaries.
into the jungle; gazing in awe at the gigantic water lily leaves that are said to support the Though this yearning for union was powerful in him, he was perhaps aware already there,
weight of a child; a visit to an indigenous village community featuring the presentation of a in the jungle, of the insurmountable difficulties that oppose it. His last production for
ritual dance, followed by jewelry shopping. The ecologically correct jungle hotel with its the stage (Via Intolleranza II) made the discrepancy between the desire to immerse one-
tourism offerings was part of the program, as was a typical local meal. In contrast with what self in a community and the impossibility of really getting closer to another human
I had seen and experienced the night before, it all struck me as banal and pointless. What being painfully palpable. The belief in the integrative power of creativity and the danger of
was all this in comparison to the almost liturgical event that had taken place out there in exoticism is the irresolvable contradiction we must endure.
the jungle (which now, in the light of day, seemed unthreatening to me)? I longed to go back
to the music and the images of Wagner’s opera as Schlingensief had unfolded it before
our eyes and ears. And when evening finally came and I sat in Teatro Amazonas for the
opera’s premiere and heard the opening bars of the overture, I was reunited with the world.
It was a festive opening night whose audience, clad in evening gowns, walked across the
red carpet while the world outside seemed to be ending amid violent showers of rain. The
way the production interwove elements from the Brazilian setting with Wagner may have
EVA MEYER-HERMANN 289

WERNER NEKES
SPLINTERS OF MEMORY
H e calls me in the fall of 1984: “Christoph Schlingensief. Can I stop by some time?
Help out? I’ve made several 8mm films when I was in high school, with fellow students
and friends. I’d like to show them to you.” He comes to see me the very next day, complaining
we were able to realize many unconventional but important films. With commissions, film-
makers were free to make decisions about projects that didn’t have an eye on commercial
success, that didn’t have to be works of a bland and wrinkle-free taste. They found their
about the misfortune of not getting accepted to the Munich Film Academy. My view that audiences thanks to Atlas-Film’s distributor for highbrow cinema, FifiGe, and municipal movie
that was the best thing that could have happened to him—would he have wanted to grow theaters, and garnered a lot of praise and honors in screenings at festivals, in museums
mold in the cages that are television-studio editorial offices?—is consolation to him. I have and independent venues, and during international tours through Goethe-Instituts and the like.
just finished shooting for the film Was geschah wirklich zwischen den Bildern? [What Really The utter radicalism of Dore O.’s poetic films and my own innovative and sometimes not
Happened Between the Images?], and spent several weekends working with Helge Schneider immediately accessible films, such as Uliissess, which were unexpectedly successful also
and Andreas Kunze developing chains of associations for the film Johnny Flash. At the in commercial terms and found large enthusiastic audiences, gave Christoph the courage
moment, Astrid Nicklaus and I are editing the rush print of Was geschah wirklich zwischen to chart his own personal path in film. During the summer break, he joined Marianne and her
den Bildern?, the first film about my collection of objects from the early history of film, a two daughters, Nicola and Ariane, on a visit to me and Dore in Sweden, my second home.
survey of all important strands of filmic language that ultimately led to the birth of cinema. He became friends with Ariane, who had worked in my film archive for some time, they moved
There is a shot in which I insert zograscope prints into a Dutch folding zograscope that in with each other, and for the next six years she was his girlfriend and edited some of his
then represent the passing of time by showing, when lit in front and from behind, a daytime films as well. When he got a job as a unit manager for Hans W. Geißendörfer’s Lindenstraße,
and a nighttime view; Astrid doesn’t like the take. It would be cumbersome to have my Christoph bought a Hymer motor home, and for a while they lived at the WDR compound
cameraman Bernd Upnmoor, who always captured wonderful images for me, come from in Cologne. In the summer of 1984, I was able to curate, with Dore O., the first temporary
Hamburg for a quick pickup shooting, and so I ask Christoph whether he thinks he can exhibition from my collection, “Alchimie des Blicks” [Alchemy of the Gaze], in conjunction
do the shots. Christoph is enthusiastic about being thrown in at the deep end, having helped with a Federico Fellini exhibition, for the inauguration of the German Film Museum in Frankfurt.
Franz Seitz with several outdoor shots using a 35mm camera for Dr. Faustus in 1982. Dore Christoph was often among the first to admire my newly acquired exhibits, seeking to fathom
O. sets up the scene, and Christoph does a single take, which is now in the film. their mysteries and play with them; these were “optical toys,” also called “philosophical
toys” around 1820 because they inspired a reflection on processes of perception. Later on,
Christoph was unfailingly obliging, absolutely reliable, and incredibly eager to learn. From he was delighted to be able to present a find to me, a praxinoscope by Émile Reynaud
now on he accompanied me as my student and friend. He spontaneously made friends with (ca. 1870). His study of my collection would later be reflected in his Animatograph, but also
all members of the crew working on the film I was shooting on weekends, Johnny Flash, in his choice of multiple projection or “expanded cinema,” a technique involving several
including Dore O., Volker Bertzki, Bernd and Birger Bustorff, as well as the actors, Helge, 16mm projectors, for his exhibitions in Munich or Zurich. He was utterly fascinated by the
Andreas, and Marianne Traub. Christoph had become a member of the team. I could trust abundance of visual material Georg Buschan laid out in his four volumes on Die Sitten
him implicitly, give him a camera and quickly describe to him which scene featuring Marianne, der Völker: Liebe, Ehe, Heirat, Geburt, Religion, Aberglaube, Lebensgewohnheiten, Kultur-
Andreas, or Heike Melba Fendel I needed for continuity. During a meeting between the eigentümlichkeiten, Tod und Bestattung bei allen Völkern der Erde [The Customs of the
music manager Toi and Mother Potzkothen—Andreas in a double role, and Dore was standing Peoples: Love, Marriage, Weddings, Births, Religion, Superstition, Lifestyle Habits, Cultural
in for Andreas at the moment where he/she knocks on the window—Christoph spontane- Peculiarities, Death, and Burial in All Peoples of the Earth]. It is probably from this fascination
ously helped me avoid crossing the line, for which I was grateful to him. Later on, I helped that his love for the peoples of Africa derives.
him find his way through the jungle of film subsidy programs, and allowed him to use my
film and studio technology. At the time I was a professor film at the University of Art and Working with students from Offenbach at a location right in our backyard, the Rauen quarry
Design Offenbach, which enabled me to hire an assistant. Christoph was delighted to in Kassenberg, he shot his first feature film, Tunguska—Die Kisten sind da [Tunguska—
draw his first regular salary, and I was glad I didn’t have to drive the distance by myself once The Boxes Have Arrived]. Next was Menu Total, which was shot at Schloss Styrum in
or twice a week. Christoph, who was actually quite fearful by nature, was not even afraid of Mülheim. I was offered the rambling vaults of a bunker in the neighborhood as a home for my
driving on black ice in the winter. He also always kept an on-board pharmacopeia, intro- collection. Yet the numerous underground rooms were too damp for my potential museum.
ducing me to Echinacea and Umckaloabo. He gave up his apartment in Munich and moved I described the hidden location to Christoph, and he rapidly developed a film production
to Schreinerstraße in Mülheim an der Ruhr. Marianne worked for the cultural film promotion schedule tailored to the premises on Bergstraße: 100 Jahre Adolf Hitler—Die letzte Stunde
program at the Filmbüro, which we had recently been able to set up in Mülheim thanks to im Führerbunker [100 Years of Adolf Hitler—The Last Hour in the Fuhrerbunker]. He veiled
Johannes Rau’s support. Her responsibilities included setting deadlines for applications. his messages, which attested to his social commitment, in the garb of cinematic trash. These
Her generosity was convenient for us, since we could work on our project outlines and disguises duped a movie audience that turned up its nose at B-movies.
screenplays through the last night, after the deadline, and then submit them by pushing them
through the mail slot at her house. But doing so did not mean that funding would be guar- To cultivate his provocative taste and aesthetic preferences, he founded Filmclub 69.
anteed. Working with incredibly limited resources, in comparison to today’s production Everyone in the audience had to register as a member to enable Christoph to circumvent
budgets, shooting without major movie stars, and relying on a great deal of improvisation, regulatory limitations. Using 35mm projectors he had bought from second-hand dealers,
WERNER NEKES 293

he deliberately presented films in bad taste that serious film critics scorned, such as works with budgets large enough to shoot several “dirty films.” There is little to indicate that future
by Russ Meyer or Otto Mühl, or Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Almost all exceptional talents from the region will be supported in their cultural work. The politicians in
screenings were complemented by outrageous appearances and performances by radical charge were asleep when economic promotion annexed cultural promotion in a bear hug that
artists who were delighted to meet an often exhibitionistic audience at Filmclub 69. has smothered culture. That was also the tenor of Christoph’s speeches. We owe it to him
to take what he said seriously.
Together, we traveled to several festivals to present our films. One of them is in Figuera da
Foz, Portugal: I spend almost the entire flight to Lisbon standing next to him in the back of
the plane, talking to him to distract him from his great fear of flying. Not until we have made
it to the grilled sardines on the beach, the tumbler of smooth cognac next to a small cup
of espresso, and our conversations with José Viera Marques and Manuel de Oliveira do we
make our peace with the world again. At the Berlinale I run into Udo Kier, whom I have
known since the 1960s; the two of us are serving on the youth-film jury at a school in Itzehoe.
We have a long talk with Derek Jarman; we are on the same wavelength. Tilda Swinton
joins us; she is enjoying the enthusiasm with which her acting in Caravaggio has been re-
ceived. Moving quickly, Christoph wins Udo and Tilda over for a project, a film to be shot
on the small island of Langeneß. The film is presented at the Hof Film Festival the following
year: Egomania—Insel ohne Hoffnung [Egomania—Island Without Hope].
In 1988, he plays a minor part in Dore O.’s film Blindman’s Ball. In 1990, Dore O. shoots a
series of photographs with him based on Frans Masereel’s Die Idee, which she will use as
a dream sequence in her film Candida.
In 1989, a group including Nam June Paik—whose work I have felt great appreciation for
since the 1960s—and myself are busy with the plans for the Academy of Media Arts Cologne.
While I teach media art in Cologne, Christoph moves to Berlin. His reports are full of his
excitement over the freedoms he enjoys while working with Frank Castorf, and he tries to get
me to join him at the Volksbühne with my own ideas. But my collection has grown to an
alarming size, and so I prefer to take care of it, inventorying the objects and planning exhi-
bitions. Our friendship continues, but our paths gradually move apart. We meet only occa-
sionally, he invites me to show my films at the Volksbühne. He integrates films from my
collection in his stage plays. He comes to Mülheim to see my most recent film, Der Tag des
Malers [The Day of the Painter], which moves him deeply. He stops by when he comes to
Oberhausen to visit his parents, asking me to show him my most important new acquisitions
and explain them to him. He asks me to shoot the decomposing hare for his production in
Bayreuth. I would love to do it but am about to open an exhibition in Melbourne. The show
“Tandem” at the Mülheim Kunstverein provides an opportunity for a more extended meeting.
Over dinner, he pulls out his laptop in order to hear my views and criticisms of his Anima-
tograph. He explains his pictures and the structure, which he realized in Iceland. I am touched
when he tells me that he will forever be grateful to me, among others, for teaching him to
always bring his current projects along, prepared at all times to present them. We meet for
the last time when the city of Mülheim, which usually does nothing to facilitate the work of
its artists, throws the Ruhr Prize at him just to get a mention in the national press for once.
Bazon Brock’s laudation ought to be published in print. Düsseldorf, too, hastily awards him
the Käutner Prize before it is too late. Christoph generously overlooks the circumstances
and delivers wonderful acceptance speeches in Mülheim and Düsseldorf. He points out how
desolate today’s cultural policies are, which support launch parties for “great movie stars”
WERNER NEKES 295

HANS ULRICH OBRIST
MULTIPLICATIONS
IN CONVERSATION WITH
HANS ULRICH OBRIST
Hans Ulrich Obrist: I want to start at the sources. I would be very interested to know who This idea of the party, in any case, was meant perfectly seriously, we wanted to put together
your “heroes” are. a party of minorities that would be in the majority. The idea that you join forces without
therefore having a “lobby,” or whatever else it is you need to have in the background. But
Christoph Schlingensief: My father, definitely. And Alfred Edel, and, I never met him, but on the way there you realize that you probably do need it, if you want to sort of turn the
still: Luis Buñuel. Hitler, a little bit, Mother Teresa … corner. And then, working with people who consider themselves outsiders to begin with,
who see themselves as the “happy unemployed.” We constantly had problems because
Obrist: And you once told me that Werner Nekes was important to you. Can you say of course we said, “Unemployment has got to go!” But then people would show up who
something about that? said, “Being unemployed is great, I get money, I don’t have to work, I hang out at home,
I’d much rather have it that way, I’m happily unemployed.” Of course these things then pose
Schlingensief: Yes, Werner was important because he was a film director who made films problems for a party.
in a way that I couldn’t have imagined beforehand and didn’t want to imagine either. “Ex-
perimental filmmaker,” “avant-garde filmmaker,” that is what it was called then. Nekes made But we really fought—and we held a couple of very nice events. The whole thing started
films by using a photo camera in order to take his shots, picture by picture, twenty-four during an Alfred Biolek talk show I was invited to. On the show I said that I would like to
pictures per second. In doing so, he of course didn’t necessarily give priority to the action. found a party, Chance 2000. After the show I immediately called my girlfriend at home be-
I was his assistant for several years, and assisting him was very interesting indeed, because I wanted to ask her what she thought of the show—but I didn’t even get through!
cause what I really wanted to do was mainstream movies, which is to say, American-style I then called the neighbors, who told me that the phone had been ringing nonstop at our
feature films and crime thrillers. And suddenly you’re watching Empire with Nekes, and place. So that was when the whole thing got started. Then there were 20,000 members,
you think to yourself, “What did Warhol do here, why didn’t they use this material differently? and we had twelve state associations—and I hadn’t even known what all of that was! We had
One could employ it in a more meaningful way!” to drive around all the time and give election speeches and meet people of one kind or another.
But Nekes then time and again persuaded me to keep watching. At some point, when I There was also the APPD, the Anarchist Pogo Party of Germany, which then always tried
wanted to give up on Empire, he said: “Just keep your seat, something very exciting is to upstage us. One day I was coming back from a speech in Munich, from students
coming up in a bit!” I said, “But I can’t do this anymore,” went to the bathroom, and when I who had been deeply moved by the whole thing, and then this woman, pierced all over, ap-
came back he said, “Well! Now you’ve unfortunately missed it!” And so I said, “Yes, but proached me, grabbed me, and stuck her tongue in my mouth—I turned away like this:
what did I miss?” And he responded, “A yellow VW.” But the film is black and white, as far eww! [Covers his mouth with both hands] Then there was a photo, that I distinctly remem-
as I know. In any case, I had missed a VW, which was a sensation in that film. That’s the ber, and later that night I read on the APPD’s website that I was now the APPD’s minis-
sort of thing Nekes taught me. That’s also when Beuys showed up in his hall. ter for misleading propaganda—the chairwoman, Ms. Karin Suchandsuch, it said, had giv-
en me a rapturous welcome—and I had gratefully accepted the offer. Next to it was the
Obrist: The first thing I heard about Beuys in my early teens in Switzerland was interest- picture where she stuck her tongue down my throat. So these were the methods one had
ingly enough the idea of a political party. Which, I think, was also very important for your to use. Then we wanted to have six million unemployed people going for a swim in
party, Chance 2000. Wolfgangsee on August 2, 1998.
Schlingensief: That had always been a dream of mine, having a party one day, I wanted to Obrist: Yes, that is one of my favorite happenings!
give a speech in the Bundestag just once. I didn’t want to give it myself, I would have
liked one of the welfare recipients from our group to give a speech there—his name was Schlingensief: It was also meant seriously! I really thought that buses upon buses would
Werner Brecht, he’s already dead. He was this big [indicates size using his hands]—he arrive in the end! And the papers started checking whether the water would actually
usually had a burn mark here on his nose because at night he would fall asleep while smok- rise by so and so many meters so that it would completely flood Helmut Schmidt’s—no, his
ing in bed. He didn’t say a whole lot. But he was there and he wasn’t dead yet and he name was Helmut Kohl!—weekend home and just sweep him off. That was the idea:
liked to smoke, that was really all he had to offer. I would have liked to see him standing for that six million unemployed people in Wolfgangsee, if they jumped in at the same time,
fifteen minutes at a lectern where all those important and powerful people churn out would pull it off.
their pieces of wisdom. Just smoking, looking up a little now and then, nodding off a little;
to my mind that would have been the greatest masterwork in terms of making a political When we arrived at the hotel, the people there, sympathizers or fans, let us all stay for free.
statement. Unfortunately that didn’t happen. It remains an unrealized project, a project When I swam a little too far to the left in the lake, the Federal Border Patrol would come
awaiting implementation. in a motorboat and instruct me via megaphone, “Mr. Schlingensief, you must swim back at
once!” If I had kept swimming for two more strokes of the oar I would have entered Kohl’s
closed territory. Sometime that day someone dropped off a letter at the reception that con-
HANS ULRICH OBRIST 299

tained a death threat, made of these letters that were cut out and pasted onto the paper. Obrist: The first time we met was in 1997, at the police station in Kassel, where we did this
I responded by trying to call the police in Sankt Gilgen. But they weren’t in. And then I Hybrid Workspace for the first Berlin Biennial together with Klaus Biesenbach and Nancy
asked the lady at the reception where the police were, and she said, “Well, of course they Spector in collaboration with Catherine David. When we arrived in Kassel you were already at
aren’t at the office, they’re all here in our garden. One’s over there in the shrubbery, and the police station, you had once again almost triggered a constitutional crisis, and that also
another two are sitting over there in that Opel Rekord.” So I went over to them and knocked, had something to do with Kohl.
one then rolled down the window—he knew immediately who I was, since we were the
reason for the surveillance. I then said, “I’ve received a death threat here, would you mind Schlingensief: Yes, weirdly enough at that time things often had to do with Kohl. That was
reading it?” And then he took the letter, read it through and said, “Go away, go back!” He 48 Stunden Überleben für Deutschland [48 Hours Survival for Germany], and we had a
got out of the car and he reached for his gun—they really thought we were going to shoot room to ourselves. I had bought cheap sandbags from Oderbruch and had them piled up
the next moment. Later a district attorney came, from Salzburg, who said that I was being there. So there were gigantic mountains of sandbags, and we sat in front of them in Ger-
threatened, I was now getting two security people from Helmut Kohl’s detail who were sup- man army apparel, I had some kind of John Lennon wig with sunglasses, and I signed books
posed to walk by my side, and I got to choose whether they were to walk right next to me I had brought along from a bookstore. There were endless lines, these crowds of smart
and catch the bullet or the knife or someone trying to hit me—or whether I just wanted them documenta visitors, who waited for me to give them some pointless book from the barrel,
to be in the same room with me and remove my body—those, he said, were my two options. and I would write something in the book, and they would go back home having been
I then got along with them very well. They carried this sandwich bag on their abdomen given something at documenta, by a real artist whose name they didn’t know and whose
with the gun in it. I told them they should stay close enough to me where they would still be book was guaranteed not to be his book—after all, I couldn’t possibly have written as
able to respond, but they didn’t have to stay too close, they could also go eat something many books as were in that barrel.
sometime or what not.
We then also led Japanese groups into that room and told them something about German
And then the great day came, four o’clock, and there were, I think, 300 people from our art. And then we didn’t let them leave the room anymore, whereupon one Japanese man
party and eighty from the APPD, who again came as well. And they then started fucking on somehow escaped and then called security staff to free the other Japanese people, or Asian
an area of the lawn. And they really had it going on down at the beach—but I wanted the people in any case. There was a night with the party chairmen, which is to say with Werner
event to go down in an orderly fashion. I wanted use to be a credible party, and if you’re a Brecht, Achim von Paczensky, a whole large group of my disabled associates, who were
credible party you don’t fuck. Well … all in the state party leadership, and we all spent the night there. That morning I got a wake-
up call—I was told that Lady Diana had just died in London. But I didn’t believe it, really
Obrist: What happened next? didn’t—the Internet wasn’t all that much to shout about back then. In any case I’d received
the news, so I immediately took out the microphone again, had breakfast, and spoke into
Schlingensief: And then we went into the water, and as we were swimming with our 300 the mike, “Ladies and gentlemen, I have just been told that Lady Diana died in a car crash
people, they kept on doing it. The mayor of Sankt Gilgen had threatened to sue us for in London! That old bitch has finally bitten the dust.” That was the sentence.
millions if a single picket fence were to be destroyed! I tried to keep pushing everyone in the
water further and further forward. Then the Border Patrol motorboat came again and the Obrist: Can you tell me about the court trial?
policemen yelled, “Swim back!” That’s when I first noticed that our clothes were all soaked
with water, we were almost drowning, swimming really became incredibly hard work. I just Schlingensief: Later on there was a court trial, too, featuring witness statements such
kept saying, “Call Mr. Kohl!” and, “Tell Mr. Kohl that we’re here! Let him show himself to us as: “My wife and I went to documenta as we had done every year”—every year!—“and were
just once!”—and the policeman said, “Swim back! Get lost! You’re not going to see him!” walking across the grounds and gathering information about the state of contemporary
I hung on to his boat because I was exhausted and kept saying, “Please tell Mr. Kohl he should art. We were very interested and were just taking an interest in this or that when we suddenly
come to the window just once, just wave once, or do anything! I’m running out of steam, heard: ‘Diana—the old bitch has finally bitten the dust!’ So I said to my wife: ‘Listen, some-
and so are the people, you have to do something! Tell him he should just come out—we don’t thing isn’t right here! Something sinister is going on.’ After the situation had quieted down a
even believe anymore that he exists!” And then the policeman started radioing, and kept little, we then heard people yelling: ‘Kill Helmut Kohl!’ At that moment I said to my wife: ‘Now
calling into the mike, “Yes, he is supposed to just come to the window, can’t he wave or some- we must intervene! We are needed here!’ And so we took appropriate action.”
thing? They’ll be gone right away—he is just supposed to wave!”
So these were the witness statements I got—numerous people applied to testify! There
Well, Kohl didn’t come wave. So I made a U-turn, yelling, “We have to go back, there is no were really reams of witness statements. And the whole thing was, again, in this room, this
way out anymore! Kohl is dead!” Back ashore I then announced, “4:32 p.m., Helmut Kohl is Hybrid Workspace set up by documenta—it’s not like it was on the street or in a depart-
dead, Germany is leaderless! We are taking power.” And that was the end. ment store. We then kept going. Then a first troop of six police came and took a porn post-
er away from Werner Brecht. He had taken his private collection of porn magazines

along for the trip, and so a Beate Uhse poster was taken away from him. So we filed a —obviously, it was foreseeable that there was something funny going on. The idea was: one
complaint against this policeman who simply took it along as indication that something porno- container, ten asylum seekers inside whom the Austrians can then “vote out” by phone or
graphic was taking place. That was so absurd, since we were in the middle of documenta. through this televoting system. So you call night after night and say, “That Mumba Bumba’s
I’d thought that, well, everything is permitted in art, we know that by now—which is also got to go!” and, “Out with him!” and then a state limo picks him up and drives him to the
why some people don’t think particularly highly of art anymore—but there in that place, that border and he gets deported. People were also able to see all of it on the Internet, with film
was so crass that we kept going. Suddenly fifteen police with a shepherd dog came in, and so on, for an international audience.
and the dog then also bit the performance artist Hanayo’s leg as she was holding her new-
born baby in her arms. Bernhard Schütz and I were made to stand against the wall and But at first we didn’t get the site we wanted: in front of the Hotel Sacher, in that corner
then marched off to the car in handcuffs. As we arrived at the car, one of the policemen said, where the shopping district starts. We were told, “Can’t do that!” So we had to go see a
“Unlock the car,” and the other policeman said, “No, you’ve got the key!” And the first one Mr. Schmitz, who sat there in his unbelievable office with a large chandelier, really lordly.
goes, “Unlock the car now”—“No, listen, I gave you the key, I don’t have the key, you have the His assistant was wearing a toupee that always sat a little crooked, and for two full hours
key!” And Bernhard Schütz—well, he is a very wild actor from the Volksbühne—he kept Mr. Schmitz did nothing but look at us, smoking his pipe and going, “Nah … can’t do that,
saying, “Really, so the key is gone? Hey, what’s going on here? Who’s got the key?” So he nah … can’t do that either, uh, nah …” And this other guy never said anything but, “Yes, I
was riling them up, which made me very uncomfortable. Then we were driven away and understand very well, Mr. Head of the Department, sir, I understand very well! That’s exactly
interrogated, and at some point, after half an hour, our handcuffs were taken off. Then a how I see it!” And we were ready to give up when Schmitz suddenly said, “Just a moment!”
policeman came in and said he was very sorry, something had gone wrong, there had took out a ruler, drew some lines, and moving the ruler back and forth and back again, “Can’t
been a misunderstanding. And I kept saying, “My God, we’re at documenta here, the paper- do in front,” he then says, “nah, nah, can’t do that, because there are the plants in front of
work’s all been filed in advance.” the parking garage, and if we put it there they won’t get any air,” or in any case only some
weird air, and they would die, it would alter the entire biotope inside the parking garage. And
Then Catherine David and you and Klaus Biesenbach etcetera came and you got us out. so that didn’t work—“but here, that works!” And then all I saw was how the man dropped
Carl Hegemann was standing outside with a liberation brigade of thirty holding up pos- his toupee. I kid you not: Schmitz had actually moved the thing to the beginning of the street,
ters saying, FREEDOM FOR SCHÜTZ AND SCHLINGENSIEF! But there was a court tri- right next to the opera, which was of course even better for us! And the toupee was lying
al nonetheless, and Bernhard Schütz and I had to pay 3,000 marks each. We recouped around somewhere, the guy was looking for it and yelping with glee, I would say it was a
that money in one evening at the Volksbühne, the Volksbühne paid the fines and we did gleeful yelping squeal.
something or other for it. Somehow told some story …
But Luc and I didn’t want to act like we were grateful, so we just said, “There? … Well …
Obrist: Another project that generated a lot of controversy as well was Ausländer raus! Hmm …” So we spent another ten minutes exclaiming, in a tone of mild skepticism,
[Foreigners Out!]. There are these moments with Géricault’s Raft of Medusa where that “Well … You really think?” And Schmitz kept sucking on his pipe. And then this man with
painting really almost triggered a constitutional crisis. Especially when the painting was the toupee said, “Yes, that is a wonderful idea, Mr. Head of the Department—wonderful,
then brought over to England. wonderful!” And so we’d received his permission, done deal, and we walked out, “Well,
thank you very much, hmm, yes, unfortunately …”, and we walked around the block, and
Schlingensief: What happened at the time in Austria was that the Austrian People’s Party gave each other a hug, and screamed with joy.
(ÖVP) suddenly—and utterly inexplicably—proclaimed that it was willing to form a coa-
lition with the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ). Then a call came from Luc Bondy, who had In any case, it was an unbelievably great place. Also because all the Japanese with their
long flirted with the idea of having me do something during the Vienna Festival. He said, buses would always—I’ve nothing against Japanese people, even if that’s how this is coming
“Meet right away!” And then he asked, “Do you have an idea what we might do?” And around across—so there were these bus stops, where the tour groups would get off, and the
the same time there was this Big Brother boom in the paper, but then there was also a first thing they saw was the sign up above: FOREIGNERS OUT! Then the tour guide would
report about Indians who were locked in a container trying to escape their country, and tried come and say, “Foreigners Out, Foreigners Out!” The Japanese walked through this place
to drill a hole into the container wall with a small piece of metal. But they all suffocated in the as though they were about to be shot. Then the Kronen-Zeitung got started and launched
container because they were so tightly packed together. And then I said to Bondy, all we this gigantic campaign against us, alleging that I had raided the Petzler ladies’ corsetry
would really have to do would be to translate into reality the slogans Mr. Haider and his crowd store—“Brutal terrorist assault on Petzler’s Ladies’ Corsetry! Schlingensief storms ladies’
up there used, because politicians usually get scared of their own statements when you wear department!” That sort of thing. Then they would print a counter-statement, then
do that, and so we needed to place FOREIGNERS OUT! nicely, to have billboard advertise- the district attorney would come in, which is to say, the domestic secret service, would come
ments just like them. And then we needed to capture the game they were playing with this in, the whole thing was blown out of proportion because the government was incapable
coalition between the ÖVP and the FPÖ into an image that any Austrian could participate of taking the sign down, they did not manage to do that, it would have been like giving in.
in. That’s how we came up with the container, for which we initially didn’t get a permit So we were in this checkmate situation, day after day. Then one Thursday there were I

don’t know how many thousand people on that square, students and all sorts of people. and large just part of me, it just happened this way, and that’s how I’ve learned it. And I can
Matthias Lilienthal helped organize all of that, and it blew our minds how many people use it, I just know how to, when I’m shooting with the Bolex and turning the crank, how
came. The whole thing then picked up incredible momentum, so that in the end Daniel often I turn forward, how often I turn backward, what I use double exposures for and what
Cohn-Bendit stood at the microphone as well, Peter Sellars stood at the microphone, not, which aperture to use. That’s just in my blood, and so it’s become part of me. I didn’t
Einstürzende Neubauten, everyone was suddenly there, and when I came back to Berlin I need to go to film school for that, that’s what I learned there. And so it’s also why I was so
was suddenly the star who did something so humane and gracious. delighted as a child when I projected my film on a television screen and kept the tele-
vision sound running. I turned the picture off, and suddenly my film had sound. This meth-
That was really the reason why I subsequently did U3000 on MTV, a show in which I od, I think, gradually seeped ever deeper into my consciousness: that these things
completely denounce myself and pull out my dick in front of the Hellwig family. That is also add to and complement one another, also expand each other, by all means is true.
to say, where I gave myself a major beating, since I also didn’t know how to deal with
the embrace, because of course it reflects exactly this ambivalent situation: it’s not a good The expanded conception of art, I think, is nothing special at all. Now I’ve reached the ex-
project, nor is it a bad project. It’s not going to change anything, but it can make some panded conception of the sick person, and this expanded conception of the sick per-
real noise. It’s being watched around the world, too, and the government can’t stand it son in turn also has to do with the fact that I cannot accept that the cancer is supposedly
—that’s really the greatest thing you can possibly experience. But I should say it again, just a fact now that takes place in my life, while on the side I also paint something. Or point
it didn’t change anything. my camera at things a little. As though one had nothing to do with the other.
Obrist: Something I absolutely wanted to talk about, because it leads to all of your current And so time and again I also had strokes of good luck: that I didn’t get into the film acade-
projects, is this way you pop up in different contexts. On the one hand, after all, you are my and then entered into a whole different territory with Nekes, or slid, with Alfred Edel
very much at home in the film context, but then from this home base you also broke into the and Dietrich Kuhlbrodt, into this sort of experimental Frankfurt School sound. That’s where
field of theater, where you are equally at home. And for several years now, really for as the Filmbüro Nordrhein-Westfalen was very important, there was the documentary film
long as we’ve known each other, since the late 1990s, you’ve also done more and more work section of the Oberhausen Short Film Festival, but I often also sat there with a personal
in the art context as well, in museums, galleries, Kunsthalles. Can you talk about how, preference for films that grabbed me, that operated to expand or where my mind can still
with film as your home base, you break into these various areas, and what these areas mean abide in them in a certain way. So I wasn’t necessarily the political director. I once sat on
to you? Theater, art, and there is also radio, with the radio plays. Are these parallel reali- the German jury at the Oberhausen Short Film Festival, and I was seated next to a guy
ties, or are they all different contexts of production? from the union, and we spent hours looking at documentaries of one kind or another that
were really abysmal shit, these films that would come to the West from the East, and in
Schlingensief: Well, the basic fact—I recently read in a book somewhere that one must exchange the people from the Communist Party of Germany/Marxists-Leninists would drive
avoid building a private mythology—is of course that as a child I grew up with my father’s eastward across the border and show their crap there. But there were also great films,
camera, it was simply there, the camera was, and I liked it. My father shot everything with it I must say.
that was there to be shot, and at some point he used this camera the wrong way by pro-
ducing a double exposure. These were Double 8 films: you had to expose them in one di- Obrist: How about the art world? On several occasions you’ve used the medium of the ex-
rection, then turn them around under a bedcover, then expose the other side. And this hibition—where films also turn up again, but in the most diverse contexts of production.
process of switching the film around under the bed, that’s what my father did twice in a row, Back in the day, in Venice, with the Church of Fear for “Utopia Station” we collaborated
hence the double exposure. He came with the film, lights out, blinds down, screen set with Molly Nesbit and Rirkrit Tiravanija, but since then you’ve done a lot more with exhibi-
up, everything already smelled a little, this dust on the lamp, you know the smell from slide tions, including a major solo exhibition at Haus der Kunst. What does the medium of the
presentations back in the day. And then the film started, and suddenly you’d see me run- exhibition mean to you?
ning around. I was drinking water while at the same time there were waterfalls over me.
Then my mother and I were sitting on the beach, and people of some kind were running Schlingensief: Well, the theater of course has a problem—so you’re coming from film,
around over us. where you can influence everything, you can edit, you can cut this actor you don’t like, you
can tilt the picture away, you can insert another intertitle there, can turn the action on its
That totally grabbed me—that that was possible, that one piece of visual information came head, everything is possible. That’s great. And you can put music to it—if you want it to be
together in this way with another. I don’t have any theory about this, nor did I need to silent, you turn the sound off, that’s all perfectly feasible. On the stage, by contrast,
meet a curator for it, I didn’t read any art criticism about it, I really didn’t, although Nekes there’s a creak, the actor who’s supposed to be silent creaks, or he has that nasal way of
then later showed me films by Brakhage that reminded me of it at several points, but I speaking you can’t stand, but then there’s no way for you to somehow edit it out. So
really experienced this in a very pure and unadulterated way. And that is also what I appreciate you’re constantly asking yourself, how do you get that guy there out? And my aversion would
so much about it, that to me these experiences are—some people may call that naïve—by grow more intense, to the point where I sometimes thought, so we’ll just turn off the light

altogether, then we won’t see whether he’s even there or not anymore. But that’s hard to We should put up a couple of pictures here, look, here, I’ll be riding around here for hours,
keep up for two hours straight. So the theater, too, wasn’t really so good. with nothing to see, why don’t you do an exhibition here.” So we did a little exhibition at her
place along her staircase, and now she’s riding through a sort of art course and having fun.
That’s why I went out into the street to do these actions, and now this is the point of contact, And sometimes she even stops the lift and wants to take a closer look. So this “Stairlift
where the filmic register, which I have a pretty good handle on, with its abilities to respond to Heaven” is really how I would see my mother ascending to heaven, where I would think,
quickly, perhaps to redirect certain balls, also to see when a medium of this sort responds, “That’s how she’s going to heaven now.”
when the perpetrator actually sits in the media. For example, I say “Kill Helmut Kohl!” once
on a stage or in an exhibition space. But the newspapers then print the sentence 680 times Obrist: One final question. You told me that you just did a new work at the Ruhrtriennale,
in one week, “Kill Helmut Kohl!” So it was all over the papers! But what they wouldn’t write A Church of Fear vs. the Alien Within—can you say something about that?
was that it happened, let’s say, in a theatrical space—only five papers did! But now that also
isn’t too much fun to me anymore, and I don’t have major ambitions in that direction. Now Schlingensief: Yes, that was my first work after cancer. It consists of texts I spoke into a
it’s back to the image, and then the visual arts come in and also strike me as an odd sort of dictaphone in the evenings during the first weeks after diagnosis; I then turned them
spectacle, where when you go to these fairs, look at these booths, that strikes me as utter into a Fluxus oratorio with the help of my friends. After the whole shit you have to go through
nonsense—these gallery owners that bark when you walk toward a picture. “Are you inter- there, you suddenly get back to a point where you continue to be very worn out and re-
ested in the picture? Do you want to know something about it? Blah blah …” So I don’t duced, but still, with your friends and your wife’s love, you suddenly start being able to do
believe that there’s really an essence to that. I know, of course, that there certainly are artists something again. I can’t run quite so fast anymore, I have to walk a little more slowly, or
who have something to tell, who, working under certain compulsions, do good work as spend more time sitting on the chair and looking straight ahead. But that also enables me
well, who really have some brains in their heads. But by and large it’s an insanely funny spec- to direct things more, perhaps to keep more of a distance—in the past I would immedia-
tacle held by charlatans who simply fart out some fashion article and disappear as quickly tely start flying off the handle, right in everyone’s faces, and always talk about what’s going
as they came. They just have the good luck that someone writes about it, and that someone to happen next, and jog and shake things and so on. Which means of course that no
then collects it. Once I was invited to a dinner in London, in an apartment stuffed chock actor knows anymore what’s going on, no one knows what that’s supposed to be anymore.
full with art, expensive, expensive, expensive. They bought it—with a shopping cart, like, in
with it!—and installed it. Perhaps I now have the chance to sometimes take a longer look. In Duisburg it worked this
way; it didn’t become embarrassing that I’m over-sharing. Because I think that exactly in
But I now take a closer look, also perhaps because this last year I have more time, and this multiplication of over-sharing, also in this multiplication of media—some of it is a sound
when I see something and I get the feeling that there’s really something seething on the in- recording, some is text being recited, the third is text being acted, the fourth is being read
side, or there’s someone who is really attached to a scholarly task, however private it may by a layperson—it isn’t embarrassing. These four possibilities, when they come to overlap,
be—when it’s scientific, that’s completely okay. When he’s doing research around it and also expand any text. And it gets out of the grief, out of a theater of vicarious sufferers.
couldn’t not do it, and he wants to know something and really toils working on it, then that
is okay with me—but I now also see that. But I would assume that many people don’t see
that, that before it they are not only at a complete loss, but also primarily thinking, “I want
to be part of this.” And that’s what would be so nice about it, if maybe we could also grad-
ually begin to dissolve this system and simply switch to the object of utility, where we would
simply say, “That’s so great, thinking that sort of thing, and what’s even greater is when
you see that there’s someone who cannot but think that way.” These situations of compul-
sion, they need to be created, and that doesn’t necessarily always require money. But
money is great. And once you’ve then sold a picture, there are a whole lot of wonderful
things you can do with it …
No, but art really is important, especially because I can put the things in a room, I can again
arrange the art in the room the way I used to edit films.
Obrist: You’re showing the African Twintowers—Stairlift to Heaven tonight.
Schlingensief: It is dedicated to my mother. Because my mother has a stairlift. When she

first rode it up—and that thing moves very slowly—she said, “Aww, how boring this is!

PETER RAUE
MEMORIES OF
W hen the editors invited me to put my memories of Christoph Schlingensief into words,
I was delighted and quickly accepted. How much there is to say, how much to re-
member about this unforgotten one! It would not be difficult to tell stories and write them
Every two years, the Society of the Friends of the Nationalgalerie awards the “Prize for
Young Art.” A jury selects the four most interesting artists from around a hundred and
twenty submissions. The four artists on this “short list” are given the opportunity (and the
down, I thought. But when I began to put my ideas down on paper, I realized that writing financial support) to design one room at Hamburger Bahnhof. Their works are shown to
about Christoph Schlingensief is much more difficult than I had thought. I have no right, do I, the public for several weeks before a new jury determines who has emerged from the con-
to take the most personal things he shared with me and spread them before the world: test as the winner, the best artist. The prize is awarded in a solemn ceremony. The award
his laughter, his tears, his rage, the moments when he opened his heart. And yet he, more speech, the famous proclamation “The winner is …,” is always delivered by a prominent
than almost any other artist in the world, was someone who showed his wounds, who figure from the art world. At the time I was the president of the association that offers the
never concealed them. “Who shows his wounds shall be healed. Who does not show his award, and so I asked Christoph whether he would be willing to hand it over. He agrees
wounds shall not be healed,” the actors chanted in A Church of Fear vs. the Alien Within. without hesitation, shows up for the event on time, dressed quite festively, the chairman
Sharing what we experienced together with the public makes sense only when it goes of the jury hands him the sealed envelope concealing the name of the winner. After a few
beyond the anecdotal register, when it is illuminating, symptomatic. I would be satisfied if opening words and the expression of our gratitude to Schlingensief for having accepted
these lines accomplished nothing but to correct the picture of Christoph Schlingensief as this post, Christoph steps onto the podium, takes the envelope in his hand, and tears it to
a “provocateur,” a distorted picture some people never tire of painting. There was nothing shreds, explaining that “every human being is an artist. Art awards are absolutely ridicu-
he was less! He was, first and foremost, an artist who pursued questions about God and lous. There is only honest and dishonest art, and there is not the slightest reason for these
death and happiness and love in radical fashion—quite literally: to their very roots. Provo- awards. Put an end to the award bullshit,” he shouts at the crowd. Bafflement. Laughter.
cation was never his aim, nor did he ever shrink from it when it seemed necessary to say “Christoph, are you serious?” I ask him as he still stands on the podium. “Perfectly serious,
what he had to say. A free-thinking, deeply Catholic, amiable man, someone who—and for or else I wouldn’t say it.” Steps off the podium and happily sits back down on his chair.
artists this is not self-evident—was approachable and approached others with deep sym- A provocateur? Not at all. For he is serious, he thinks the whole prizing and praising of art is
pathy, Christoph Schlingensief was, as I once put it to him, the “ideal son-in-law.” And I ridiculous, counter to art, a perversion. We somehow saved the situation, identified the
am touched to this day when I think of his text message: “Asked Aino’s father for her hand award winner, announced his name—and the only question everyone asked at the party after
in marriage yesterday. He immediately said yes. I cried I was so happy.” These are not the the ceremony was: “Is Christoph right?”
words of a provocateur but those of a man of deep feeling, a sensitive and indeed some-
times delicate man. In the following I will limit myself to three small scenes, three sketches And now a very brief final scene: I run into Christoph Schlingensief on Potsdamer Platz a few
of Schlingensief, three portraits of a great artist and enchanting man. hours after he was in the “tube.” He does not seem depressed. “What’s the result of the
exam, Christoph?” “Well—overtime.” That was in late May of 2010. The overtime lasted for
Parsifal. The production in Bayreuth that, as he was convinced, brought on his cancer and no more than three months, until he died on August 21. Overtime: ever since his cancer
cost him his life. We spoke on the phone almost every day during the rehearsal period be- diagnosis, he fought for every bit of playtime. With an incredible sense of humor. With in-
cause he felt he did not want to, and could not, defy the resistance Wolfgang Wagner describable desperation. With courage and dignity. How we would have wished for more
mounted to his directing. Had he not received so much support from the great composer playtime! For “it couldn’t possibly be as lovely in heaven as it is here.” I am sure: Christoph
and conductor Boulez, Parsifal would never have premiered. On the way to that goal: is wrong about this one.
collapses, hospital, desperation. And an unfathomable strength with which he waged the
struggle for his directorial ideas, for the integration of video in the production, for the There was one little piece of heaven on this wide earth Christoph Schlingensief wanted to
inclusion of the hare—“something dies with the hare, while life at once erupts”—and re- build before he would leave: in Burkina Faso—located in West Africa, one of the world’s ten
fused to let the king of the hill’s concerns over a lack of “fidelity to Wagner” dissuade poorest countries—he planned his “opera village.” A school, a canteen, a hospital, and
him even one iota from the concept behind his production. Shortly before the premiere, the so-called opera. Not in order to stage La Traviata in Burkina Faso, but to provide the
the house management informs him that he is prohibited from entering the building on country’s high school students with access to the arts next to, and integrated with, their
opening night; he was officially barred from the house. The reason: the idiotic worry that normal education—access to the music of their country, to “World Music,” to filmmaking,
he might want to disrupt the performance by protesting. Yet another desperate call, yet photography, dance, painting: play without limits. This is not about Europeans spreading
again his boundless rage. I propose: “On opening night you casually walk in to see the their pedagogy; people from Burkina Faso will direct the school, teach, make music, play,
show, and if they don’t want to let you in based on the house ban, they’ll have to march and dance with the children. After Christoph’s death, it took a while before the forces
you off in handcuffs. That’s what I’m going to tell the other side’s lawyer—he acts for the gathered that would continue his work, before Aino Laberenz, who had been involved with
house management.” I can still hear his laughter of relief over this “solution.” A day after I the project from the very first idea Christoph had for it, found the courage to keep going.
had communicated the “response” to the house ban, he called me: “The ban has been lifted.”
But now the work is proceeding apace: funding is being collected, the architect Francis
Kéré is realizing his gorgeous plans—and the first students are scheduled to attend the
PETER RAUE 311

school as early as the fall of 2011. The project has been met with widespread approval in
Ouagadougou (from the responsible ministry as well as the city’s artists, filmmakers, dancers),
and people we talk to smile radiantly whenever Christoph is mentioned. So there will be
one place—for many many years, we hope—in that poor beautiful country where this world
is at least nearly as lovely as they say heaven is.
CHARLOTTE ROCHE
THE SOIL OF BURKINA FASO
PETER RAUE
CHARLOTTE ROCHE The Soil of Burkina Faso, 2011 315
STEPHANIE ROSENTHAL
18 IMAGES PER SECOND
CHRISTOPH SCHLINGENSIEF—
THE IMAGE-MAKER
“T he black space is a moment of pupation. After the black space, new life returns. But
the black space is no less alive, for it really makes the emergence of life possible.”1
The black space, a term describing the interval between two individual frames in film, seems
to be a central concept in Christoph Schlingensief’s work. It is, by figurative extension,
the moment when we do not know which direction things are going, when we can open our
minds to the new and different. In and with his art, Schlingensief unremittingly ventured
into this black space, time and again surrendering himself and his art in order to rediscover
both. As Christoph Schlingensief and I were working on the exhibition “18 Images per
Second” held at Haus der Kunst, Munich, in 2006/7, we talked a great deal about what
this black space meant to him. To prepare for the exhibition, I spent some time with him
in Manaus, Brazil, where he shot the films for the show. He was there to direct Richard
Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman for the opera festival at Teatro Amazonas. I learned in
Manaus that Schlingensief, on the stage as much as in film, did not look for his images—
he found them. The images built on one another, emerged from one another, developed
in concert with the actors. Schlingensief made situations, actions, processes possible and
then assembled them in ways that made sense to him. An essential element was the super-
imposition of images, and hence of meanings. He created spaces of the imagination for
the beholder: spaces that took shape only by virtue of the black space of what one could
not see. The title of the exhibition referred to this circumstance: “Eighteen images per
second is the speed at which the eye no longer perceives the black between the images
that is necessary to advance the film, the black space, that is to say, as flicker. But that
already starts to happen at sixteen images per second, so that eighteen images is almost
already two images too many, and at twenty-four images per second, the excess already
amounts to six pictures.”2
Christoph Schlingensief was, to my mind, one of the best image-makers. The pictures he
managed to capture were full of magic, conveying the mood of the particular place where
they were recorded in a unique way. By writing “image-maker,” I am referring to the fact
that he created images on film, in three-dimensional space, and within me. My aim in orga-
nizing the exhibition “18 Images per Second” at Haus der Kunst was therefore to focus
attention on the installational and visual strengths of his work. The exhibition became an
important turning point, both in Schlingensief’s oeuvre and with regard to its context. Until
2000, Schlingensief had been considered from the perspectives of theater, opera, or film.
After his participation in the 2003 Venice Biennale and several smaller presentations at
German and Austrian museums, Christoph Schlingensief’s show at Haus der Kunst was the
first time audiences saw a larger installation at a site dedicated to the visual arts. The exhibi-
tion sought to trigger a shift of perspectives and enable visitors to break free of set ways of
looking at his art. The artist himself, we hoped, would escape the label of the provocateur
that had clung to him; and the use of the installation format would relieve his work of the de-
mand for linear structures. At the time, Schlingensief made the very deliberate decision
to step aside as a visible agent to allow people to take an unvarnished look at his pictures.
He accordingly resolved against the use of actors in the installation, focusing entirely on
the presentation of his films in an installation format. Having launched his career in the the-
ater in the early 1990s, he now, in 2006, found himself increasingly returning to film. He
more and more frequently shot his films abroad: “Working in foreign countries, shooting
abroad is of elementary importance to me. […] This work is becoming ever more important to
18 Images per Second, Haus der Kunst, Munich, 2007,

STEPHANIE ROSENTHAL Installation View 319
me because I don’t see any charge in Germany. What I see is discharge. […] It is very impor- backward. You can do double exposures and quintuple exposures. The Bolex is simply
tant to me that I not appear as an exporting artist but instead seek to make the connection.”3 an instrument straight from my dreams. It forces you to limit yourself in a way that is very
productive, since a reel of film only lasts for just over three minutes.”4 Schlingensief ac-
For Munich, Schlingensief shot twelve 16mm short films in Manaus, which he presented in the cordingly had to switch reels as frequently as every three minutes. The action would not
context of a giant sculptural Last Supper scene. The latter towered over eighteen cubicles: stop, and what happened as he was exchanging the film stock remained untold, swallowed
twelve set into its support structure, six arranged in front of it. The Last Supper itself was also up by darkness.
manufactured in Manaus, modeled after a float in the city’s carnival. The back wall of the
support structure contained a wall of eighteen monitors on which Schlingensief displayed Equally important are the images he does not show, what remains when a bright light is
parts of his film The African Twintowers. The six booths in the front part of the section extinguished: the afterglow that creates new images. Schlingensief wanted to activate the
were legible as shrines or nuclei of Schlingensief’s engagement with film in general and his afterimages his pictures leave on the beholder’s retina for his art. He worked with the
Munich installation more specifically. knowledge that images change in our recollection, becoming superimposed on other im-
ages, that the images we remember are slowly drained of their color, that remembering
The twelve shorts, running on rattling projectors, were shown as infinite loops in the twelve also means forgetting. The multiple exposures in his films reflected this awareness, as did
booths beneath the Last Supper scene. The twelve booths corresponded to the twelve the fact that the open roles of film were exposed to the destructive influences of the envi-
apostles, though who was who and how Schlingensief had assigned the films remained un- ronment. The dust that accumulated on the films left more and more scratches until the
clear. Each film had its own booth, and each booth its own projector. The length of the images finally disappeared.
loops determined how many rolls of film ran. Schlingensief deliberately exposed the film to
dust, and hence to its destruction. The powerful presence of the projector (the rattling Schlingensief did not think that the cinema was a format suitable to the presentation of his
noise, the heat of the light bulb, and the smell of hot celluloid) heightened the involvement of films, as he sought to create a more direct relationship between the picture and its beholder.
the beholder’s body, physically influencing his or her perception. The small spaces created a In Munich, he began to work on a new form of presentation that was clearly related to his
mood of intense intimacy, putting the beholder in direct interaction with the filmic image. work as a theater director. Having integrated films into his work for the stage for years, he
The shorts focused on the human pursuit of resolution and redemption, a subject that had had learned how to use them in an open scenic space. Works such as his Animatographs
increasingly been on Schlingensief’s mind ever since he directed Parsifal in Bayreuth; it (the Animatograph at Neuhardenberg, 2007, as well as Area 7 at Vienna’s Burgtheater, 2006)
was also a central theme in The Flying Dutchman. According to Schlingensief, the flying were already filmic spaces the beholder could enter. “18 Images per Second” was the
Dutchman sought an image that would redeem him, without ever finding it. Senta (the central logical extension of the same idea.
female character in Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman), the woman who loved him, likewise
had an image she wished to see fulfilled, which brought her no happiness. He continued to pursue the themes that had appeared in his films and theatrical and operatic
work, although his formal language had become starker and clearer. The element of per-
The protagonists of the twelve black-and-white films are actors like Karin Witt and Klaus formance had disappeared. He no longer appeared in person, and the installation stood for
Beyer with whom Schlingensief had worked for years in his theatrical, opera, and film proj- itself, but as such it also stood in for him. Schlingensief was always present in his works.
ects. As in much of his work, one motif emerges from the other. No beginning; no end. It was as though his art invited us to enter into the labyrinth of his mind, but without particular
The images are like those in a dream, from a different time and yet recognizably made just consideration for the fact that we had only just come aboard; the machine rattled on, telling
now: timeless. Karin Witt, playing the role of Senta, appears in the jungle, as a petite bride us of people, stories, and myths, things he had read and others he had heard, things real
next to indigenous peoples, or as a fertility goddess buried beneath fish. Other scenes and unreal. The attempt to put the images we had seen into a sort of order in our own minds
include a Brazilian child, wearing a bashful smile, standing in the jungle; an old Brazilian man foundered. It all went too fast! And so we immersed ourselves in the stream of images, rel-
on the beach, holding a mirror reflecting the camera and Schlingensief behind it; a band ished being carried away by it, and later emerged, refreshed.
of indigenous peoples, their bodies painted and clad in grass skirts, playing flutes on the
beach; a large passenger ship traveling up the Amazon. Alternating surges of brightness and Schlingensief was not interested in the one image, not in the ultimate image; for what mattered
darkness, a pulsating image, and cross-fades are characteristic features of these black- to him in the end was the black space between the images, and what comes into being at
and-white films. The viewer frequently receives the impression that Schlingensief is using that moment in the process of beholding. Schlingensief sought to use the black space, the
the camera to capture the sunlight itself, leaving nothing but a blindingly white picture. This moment of not seeing or the inability to see, to set our inner screens aglow.
effect was achieved by using a 16mm Bolex camera, a model made in the 1930s, robust
and particularly wieldy. A small lever on the Bolex enabled Schlingensief to drown the pic- 1 Christoph Schlingensief in conversation with the author, Manaus, Brazil (Easter 2007).
2 Ibid.
tures in light or darkness and then bring them back. Schlingensief was fascinated by the 3 Ibid.
Bolex, which he described as a very “palpable” instrument: “You have to wind this camera 4 Ibid.
up by hand, you can select different film speeds, and using a crank you can even shoot
STEPHANIE ROSENTHAL 321

KARLHEINZ SCHMID
DEAR CHRISTOPH
S unday, August 22, 2010, eight o’clock. Stunned by the news of your death that came
yesterday—in the end, it was a surprise after all—and having slept only a few hours,
I gaze into the morning sun, little big Scorpio brother, and find no way forward in my gloom.
we went our separate as well as shared ways—you in Oberhausen, I, your senior, in Hanau
in Hesse. Boy, the parallels we kept discovering by chance. For a while I thought, pardon
my English, that you were shitting me; it wasn’t possible, was it, that there would be someone
As though paralyzed, my mind keeps returning to something Bazon Brock made us take to out there whose biography, at least the milestones, was a virtual carbon copy of mine.
heart: Death must be abolished, this damn mess must stop. Your fiftieth birthday was to be These familiar paths running along similar lines no doubt proved a link between us, helping
in a few weeks, the opera village project in Africa needed ongoing work, and of course you us get through even the rough patches when you would pull stunts from the cornucopia of
had hoped to make a personal appearance in Venice next year, where you were to design the perfidy, no holds barred, to the limits of what our relationship would bear.
German Pavilion at the Biennale. It would have been an honor for you to represent the na-
tion and to irritate it as well, to challenge and provoke. I had to learn that you didn’t mean to hurt me and Gabriele personally—after we had helped
you get a well-paid commission to direct a production—that your merciless, borderline,
Susanne Gaensheimer, the German curator, now probably has to ask herself whether sometimes antisocial, even inhuman methods, not infrequently camouflaged as art, were
Schlingensief without Schlingensief isn’t even worse and more impossible than Beuys without directed against a system that struck you as questionable. But when you played the role
Beuys. Alas! Christoph, this damned lung cancer, which you had bravely stood up to since of the smoothly polite son-in-law, be it at the Wagners’ in Bayreuth, be it on the (Berlinale’s)
2008, has torn you away from us much too early. That we will miss you is a lousy formula of red carpet at home in Berlin, you often gave the impression that you didn’t in fact mind the
mourning I can’t inflict on you even posthumously. But I need you to know up there on pomp and circumstance at all. Yes, you were a player on the social stage, and you played
Cloud 24, or down there in the fires of Satan, that we already now suspect how great the people, too, dear Christoph, and before your illness led Gabriele to judge you with a certain
loss is, how much the international culture scene will suffer because one of its leading leniency, she would often say that a player and cheat like you could not but burn in hell later
initiators and contrarians has made his last exit. on. That, she thought, would only be fair.
Months ago, you wrote to me that “these fucking metastases were once again on the But today, one day after your unspeakable exodus from the world of culture, which is sadden-
advance,” that “these little growth enthusiasts,” to whom you had already had to sacrifice ing to all of us, let us be hopeful and assume that you will end up above—for your recent
your entire left lung, were up to mischief again, and that yet another chemo had failed to good deeds, in Africa, if for nothing else. A Burkina Faso indulgence, that is to say. In your
work. In an act of helplessness as much as piety, I took a printout of your e-mail, and uncere- book entitled So schön wie hier kann’s im Himmel gar nicht sein! [It couldn’t possibly be
moniously pinned it to the wall next to my desk, directly beneath the framed photograph of as lovely in heaven as it is here!], you made the astonishing admission that there are various
the vigorously beating organ I had received at the last minute, shortly before your illness was rules. “There’s a boundary one must not transgress,” you write on page 175, “lest one open
diagnosed, thanks to a heart transplantation. Do you remember, Christoph, how, in 2008, the door to one’s own disintegration.” Little wonder, then, that you—whom many people would
during the first months after your surgery, we exchanged e-mails nonstop, hell-bent on sharing describe as an artist ruthlessly possessed by his ideas, including the controversial work with
even the most intimate feelings, telling each other to have courage? your disabled “freak stars”—were occasionally able to feel your secretly soft heart.
And so today I must write the last page of our correspondence, open a final chapter, by saying Of all days, on Christmas Eve of 2007—hardly an accident, I would think—you, the bastard,
farewell. A chainsaw massacre, as it were. But how to pay tribute to you; how to encompass sent a sort of apology to Gabriele and me for an earlier collaboration at Berlin’s Volksbühne
everything you have accomplished, how you stretched, and sometimes overstretched, the that had been most grueling, with a lot of backstabbing on your part. The project, your lines
narrow idea of art? “Failure as Opportunity”—do you have any idea how much this slogan you read, had “not exactly been the crowning achievement of my athletic endeavors.” That
propagated has ushered in a new way of thinking? What was weak, what met with little showed true greatness, quite in contrast with the cowardly retreat you beat in February 2005,
success or none at all—these marks of a loser, which society had once frowned upon, grad- something we will not soon forget. It was quite the lesson, and we were beside ourselves.
ually really came to be understood, and not just by your fellow artists, as an opportunity to My heart, already weak at the time, was twitching.
free life from the normative strictures of daily career rituals and transpose it into a different
kind of value register. What was sensational, too, was how you—whose individual projects What remains, dear Christoph, are the profound memories of a man who—like few others—
drew plenty of harsh criticism, including my own—straddled the disciplines and cast off the showed us time and again in his untiring creative work, whether it tended toward construction
petit-bourgeois thinking in genres. Film, theater, opera, literature, the visual arts—hand in or destruction, what art can do, should be, could be. An existential balancing artist is what
hand, arm in arm, head to head, or ass to ass. One gaffe after another. you were, a tightrope walker who feared no height—though you always knew that the danger
of falling was dialectically tied in with any flight of creative euphoria. Intoxicated with the
And yet we’re both from most upstanding middle-class families, only children both of us, the theatrical productions of life and death, you conducted your noisy acrobatic exercises on this
sons of mothers named Anni who both gave birth to us, seven years apart, exactly on earth or a few feet above, were able to conduct them longer than the severity of your illness
October 24, not knowing we would neither want to be pharmacists nor post office clerks. had allowed us to expect. Now the time has come for eternal quiet. Away with the megaphone!
As narrow-gauge filmmakers, department of Super 8, or as altar boys, censers preferred, Silence—silence, too, outside on this Sunday morning shortly after ten. I hope we will see
KARLHEINZ SCHMID 325

each other one day on Cloud 24. Then, Scorpio brother, you can finally answer me these
questions: Why was your poison stinger longer than mine? And looking back, were your
claw attacks worth it, personally and socially? That’s a balance you still need to draw up.
You’re getting detention, Christoph! Affectionately yours, Carlo

ELISABETH SCHWEEGER
A PERSONAL PERSPECTIVE ON
KARLHEINZ SCHMID
“T he great power, however, rests in uncertainty, in the conviction that there are no
solutions but only transformations and changes of form … that, to me, is not fatalism,
it is a very big yes to life.” (Christoph Schlingensief)
I understand Schlingensief as someone who knew about the world, had a pronounced sense
of his mission, and was always on air, always live. It seemed as though he was driven by a
duty, a responsibility that cast a spell over everyone he met.
To comprehend Schlingensief in a few sentences, to describe him in a single page strikes Schlingensief’s work has left a deeply profound imprint.
me as impossible. His work and he himself were so fascinating because he always acted
emotionally and yet was invariably perfectly clear in the use of, and engagement with, the As theatrical productions of today’s world, informed by German traditions and yet of universal
media conditions and communicative abilities of our time. He didn’t speculate, he confuted human validity in their moral high-mindedness, his works established a new iconography that
every expectation, he picked a fight, he didn’t use “coolness” or skepticism to stand aloof. tied art most closely to everyday life.
He spoke of opacity and meant authenticity. In this way, his art created forever more interfaces
with its environment, inevitably inviting people to interact with it. He generated new ways of grasping and looking at reality, new interpretations of art: nothing
remained untouched in his work—Catholicism encountered the world of consumerism,
Since the early years of the last century, art has come to work with greater and greater different cultures collided, morality met immorality, systems were perverted into their oppo-
energy on its own boundaries and on dissolving the individual disciplines; in Schlingensief sites, he beat the entertainment industry at its own game and execrated the conventional
it became an instrument that, no longer requiring interpretation, was instead able to prove publicly funded repertoire theater as an entertainment factory. He interwove all devices of
itself wrong. Schlingensief thus triggered a turning point at which art must define itself in art and put them to use. Film, for instance, the artistic means that was second nature to
a new way. him, a technical instrument beholden to movement that allows for cuts, slashes, contortions,
false perspectives, etc., also shaped the aesthetics of his later work, be it on stage, in the
His Viennese container project Ausländer raus! [Foreigners Out!] attested to this redefinition art space, in the public sphere, in the book.
of art, in which art in the classical sense failed to recognize itself because it suddenly found
itself confronted with forms from reality shows, among other things. Working in the art con- His art is contradictory, without ideology, open. He shied away from nothing, took what he
text, Schlingensief successfully staged an aggressive intervention in political issues by needed, from Goethe to Immendorf, from Nietzsche to Warhol, from Schönberg to Jelinek,
employing form, style, and content in antithetical fashion: “Refuting [Jörg] Haider is impossi- jumbling it up and patching it together into new shapes—a way of working that produced
ble; doing a test run of Haider is possible.” Accordingly, the participants in his productions astonishing screenplays, texts, shows, installations. He was a congenial plagiarist, a DJ as
were not always actors but also included people directly affected by an issue: foreigners, well as VJ of art, something he acknowledged frankly and publicly. Truth, in its incredible
former neo-Nazis, disabled people, etc. So he did test runs, as though in a laboratory, of complexity, rose up before us, and its power to amaze and affect us was ineluctable. Art, he
what it means to stigmatize someone and to expel him from the country at the end of the day. thought, “becomes interesting when we face something we cannot altogether explain.”
Similar ideas drove his project of founding the party Chance 2000 or the Church of Fear.
So it was only logical that Christoph Schlingensief would go to Africa. Working there, he could
Art became a test laboratory. And it was only logical that he would say about the theater: kick something off, set something in motion, but he clearly recognized his limitations; the
that’s politics. language and the different culture, to begin with, were barriers to understanding. Suddenly
the only option was trust. Suddenly the only thing to do was to marvel in beauty. He created
Schlingensief refused to see art as independent from life. The separation between art and something, and in so doing engendered movement. And miraculously demonstrated that artis-
life did not exist for him. In repealing the boundaries between the disciplines of art and the tic thinking and action can move mountains and lead to insight, insight of which a self-posses-
conduct of life, and in the gift that enabled him to use all means the modern world of media sion that fights back, that can stand up, can be itself, believes its own ego and the other’s
put at his disposal with absolute impudence, he turned art into an instrument, even a weapon. capable. This was most evident in his play Mea Culpa, where he flips death the bird with great
It allowed him to take specific stances and to interfere, to broach the issues of the day: serenity, declaring himself the creator of his own life.
that is, to use his art to make a difference in its social context, a form of action that ultimately
found its most concrete realization in the opera village project, Remdoogo. Schlingensief made us shake and tear at our own perceptions until we were left unnerved,
entranced, crazed, amazed. Together with the artist, who, often in the thick of it, acting as
This impulse arose out of a conception of freedom he insisted on and claimed for himself. moderator, driving force, actor, seducer, took aim at a reality that seemed to have spun out
That is why he also permitted himself infringements that seemed to amount to breaches of control.
of rules, in the registers of content as well as style, and through them he did not create
reality, as the theater is wont to claim it does, but attacked it, turning art into reality and A loving moralist, sickened by the German character, its past and its uncertain future (he once
vice versa. spoke of the putrid smell in Germany), but also by the opacity of the world in general; but
which he could never have done, never wanted to do without this world—he simply loved it.
ELISABETH SCHWEEGER 329

His “stomach was twisting itself into a knot,” he once called out to me via text message. Every
single instance of injustice, every failure of understanding affected him personally, drained
his body of its strength. He was like a seismograph, recording everything, needing his art for
self-protection, a gifted chronicler of our time who used the means of art to render magnificent
liberties (back) to life.
GEORG SEESSLEN
ART IN FILMS?
NO. ART AS FILM
ELISABETH SCHWEEGER
I example, those by Radley Metzger, Russ Meyer, or Herschell Gordon Lewis, and with the
midnight movies of the new Fauves like Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre or George
I will try to answer, in a few words, the question: What is so darn special about the films of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. I think it was not only the roughness, this daring glance to
Christoph Schlingensief? the other side, and of course the close relationship between filmmakers and their audience
that influenced Christoph Schlingensief, but also the fact that these masters of exploitation
The first answer is very easy: they are beautiful. had developed a code of cinematic representation of the body, of pain and rage, that denied
all Hollywood masquerades and myths.
That may come as a little surprise, because when they came out, the critics and audience
talked about creative chaos, about rebellion, about bad taste, and of course about the Now, these are the four sources of what I called, strangely enough, the beauty of Christoph
potential for scandal. They did not talk a lot about beauty, did they? Schlingensief’s films: the struggle with traditions, codes and conventions of filmmaking,
the influence of modern art, the strain of magic autobiography, and the codes of open secrets
Christoph Schlingensief’s films were considered the work of a rebellious, slightly messy, in what are called trash movies.
slightly uneasy, though very gifted low-budget or now-budget little brother of the great
masters of New German Cinema, like Herzog, Wenders, or Fassbinder. And they were These four elements find themselves put together in a form of composition that is in turn
considered a link, or let’s say a short-circuit, between trash and art, underground and centered around, let’s say, two strange attractors. Number one: the myths of Christianity,
art house, the aesthetics of DIY-punk and traditional avant-garde. And, let us not forget: often filtered through the autobiographical experience and not nearly as blasphemous or
they did not have a lot of friends in German film culture then. fishing for cheap thrills as some of the critics would have it, but in a very direct form of
embodiment, of reenactment. Number two: the myths of German history, from fascism to
Christoph Schlingensief’s films were certainly not meant to provoke Hollywood remakes. the fall of the Berlin Wall. And these political aspects of the films in particular lead us to
They were not meant to fit into primetime TV programs. They were not even meant to fulfill the center of this conceptual art of embodiment.
the dreams of the Sunday afternoon art-house audience. They were meant right from the
beginning as works of art. Usually that does not include a feel-good guarantee. But it does It is not about showing something. It is not about documenting something. It is not about
include the category of beauty. sharing ideas, formulating images of dissidence. But it is, exactly what would be realized in
his later work for other media, for the stage, even for public places, about acting it out.
An unseen beauty, that is. The reason may be that the beauty of these films does not re- Bringing it to a bodily performance. Living it. Right in front of the camera. That is, of course,
veal itself so easily in the codes of film history—though they are full of film history—but a very strange, very unique connection between religious and political, artistic and social
more openly in the terms of modern art. So let’s say, and that is already the second answer: impulses. And that is the third answer to our question: Christoph Schlingensief’s films bring
Christoph Schlingensief’s film opened the doors of cinema to a series of tendencies and together, not without conflict, very different codes, very different zones, very different
techniques of modern art, beginning with Dadaism and Surrealism, which was already image / language units of our social life. There are no borders between politics, religion, inti-
present in the work of Luis Buñuel or Federico Fellini, leading to Pop art, Fluxus, Happening, macy (including sexuality), and representation. And that is, I think, what radical art is all about.
Situationist art, the Orgies Mysteries Theater of the Vienna School, Abstract Expressionism,
reenactment or street art, and including concepts like the Gesamtkunstwerk, the complete II
or synthetic artwork, or the soziale Plastik [social sculpture] of Joseph Beuys, who was really
very influential for Christoph Schlingensief. Rainer Werner Fassbinder once replied, when he was asked what his films were about,
that he made films not about something but with something. He made films with lighting,
So we do not have here, like we are used to having, films with art in them, but we have art with people, with places, with words, and so on. And that is the case even more in the
as film, and “radical art” for that matter. And then, from these two fields of conflict, strug- films of Christoph Schlingensief: we see what a film is made with.
gling with the codes of traditional cinema and transforming methods and styles of modern
art into cinema, we find two other strong impulses. Usually, discussing a film, you begin with plot, characters, style, and perhaps meaning. But
there are some films where this kind of discussion does not make very much sense. Maybe
The first of course is the open if sometimes ironically reflected autobiographic context. we can go a little deeper, treating even more fundamental elements of filmmaking: space, time,
Maybe in itself it was a reaction to the heroic biographies of the preceding generation: a and subject. Subject not in the sense of theme or motive, but in a strictly grammatical sense:
petit bourgeois growing up in a more or less happy and loving family, far from the great what is I? How do we construct a we? And so on.
German Oedipus tale that was present in all political and artistic discourses so far. In ev-
ery Christoph Schlingensief film we see the child from Oberhausen at play. The second The spaces in Christoph Schlingensief’s films are easily described: it’s a sort of urban niche,
impulse is a close connection with what is called trash movies, mainly American films—for a wasteland, a place where children used to play, sometimes forbidden, games, somewhat
GEORG SEESSLEN 333

forgotten, archaic places where human codes are negated. Again, there are autobiographic in the desert where they can sort things out, rest a little, talk a little, even make love or
subtexts, again there are Christian and political metaphors at work. “It is not we who con- kill each other.
struct the space, the space constructs us,” was what he said, and we can see his films as
models of space constructing subjects. Of course there are also many recurring motifs in Schlingensief’s films, first of all acting out
images of German history, or let’s say, sub-history. It all begins with taking the myths literally
Time in Christoph Schlingensief’s film is far away from the usual grammar that reaches or pictorially, from Hitler being buried in the German subconscious to the cannibalism in
from “once upon a time” to “it happened yesterday.” It’s pure present. It is even not a German reunification.
“happening” but a going-on. This is the time in a Schlingensief film: something is going on.
Always now. And there is this recurrent drowning, hiding, searching of film reels. This has a lot to do
with its function as a social sculpture and a living being, and it is a direct reflection of film
When we met at his Munich exhibition at Haus der Kunst, Christoph showed me around. as a subversive, forbidden act. (Of course we all know the story of United Trash, where
And there was this arrangement of projected films, complete with a lot of things memo- the reels had to be hidden in order to protect them from the police.)
rializing his childhood. And you could see the film as a material literally getting weary, get-
ting wrecked, dying at the end, being reanimated, and dying again. And it seemed per- If we understand them as a moving form of what Joseph Beuys called soziale Plastik, social
fectly clear to me what a film was in this context. A living being. sculpture, then we see Christoph Schlingensief’s films not only as works and as statements
but also what Beuys, again, called the “nomadic gesture.” Everything that is happening in
I think we can understand Christoph Schlingensief’s films by seeing them as living beings, them tends to not stay within the frame. Every film by Christoph Schlingensief is at the same
including the possibility of changing, of being a little absent, getting lost and being time film and anti-film. We see that an impulse to be more than a film, to leave, to destroy
found again, leaving traces, and so on. So they reflect time in another way, not in themselves the frame, to overcome the deadness of film, is also an impulse of self-destruction. And again
but in their connection with the spectator. That, of course, is the same thing social we are close to Joseph Beuys, who asserted the union of art and anti-art. Usually, discussing
sculpture intends. a film you begin by a description of what is going on on the screen. But that is of no use in
a Schlingensief film. People moving around in strange places, crying, yelling at each other,
Subjects in a Schlingensief film are not persons in the sense of psychological realism, being astonished by themselves, acting something out that was buried in themselves or
complete with back stories, plausible reactions, everyday behaviors; nor are they mythic elsewhere, forming strange roundels of chases and flights and so on. Crossing our view. In
figures, as familiar from genre films, like heroes, heavies, sidekicks, and so on. They are this case we must describe what is going on inside ourselves. Because in the art of reen-
artists in their own right, acting something out or reenacting something, including rage, actment, embodiment, happening, Situationist or Actionist performance you cannot read a
pain, despair. What we see is not I, not we, but a kind of you. It’s neither make-believe work of art the way we used to learn to read a film in seventies film theory between Marxism,
nor identification, but dialogue. And that kind of a cinematic “you” is a utopian view that psychoanalysis, and Structuralism; you must participate in a way.
can be found in works as different as those of Godard, Pasolini, and Alexander Kluge.
And that is my last answer to our question: Christoph Schlingensief’s films foreshadow the
The actors, or the artists participating in this acting-out and reenactment, are moved around nomadic gesture of moving pictures. Leaving the cinema and reaching for life.
in these places in a way that is neither dance—choreography—nor a staging of action
and reaction; maybe we could call it some kind of roundel. That is a form of dance in which
the individual is taken away by the movement of others, in a chasing or fleeing, one of the
archetypal movements of film, but also in the sense of a death dance, which is a very deeply
rooted form of representation of society especially in German culture. Maybe the death
dance is overshadowed by the presence of death, impersonated in a living skeleton, but it
is also meant as a dance of life, giving the participants the opportunity to act out their
social roles, the bourgeois, the maiden, the priest, the soldier, and so on. In this roundel or
death dance everyone has his opportunity to perform, to act out, and then move on.
III
For film to be a living being, as an art of presence, it is necessary to have a reliable

stock company or something like a factory, some kind of nomadic family whose members
seem not to make a movie but to cross a movie, like nomads crossing some place
GEORG SEESSLEN 335

THE ARTIST OF DEMOCRACY

It was the opening night of the 2009 Berlinale, and as always during the Berlinale season
it was too cold in Berlin, and not even Dieter Kosslick could do anything about that. But
he had appointed Christoph Schlingensief to the International Jury—showing once again
Today, two years later, I can only hope that German foreign policy remains conscious of
what we initiated back then, proceeding along the path we charted and enlarging the mea-
sures we implemented. I can assure those now in charge that I, in my new function, and
what committed art in our times can mean and what it can set in motion. the representatives of the opposition in general will not withhold their support of these is-
sues. For that, too, is political responsibility: to have the greater common cause in view
Christoph Schlingensief sat at the large table in one corner of the Adagio, in the belly, so and not to abandon it for the sake of egoistic impulses; to live democracy rather than just
to speak, of the Berlinale Palast. On the margins of the whole hubbub, and yet at its center. talk about it.
Amid the Berlin cold, the African warmth of his heart. A member of my staff sat with him,
they had known each other for more than ten years, ever since Christoph Schlingensief’s That was, time and again, the point on which we converged in our conversations. In my po-
production of Brecht’s Rosa Luxemburg fragment at the Volksbühne in Berlin. I sat down litical language and work, it was the struggle against the egoisms and particular interests
next to him, and we immediately got to talking about his Africa project. A festival hall grow- in politics, and for shared responsibility. Against a mentality that prizes stinginess above all,
ing from the inside out, a living space for continents and arts in which the separation of art against the dangerous view that all will be provided for if everyone looks out for himself.
from non-art would be abolished. As though a society were an addition of egoisms. That is the point of departure in my polit-
ical work, and my impression was that it was also one of the driving forces of what Christoph
What I really wanted to ask him at the time was whether he would not realize the same Schlingensief did as an artist.
concept here in Berlin at the Humboldt-Forum. But then he immediately brought up the
matter that was closest to his heart: his festival hall for Africa. He spoke about his love for Embedded in his artistic work was the attempt to fight with the weapons of art. To insist on
Africa, about the need to do more for culture there, and about a second need: the need the rights of the individual against the narcissistic excesses as well as humiliations of a
to firmly anchor art in society, here as much as there. About how art affects society and what society founded on egoisms. In that regard, I see a common thread that begins with 100
it receives from society, in short: about democracy and art. Jahre CDU [100 Years of CDU], runs through Chance 2000, and finally leads to the festival
hall in Africa. Responsibility, to my mind, is the key term here.
A short while ago, we launched an Africa initiative spearheaded by the Foreign Office. The
initiative was the immediate fruit of my trips to the continent, from which I had returned Such responsibility is most closely associated with a second aspect that, in my eyes, makes
with the impression that it was high time to strengthen our involvement there, to help in Christoph Schlingensief the artist of democracy. A warmth that comes from the heart, or
particular with the establishment of democratic societies, which always also requires the to use a more neutral term, empathy. In this regard, too, he stands in a great tradition led by
instruments of cultural policy. More specifically, we needed to build schools, set up school the august pioneer of art in democracy, Joseph Beuys.
broadcasting stations, and ask the Goethe-Institut to increase its efforts there. That eve-
ning at the Berlinale, however, Christoph Schlingensief told me that although Goethe was all “Everyone ought to be encouraged, really”: that was a Beuys line Christoph Schlingensief
good and fine, he needed more Marx. Less beautiful speeches and more filthy lucre. quoted in conversation with me on various occasions, indicating that his aim was precisely
to expand the concept of art to include all human activity, and expressing his conviction
From this request, our conversation led us to the question of the responsibility every individual that this view could become the basis for something new and magnificent. Such as the opera
has in his place. His responsibility as an artist, mine as a politician, but both anchored in, and village in Africa, which draws its energy from the union of life and art—may it grow and pros-
dedicated to, the framework of society. per as Christoph Schlingensief’s legacy, his baby.
It was a moving evening; an evening that moved me very much because our paths had crossed But achieving this aim requires artists and other people—and I explicitly include politicians
again after several years, and we were able to start a new conversation that was at bottom in this group—to work together in the shared conviction that people must be encouraged
an old one: about responsibility and participation. In the national framework, but importantly in to participate, to join forces and pitch in. Policy can and must help to make such collaboration
the international one as well. happen, in particular in the fields of cultural and educational programs. That is the fairly
precise opposite of a politics that redlines, reprimands, and excludes. That is also why I
But it was also an evening on which, working together, we were able to set something in emphatically reject populist doomsayers and those who prattle on about a Leitkultur, a
motion. The very next day I asked my staff to study the situation, to develop proposals, to “guiding culture.” I believe that this is a cynical approach to politics, one that fuses intellec-
lend active and practical support to Christoph Schlingensief’s project. A few days after tual narrow-mindedness with a lack of empathy.
the Berlinale we sat down together one more time, discussed initial proposals, expanded
them, and filled in several details, and one year later, when we opened our 2009 confer- And so it does not seem coincidental to me that these same people displayed the greatest
ence on cultural issues at the Foreign Office, the package he had wanted for his festival hall hostility toward Christoph Schlingensief’s works. How they howled when he exclaimed,
had been put together. “Kill Helmut Kohl!” And as Christoph Schlingensief told me with palpable dismay, when he
FRANK-WALTER STEINMEIER 339

approached a painting during a visit to the chancellor’s office in 2009 he was asked not to
destroy it. These people took offence at the way his art demanded responsibility and ac-
countability. Quite literally: with the entire Schlingensief family, he demanded accountability,
from Kassel to Wolfgangsee, from Vienna to Burkina Faso. It was a long journey, a journey
that included moments of wonderful poetic beauty and others full of irritation and the destruc-
tion of what seemed indubitable certainties, and ultimately led him to the clarity with which SANDRA UMATHUM
he described the motives for his commitment in Africa.
THEATER OF SELF-QUESTIONING:
But his was also an art that demanded accountability from those who, buoyed by cynical ROCKY DUTSCHKE, ’68, OR THE
arrogance, believe themselves superior to others. For cynicism as a way of life works best CHILDREN OF THE REVOLUTION
when we do not take the other person seriously, when we do not accept him for who he is.
It was against this cynical coldness that Christoph Schlingensief fought with the African
warmth of his heart.
Precisely because he bore such a great excess of empathy within himself did he seek to hold
others and himself accountable. But not in order to denigrate them; his aim was to make a
different, a better life possible. Also and especially when his art crossed the threshold of pain.
The battle he fought was not fought in vain; and it is up to us to live up to this legacy.
W hen the Volksbühne reopened under a new directorship in 1992, film director
Christoph Schlingensief was brought into the circle of those who had made it their
task in post-socialist East Berlin “to observe meticulously, to make—as malignantly as
in order to give a name to the ambiguity of reality and fiction with which the theater of the
1990s had been so preoccupied. This ambiguity has been internalized as a stylistic device
of contemporary theater. But back then it was a challenge, and frequently an overwhelming
possible—the disease in the national body of Germany the subject matter of theater and to one, for many theatergoers. The incursion of reality into the theater was an affront, and it
create feelings of uncertainty.” In his luggage, the Catholic son of a pharmacist from the was often possible to listen to conversations after a performance that were about little other
West German town of Oberhausen brought with him much exploitable material from his than whether something had been staged or was the result of chance, mishap, or a spon-
own biography and postwar history. taneous decision.
His first production, 100 Jahre CDU—Spiel ohne Grenzen [100 Years of CDU—Game Schlingensief has explored the generation of undecidable situations and the play with them
without Limits, 1993], showed the “vision of a fascistic madhouse Germany.” In an attempt like no one else. But it wasn’t only that the planned and the unplanned, the invented and
to recreate the state of chaos in which Germany found itself after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the true sometimes became so inextricable that you scarcely knew what to think or how to
Schlingensief put it all on stage and, in doing so, transformed the stage into a madhouse respond; with Schlingensief, even categories like right and wrong, good and bad were put
as well. Faster than any professional television junky could have done, he and his protago- to the test in such a way that you seemed to lose track of your own value system. He produced
nists zapped through the German TV landscape. There were quotations from game and disorientation, with the result that his viewers were left to themselves, to their perception,
talk shows, news programs, and calls for donations, until the absurdly distorted stage figures bewilderment, ethics, and doubts, and not least to their understanding of theater itself. Yet
overlapped with the various television formats, representatives, and content. The former Schlingensief never simply delegated this self-questioning to the audience. He also con-
German president Richard von Weizsäcker sang a song about the lovely Bellevue Palace ducted it himself.
and stupid Berlin; a UN officer bet that he would be able to paint a Star of David on the
window of a Turkish grocery and be back in the studio in ten minutes; victims of a neo-Nazi Schlingensief’s tearful, bloodstained appearance on stage was the result of a spur-of-the-
attack warbled the famous pop song of a children’s charity. Schlingensief served up a moment decision. But with his next production Kühnen ’94—Bring mir den Kopf von
mixed bag from which the grimacing visage of the media-generated fun society stared back Adolf Hitler! [Kühnen ’94—Bring Me the Head of Adolf Hitler!, 1993], his presence on stage
at the audience. became a significant feature of his theater work. Initially, he was unsure about what to
do with theater. But he soon realized that it offered him possibilities that were unavailable
The critics panned the production. It was described as a “politically adolescent gaffe.” Its to him as a filmmaker. With film there comes a point in the editing room when you have to
director was certified as having “no talent” and lacking a concept. Schlingensief felt he tie yourself down. Theater, on the other hand, allowed Schlingensief to intervene even after
hadn’t been taken seriously. During the sixth performance he sat in the canteen wondering the premiere and to go on reorganizing and altering scenes that had been set during re-
how the thing could be salvaged. Having got up some Dutch courage, he stormed onto hearsal. But it wasn’t enough for him to adjust his productions only before or after a perfor-
the stage, rammed a syringe into the blood-bag under his shirt, bit on a blood capsule and mance, so he put himself on stage—as director and actor in one—where he could respond
screamed, “Lights down!” Then he continued, “I am the pharmacist’s son from Oberhau- as needed to everyone and everything, and be able to take up and spontaneously deal with
sen, and now you’ve got me. You wanted it.” Schlingensief looked bad. He was covered in anything from the critics to the audience to the activities of his fellow actors, or even his
fake blood from head to foot. With tears in his eyes he began to talk about the death of own aimlessness. But this also meant that what had been developed in rehearsal was in
his grandmother. You could have heard a pin drop in the auditorium. His appearance had danger of being thrown out the next moment. All of a sudden, no one was sure of his or her
apparently unleashed consternation and confusion. role, neither Schlingensief himself, nor his actors or audience.
Directors are figures rarely seen on stage. They usually only come to the premiere to take In Schlingensief, a director came to the theater who refused to deliver productions as sim-
their applause. But Schlingensief had his say—and an enigmatic one at that—in his own ulated reproductions. He was instead interested in the possibility of situational resetting,
piece. Was his appearance on stage really a part of the production? Was his emotional out- of variation, of the surprise effect, and the revelation of what is usually concealed: the gaps,
burst real or was he only acting? And was the story true or invented? Schlingensief had the mistakes, the perplexities, or the moments of failure. During the 1990s, playing with
set a situation in motion that held the answers to these questions in abeyance. It could all variables became a trademark of Schlingensief’s theater, and with it he revealed what few
have been simulated. But the possibility that everything was genuine, and that reality had directors had explicitly dealt with until then: that performances are not only unpredictable,
indeed snuck into the theater, provoked the audience into abandoning its aesthetic distance. but also singular events, unrepeatable in the sense that the actors are not in the same physical
Schlingensief’s entrance threw everything into confusion. Regardless of whether you were and mental condition each evening and that the audience is always different. Because
prepared to give credence to his emotions or not, you couldn’t really be sure if he was being Schlingensief had abandoned the assumption of exact repetition in favor of difference and
sincere. Today, almost two decades later, audiences have long become accustomed to uniqueness, it was not uncommon to tell someone about a particularly impressive scene that
such ambiguous situations, which are a characteristic of postdramatic theater, as Hans-Thies this person, who had seen the production on another night, hadn’t experienced.
Lehmann has shown. He was one of the first to talk about the “aesthetics of undecidability,”
SANDRA UMATHUM 343

June 1996: a little more than twenty years after the death of Ulrike Meinhof, and only a few Dutschke. In this respect, Rocky Dutschke was not simply a turning point. In view of
days after the premiere of Rocky Dutschke, ’68—Schlingensief was no longer an un- Schlingensief’s attempt to challenge the conventionalized receptive patterns of the audi-
known entity in Berlin. Several of my friends told me I shouldn’t miss the production. At ence, it was also a first test run.
last, quite a different kind of theater. You could sit on the floor and even actively take part.
In the foyer leading into the auditorium, we went past blurred photographs of the rehears-
When we arrived at the forecourt of the Volksbühne, the participatory theater had already als and the actors. The photos were countered by various quotations: “There are no uto-
begun. Some of those present, easily recognizable as the Volksbühne’s then-typical pias any more, there is no meaning any more, there is no significance any more, there is
audience, were sitting on the steps up to the foyer drinking beer and smoking cigarettes, only this vacuum, this empty space. We don’t know where we are going in this empty
while the others had gathered around a brass band that was marching behind a banner space, how we should move, which direction makes sense. So we act. The play emerges
bearing the words: NO POWER FOR ANYONE! Actors dressed as police were calling from this.” Or: “There is no accommodation with this world any more; we only belong in
out various orders into the crowd and busily checking out the area when Schlingensief it to the extent to which we rebel against it.” These and other quotes from Dutschke, Heiner
turned up to present two of the evening’s main protagonists in a kind of twin pack: Rudi Müller, Adorno, Wolf Biermann, and others ushered the audience through to the corridor
Dutschke (1940–79), spokesman of the West German and particularly West Berlin around the auditorium itself. Naked men and women cavorted about on mattresses on the
student movement of the 1960s, and himself, master of ceremonies and spokesman of the floor—an echo of Kommune 22—while theater police carried out occasional identity checks.
performance. In an ill-fitting wig, and with a megaphone in his hand, he evoked Dutschke A young woman was positioned at the entrance and stamped people’s wrists with the
without quite disappearing behind him. The years 1968 and 1996 were curiously brought word EINREISE [entry].
together in this double role.
The stage designer Bert Neumann had removed all the seating, replacing it with a stand in
“To the party headquarters!” yelled Schlingensief / Dutschke into the megaphone and led the the middle of the stalls upon which stood a tent and a banner explaining that this some-
audience towards the PDS,1 building at the end of the street, where a banner with the what ramshackle installation represented Luckenwalde, the small town in East Germany
slogan HAVE NO FEAR! was hanging from one of the first-floor windows. The theater police where the real Dutschke had grown up. At the back of the auditorium there was a lectern.
wanted to stop the crowd, but already a few were trying to storm the PDS headquarters. The theatergoers could find themselves a place somewhere on the wide steps of the floor,
The rest of the crowd looked amused. The theater police refused entry and ensured order. which had been affixed with narrow yellow-and-black tape bearing the phrase MORE
Schlingensief / Dutschke fired two shots, and then everyone went back to the main entrance EMOTION! While the audience was filling up the space, on stage the Workers and Vet-
of the Volksbühne. A second Rudi Dutschke, this time embodied by the actor Sophie Rois, erans Choir of Berlin-Neukölln sang Ernst Busch’s version of “Spaniens Himmel” (The
was riding around on a bicycle. Schlingensief bawled into the microphone, “Who wants to Spanish Sky). A large banner hung from the circle, upon which the central question of the
shoot Rudi Dutschke this evening? Volunteers come forward!” Then three shots rang out evening was written in large letters: WHO THE FUCK IS RUDI DUTSCHKE?
—just like in 1968 on the Kurfürstendamm in Berlin-Charlottenburg, where the eloquent
thinker of the political protest movement and the SDS (Sozialistischer Deutscher Studen- Gradually, the performance itself began. The audience was divided up into different classes:
tenbund / Socialist German Student Union) was struck down. Rois / Dutschke fell off her music, geography, and politics. We ended up in the music class and huddled with our
bicycle. Theater nurses hurried over in order to carry the wounded person away. Then the fellow pupils on the left of the auditorium, while at the lectern Schlingensief / Dutschke and
demonstrators were asked to take their seats in the auditorium. his ensemble of disabled, amateur, and a few professional actors reenacted the run-up to
and opening of the exhibition in Luckenwalde that shortly before—on April 11, 1996, exactly
Everyone who had come for an evening at the theater had been transformed into actors in twenty-eight years after the attack on the town’s famous son—had been initiated in re-
a street scene that revived the late 1960s—its political campaigns, demonstrations, and membrance of Dutschke by some dedicated school students. The Volksbühne became
features belonging to the past. The students of 1996, who were now entering the theater Luckenwalde, and the audience everything in one: pupils, visitors to the exhibition, and wit-
in jeans and T-shirts, were putting themselves on display as the heirs to those events nesses to a play located somewhere between plan and improvisation that so relentlessly
whose news-at-a-glance comeback had just been made possible through their participation. put its amateurishness on display that its distanced stance could hardly be misunderstood.
Whether you wanted to be or not, you were already part of the picture. Schlingensief had
shifted the opening of this production to outside the front doors of the Volksbühne. But that Rocky Dutschke, it now at least became clear, was not aligning itself with the pupils in
wasn’t all. He had also used this opening for the instantiation of his altered concept of the Luckenwalde. Unlike them, Schlingensief and his ensemble were clearly not interested in
audience. After 100 Jahre CDU and Kühnen ’94, he had begun to include the spectators producing a glorifying homage to Dutschke. The homage they paid was to make him the
as active participants in his productions. This integration of the audience—from which pivotal figure of a revue with political content in the good old Volksbühne tradition from Er-
other productions, such as Passion Impossible: 7 Tage Notruf für Deutschland [Passion win Piscator to Benno Besson—an act which was neither apotheosis nor genuflection.
Impossible: 7 Day Emergency Call for Germany, 1997], Chance 2000 (1998), and Bitte Instead they used this icon of the Left, his life, and its significance for 1968 primarily as the
liebt Österreich! [Please Love Austria!, 2000] drew their essential life—began with Rocky supplier of images from an era that, as Schlingensief once said, “still had something holy
SANDRA UMATHUM 345

about it.” In Rocky Dutschke these images, lodged in the collective memory, served as the that the revolution had taken place without him, and that since 1968 a know-it-all paralysis
pattern for scenes in which the events of the time were reenacted and played out, events has become widespread. Using theatrical means and a theatrical setting, Schlingensief
which Schlingensief and his ensemble, and large sections of the audience, had not experi- worked off both circumstances: he reenacted the revolution and, in doing so, produced ex-
enced themselves. But this reenactment and playing out had nothing at all to do with real- ercises in de-paralyzation.
istic imitation. It was much more of an extreme struggle with both the past and, by entering
the past, its repercussions in the present. In the permanent oscillation between resignation, It was no surprise that such exercises also affected the traditional role of the audience.
plaintiveness, irony, and anger, Rudi—and with him 1968 and its heirs—was put through the “The images alone aren’t enough,” said Schlingensief, “you have to feel things, understand
ringer in a manner that could perhaps only be undertaken by a younger generation. them physically.” The time of undisturbed, distanced enjoyment of art was gone. No one
asked if you wanted to take part. When one gentleman was required to drop his trousers
What happened during the performance can hardly be described in sequence. Sometimes in order to bath his bottom in milk in the style of an African ritual (and actually did so), it
up to three Dutschkes rampaged through the auditorium: portrayed by Rois in a striped soon became clear that things could become uncomfortable.
T-shirt and open fly button as a hysterical pill popper, by Schlingensief armed with either
megaphone or microphone, and / or the actor Bernhard Schütz, who fired sentimental revo- Following this scene, two of my friends went to sit at the edge of the auditorium in order to be
lutionary compound sentences into the audience in the student leader’s circuitously academic on the safe side. They were well advised. Only ten minutes later Bernhard Schütz stormed
style. At other times, Rois appeared as “Norma” and Schütz in a dress. up to my boyfriend, of all people, and before he knew what was happening, Schütz had taped
his ankles and was dragging him by the arms to the stage. “You’re coming with me!” he
Dutschke’s mother (Rosemarie Bärhold) complained about how her son had preferred to screamed. Neither my boyfriend nor I knew how to respond. We weren’t used to being bull-
go to the West instead of into the NVA [Nationale Volksarmee / National People’s Army], dozed in such a way in the theater, a space where events usually only take place in an “as-if”
and on stage the journey to West Berlin was played out with the participation of the audi- mode. But here this convention was being circumvented. Here the game was suddenly be-
ence. Theatergoers voluntarily or involuntarily placed in the limelight mingled with the en- coming serious. Here someone was really being tied up and couldn’t tell how far things
semble, and suddenly Dutschke’s transit to the West was grotesquely interwoven with 1989. would go. What should we do? Start a discussion? Wave our arms? Scream? Out of the
The journey came to an end before the audience really knew what exactly was expected of question. We didn’t want to make a bad situation worse. As I was trying to undo the tape,
them. The lights went up; ugly close-ups from an operating theater appeared on a screen another actor (Astrid Meyerfeldt) came running up. She yelled at my boyfriend, “Why are
above the stage, followed later in the evening by images from a concentration camp. One of you putting up with this? Why aren’t you defending yourself?” And while she got involved
Schlingensief’s disabled performers appeared as Wolf Biermann and endlessly strummed in a scuffle with Bernhard Schütz, she shouted at the audience, “And you lot? You’d rather
a guitar. Rois/Dutschke hammered on a blackboard. Now and then actors yelled “Ho! Ho! gawk than intervene?” The situation then calmed down, but it left a stale aftertaste, and
Ho Chi Minh!” through the auditorium, while a woman explained how every year she went not only because of the shock created by Schütz’s aggressive behavior. It was primarily to
with her family to Bergen-Belsen, where her husband recited the names of the six million do with the fact that both actors had unmasked the audience as compliant spectators.
murdered Jews.
We left the theater towards the end of the performance when Schlingensief was standing
Seriousness and slapstick combined in an uneasy symbiosis. A corny joke mingled with an in a boxing ring, surrounded by portraits of socialist heroes from Karl Marx to Ché Guevara,
image of torture, the stuttering Dutschke—who after the attack was limited in his ability to and inviting the audience for a free beer. The evening had been strenuous. Schlingensief’s
articulate himself—was immersed in sentimental television falsity. From the flotsam and jet- banquet had been difficult to digest and had plunged us into a whirl of contradictory emo-
sam of German history, Schlingensief and his team mounted a synaesthetic frontal attack on tions, attitudes, and opinions. Rocky Dutschke had been wonderful and enervating, tiring
the senses. Sometimes one scarcely knew where to look, and whenever it seemed as if it and exhilarating, profound and banal, ugly and beautiful at once. Schlingensief had not only
was going to get really funny, embarrassment put a brake on the laughter. From time to time confronted us—at a rapid pace—with all the clichéd tableau images from 1968, Dutschke’s
Schlingensief interrupted the performance and explained, with the help of chalk diagrams biography, and East Germany, but also with various chapters from the history of avant-
on a blackboard, what had happened up to that point. “I’ll give you a summary,” he shout- garde theater. It had been an encounter with the past, somewhere between a whale of a time
ed before recapitulating. But instead of providing an answer to the question of how all and harassment, which showed that through theory alone, and from a distance, much can
this material was related and what it had to do with Rudi Dutschke, he explicitly invited the become romanticized.
audience to not make connections between the images. In an impassioned attempt to defy
arbitrariness and loss of meaning, Schlingensief confronted his audience with both of them. We sat for a long time on the steps outside. It wasn’t easy to grasp what we had experi-
The critics accused this production of all kinds of things. Schlingensief had turned Dutschke enced, and this was certainly one of the reasons why Rocky Dutschke attracted only cursory
into a “halfwit” and produced “ballsy shallowness.” Only a few reviewers took the trouble interest from both critics and theater scholars. How can one talk in a helpfully interpretive
to look more closely, and only some recognized that with Rocky Dutschke, Schlingensief— way about a work that can’t be dealt with through conventional explanatory models? And
defiantly, angrily, but also with tongue-in-cheek zestfulness—was lamenting both the fact how can it be integrated into theatrical discourse when it has thrown all known categorical
SANDRA UMATHUM 347

access possibilities overboard? During the mid ’90s, being a critic or a theater scholar still
meant reading the theatrical signs, and asking how directors interpret plays and actors their
roles. But Rocky Dutschke was not only a celebratory departure from literary theater. It
had also radically put the permeability of the fourth wall to the test, along with the rules of
role-playing and the standard “as-if” mode characteristic of institutionalized theater.
ANTJE VOLLMER
It hassled and accosted its audience, some of whom were treated to unpleasant experien-
ces. Schlingensief may have remained silent on the question of who Rudi Dutschke really CHRISTOPH SCHLINGENSIEF:
was, but by approaching the insurgent leader of ’68 using all theatrical means, he became MYTH AND OVERPAINTING, NEPAL
an insurgent himself: a director who has explored the possibilities of theater in multiple AND PARSIFAL
directions and who, by thwarting every convention, has contributed to both the establishment
of a new aesthetics of the theater and to an altered approach to discursive theater criticism
and scholarship.
1 The PDS emerged from the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED / Socialist Unity Party of Germany), which renamed
itself in February 1990. From July 2005 onwards it was known as Die Linkspartei.PDS (Die Linke.PDS / The Left Party.PDS)
until it fused with a new left-wing party, the WASG, on June 16, 2007 to become Die Linke (The Left).
2 Kommune 2 (1967–8) was a commune in Berlin-Charlottenburg that attempted to combine collective living with political activity.
Its name was a reference to the recently founded Kommune 1, in contrast to which it was also known as the “political commune.”
SANDRA UMATHUM
I before act three opened. Christoph Schlingensief stood at the center in gigantic hoof-like
high heels, a horned king at the heart of tragedy, the tumescent song of the he-goats.
There were not many of us who had made the trip to Neuhardenberg to experience Christoph
Schlingensief’s open-air course Odin’s Parsipark (2005). A secret society on a bus trip. It was only logical that Christoph Schlingensief would return to Nepal when he was prepar-
We were received like a royal delegation of exceptionally knowledgeable experts. Christoph ing his third grand opera, the Szenen aus dem Leben der Heiligen Johanna [Scenes from
Schlingensief’s vibrant enthusiasm was always the most persuasive Market Gate of Miletus the Life of Saint Joan] by Walter Braunfels. That was around the turn of the year 2007/08.
to the archaic world of his images, iconographies, and obsessions. A seducer who could This time he went to the river where the Hindus wash and cremate their dead. Shooting, he
make ice and cynicism melt. came so close to the fire that he almost burnt himself; he had long transgressed the bounds
of permissible interference with the sacred act. It was here that he created the film sequence
He had found something new; he was undergoing an artistic metamorphosis. The era of “Der König wohnt in mir” [The King Lives Within Me], the head of the dead priest-guru
his actions, which had frequently been read as purely political although they were al- strewn with blossoms from which flames burst forth. It became the breathlessly still opening
ways intended as more than that, had been exhausted, even in his own view of him self. image of the production, anticipating the death of Joan, with which the opera closes.
He had challenged Helmut Kohl and the entire increasingly indolent federal German
society by calling for Chance 2000 to be given to the homeless, the jobless, the chance- “Redeem the redeemers at last!” That was the motto the artist Christoph Schlingensief
less. He had unmasked Austria’s respectability by putting cages decorated with the had adopted for his own life. When he returned from this trip, he felt so cold that not even
Haider slogan, FOREIGNERS OUT!, and filled with real people on the city’s central square the flames in the fireplace in his own home could warm him up. A few days later, he re-
(2000). In his production of Hamlet (2001), he had brought real, existing neo-Nazis on ceived his first cancer diagnosis.
stage, not just demanding that a way be paved for them to return to society but paving
that way. With his voodoo magic outside Möllemann’s office, he had painted an exag- III
gerated but acute picture of a politician trying to boost his party in the polls by tapping
anti-Semitic resentment (2002). Afterwards it was as though he was in a fever, sen- Carl-Hans Graf von Hardenberg nearly died at the Neuhardenberg Manor: a few days after
sing that he had touched upon larger and buried catastrophes. When his action then July 20, 1944, the SS came to arrest the co-conspirator, and pretending to bid farewell to
led to a debate in the Bundestag over the limits of the permissible, when Möllemann his wife, he shot himself in the chest. Due to an old battlefield injury, it failed to strike his
accused Schlingensief of “incitement to murder” and finally fell from the sky after delib- heart, as did the scissors he grabbed from the hand of the doctor trying to dress his wound
erately failing to deploy his parachute, Christoph Schlingensief was profoundly shocked that he rammed deep into the wound. Hardenberg barely survived the concentration camp.
by the prophetic value of Dadaist voodoo actions. Rarely did an artist rely as ruthlessly on Nine months later, in April 1945, the vast plain in front of Neuhardenberg, near Seelow
the power of art to change reality as he did, absolutely fearless in that regard. But he Heights, was the site of the last decisive battle before Berlin, with more than fifty thousand
also knew of the magical power of myth, of its exposed location on the boundary between soldiers killed. A senseless shedding of blood.
life and death.
In 2005, a long course was laid out in Neuhardenberg for us to walk along, a sort of scav-
II enger hunt that led us past many waypoints, including a small sacrificial altar, as dusk
slowly fell over the grounds, until somewhere out there we arrived at a sort of shack. This
Christoph Schlingensief paid two visits to Nepal, to the city of Bhaktapur. Until recently, was the centerpiece of Schlingensief’s arrangement: a concrete silo, a wooden shed, a
Bhaktapur was a place that had fallen out of global time. Set in the shadows of the second stable at Bethlehem. Inside stood the sanctuary: the Animatograph. I have rarely
Himalayas, with medieval lanes filled with guilds and artisans, the city is a grand melting seen Christoph Schlingensief so happy, so aglow from within. The Animatograph—a
pot of cultural amalgamations that have generated ancient traditions of pilgrimage and “walk-on photographic plate” (Schlingensief)—was a small rotating stage on which the visitor
trade. Each alley is studded with little altars, small temples, and shrines that honor all could sit down. Multiple projectors showing different films flooded it with pictures blen-
the gods: the animist spirits from the mountains and rice paddies of the Newa, the ding into each other to create entirely new images. There were episodes from his earlier
Hindu divinities of the Brahmins, the altars at which Tibetan and Indian Buddhists pray, films, animal portraits from Namibia, sacrificial scenes from Nepal, the Icelandic Odin
the golden sanctuaries of the kings of the Kathmandu Valley, the numerologists of the landscapes, almost all of it in black and white and hues of gray. “Do you see that,” he said,
Confucians, and the disconcerting sacrificial rituals of white lambs and black buffaloes “at last the pictures are generating themselves!” What he fed into the arrangement had
chased from the city that derive from the Jewish or the Christian tradition. The undis- become matter, the stuff of images, spectral beings, shimmering substances. The images
guised magical-animistic intensity of the sacrificial feasts with their haunting processions had come to rule over the artist. He had served them, and now they took control of the
of drummers and fertility rituals was at once shocking and fascinating to him. After direction, creating picture-like phenomena that, barely seen, disappeared into nothingness
these impressions, he created the most beautiful film sequences for the grand Grail and or blurred into the next sequence. Here was a spherical creative process. Some musicians
sacrifice scene in Parsifal that flickered across the gauze veil concealing the dark stage spend their lives seeking to find the primeval music; Christoph Schlingensief sought the
ANTJE VOLLMER 351

primal images, images that are pure artistic energy. Therein lay his affinity for Wagner, whom
he understood at once. He never visualized, let alone interpreted, Parsifal. He simply cre-
ated images the way Wagner created music. They were twins in their quest for another state.
Here, on this remote location in Neuhardenberg, this other state emerged on a dark night
and disappeared again. It had been proven then: art creates itself.
IV
This was at bottom always what he sought; it was always how he worked. Nothing could be
further from the contemporary director’s theater than his permanent interventions into his
own directing, often jumbling everything up. Christoph Schlingensief unswervingly followed
his star, leaving everything to the artistic moment, entrusting himself to it. What appeared
to be provocation, disruption, confusion was forever only the product of his humility, his almost
childlike trust that everything can come into being anew out of the artistic magic of the
moment. All that was inflexible, all that was predetermined meant death to him.
I saw him just as happy one more time when, already ravaged by his disease, he spent an
entire day with his wife, Aino Laberenz, in the grand Beuys exhibition at Berlin’s Hamburger
Bahnhof. There he crouched, his back against a wall, his arms wrapped around his knees,
and saw the promised land: on the large concrete wall across the room, Joseph Beuys met
the coyote and welcomed in it the primal ground and the myth of America. Christoph
Schlingensief laughed, shook his head, snorted with delight, was consoled. Two kings had
seen each other; a greeting passed between them, and recognition.
ANTJE VOLLMER
APPENDIX
Christoph Schlingensief was born in Oberhausen on Parsifal at the Bayreuth Festival (2004–7) and The Flying
October 24, 1960. At the age of eight, he shot his first Dutchman at Teatro Amazonas in Manaus, Brazil.
film. After subsequent short films, he created his first
feature-length film, Tunguska—Die Kisten sind da [Tun- The rotating stage Schlingensief developed for Parsifal
guska—The Boxes Have Arrived], in 1984. Films that also served as a prototype for the Animatograph, which
followed include Menu Total (1985–6), Egomania (1986), was first deployed during the 2005 Reykjavik Art Festival,
Mutters Maske [Mother’s Mask, 1987], the Germany Iceland. After stops in Neuhardenberg and Namibia
trilogy of 100 Jahre Adolf Hitler—Die letzte Stunde im (both 2005), the Animatograph was included in Kaprow
Führerbunker [100 Years of Adolf Hitler—The Last Hour City at Volksbühne, Berlin (2006), and in Area 7 at Burg-
in the Fuhrerbunker, 1988], Das deutsche Kettensägen- theater, Vienna (2007).
massaker [The German Chainsaw Massacre, 1990],
and Terror 2000—Intensivstation Deutschland [Terror When he was diagnosed with cancer in 2008, Christoph
2000—Intensive Station Germany, 1991–2], as well as Schlingensief tackled his illness head-on in his pro-
United Trash (1995–6) and Die 120 Tage von Brottrop duction Der Zwischenstand der Dinge [The Intermedi-
[The 120 Days of Bottrop, 1997]. ate State of Affairs] at the Maxim Gorki Theater, Berlin
(2008); the Fluxus oratorio Eine Kirche der Angst vor
In 1993, Schlingensief directed his first theater produc- dem Fremden in mir [A Church of Fear vs. the Alien
tion at Volksbühne, Berlin. 100 Jahre CDU—Spiel ohne Within], which premiered in 2008 as part of the Ruhrtri-
Grenzen [100 Years of CDU—Game without Limits] ennale festival; the readymade opera Mea Culpa at
was followed by Kühnen ’94—Bring mir den Kopf von Burgtheater, Vienna (2009); and Sterben lernen—Herr
Adolf Hitler! [Kühnen ’94—Bring Me the Head of Adolf Andersen stirbt in 60 Minuten [Learning to Die—Mr.
Hitler!, 1993], Rocky Dutschke (1996), Die Berliner Andersen Dies in 60 Minutes], a coproduction of Neu-
Republik [The Berlin Republic, 1999], Rosebud (2001), markttheater and Schauspielhaus, both Zurich.
ATTA ATTA (2002), Kunst und Gemüse—Theater ALS
Krankeit [Art and Vegetables—Theater A(L)S Illness, In 2008, Schlingensief developed the idea of Remdoogo,
2004], and others. a festival hall for Africa, which he conceived with the
Burkinabè architect Francis Kéré. The groundbreaking
Schlingensief directed at almost every major theater in ceremony was held on February 8, 2010. His final work
the German-speaking world; his work includes Hamlet for the stage, Via Intolleranza II (2010), was created in
(2001), starring neo-Nazis willing to renounce their affili- collaboration with artists from Ouagadougou, the capital
ations, at Schauspielhaus Zürich; Elfriede Jelinek’s Bam- of Burkina Faso.
biland (2003) at Burgtheater Vienna; and Attabambi-
Pornoland (2004), again at Schauspielhaus. In May 2010, Susanne Gaensheimer invited Christoph
Schlingensief to exhibit at the German Pavilion of the
Between 1997 and 2003, Schlingensief worked in 54th Venice Biennale, 2011. The present volume docu-
television, hosting the shows Talk 2000, U3000, and ments his plans for the pavilion. In light of his death,
FREAKSTARS 3000, a series featuring “non-disabled” Gaensheimer has realized an exhibition of existing works
people. by Schlingensief.
In 1997, he created his first performative project outside Christoph Schlingensief was professor of Fine Art at
the theater context: Mein Filz, mein Fett, mein Hase the Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Braunschweig. He
[My Felt, My Fat, My Hare] at documenta 10, Kassel. In received numerous distinctions, including the 2010
the following year, he founded the political party Chance Helmut Käutner Award and the 2011 Hein Heckroth
2000—Beweise, dass es dich gibt [Chance 2000— Stage Award. In 2010, the Filmmuseum Düsseldorf hon-
Prove That You Exist], which received 56,000 votes in the ored him with a retrospective of his filmic oeuvre. A
1998 German Bundestag elections. During the 2000 second filmic retrospective was organized by Filmgalerie
Vienna Festival, Schlingensief held the container action 451 at Kino Babylon, Berlin, between 2010 and 2011.
Bitte liebt Österreich [Please Love Austria]. In 2003, he On numerous occasions, Schlingensief was invited to
participated in the 50th Venice Biennale with Church include his productions in the Berliner Theatertreffen;
of Fear which he also presented at Museum Ludwig, in 2011, after his death, Via Intolleranza II was also part
Cologne, in 2005. In 2007, he realized the exhibition “18 of that festival.
Images per Second” at Haus der Kunst, Munich.
Christoph Schlingensief died in Berlin on August 21,
In 2004, Schlingensief started directing operas including 2010.
CHRISTOPH SCHLINGENSIEF 357

THE AUTHORS
ELKE AUS DEM MOORE SCHORSCH KAMERUN STEPHANIE ROSENTHAL

is director of the Visual Arts Department at the Institute is a musician, author, and stage director. He lives in is chief curator at the Hayward Gallery, London.
of Foreign Cultural Relations (ifa). Hamburg.
KARLHEINZ SCHMID
HELKE BAYRLE ALEXANDER KLUGE is a journalist and publisher of KUNSTZEITUNG.
is a filmmaker and lives in Frankfurt am Main. is a filmmaker and writer. He lives in Munich.
ELISABETH SCHWEEGER
KLAUS BIESENBACH DIETRICH KUHLBRODT is artistic director of the KunstFestSpiele Herrenhausen,
is a curator and the director of MoMA PS1, New York. is a lawyer, author, and actor. He lives in Hamburg. Hanover.
JOHN BOCK AINO LABERENZ GEORG SEESSLEN

is an artist and lives in Berlin. is a costume designer. She and Christoph Schlingensief is an author and film critic. He lives in Kaufbeuren.
married in 2009.
FRANK CASTORF FRANK-WALTER STEINMEIER
is the stage director and artistic director of the Volks- TORSTEN LEMMER is chairman of the Social Democratic Party of Germany
bühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, Berlin. was a producer of radical right-wing music and repre- in the Bundestag.
sented a breakaway faction of Die Republikaner in the
THOMAS DEMAND Düsseldorf city council. He left the right-wing scene in SANDRA UMATHUM
is an artist and lives in Berlin and Los Angeles. 2001 and has since spoken out against racism and is a theater scholar and a visiting professor in the
right-wing violence. Department of Dramaturgy at the University of Music
CHRIS DERCON and Theater, Leipzig.
is a curator and the director of the Tate Modern, London. MATTHIAS LILIENTHAL
is the dramaturge and artistic director of the Hebbel ANTJE VOLLMER
DIEDRICH DIEDERICHSEN am Ufer / HAU, Berlin. is a journalist and was vice president of the German
is a cultural scholar and critic. He lives in Berlin. Bundestag until 2005.
JONATHAN MEESE
SUSANNE GAENSHEIMER is an artist and lives in Berlin.
is director of the MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst,
Frankfurt am Main, and curator of the German Pavilion THOMAS MEINECKE
at the 54th Venice Biennale, 2011. is a musician and author. He lives in Eurasburg, Bavaria.
BORIS GROYS MICHAELA MELIÁN

is an art critic and professor of aesthetics, philosophy, is a musician and visual artist. She lives in Eurasburg,
and media theory at the Karlsruhe University of Arts Bavaria.
and Design.
KLAUS MERTES
CARL HEGEMANN is principal of the Canisius-Kolleg, Berlin.
longtime dramaturge at the Volksbühne, Berlin, regularly
worked with Christoph Schlingensief starting in 1997. EVA MEYER-HERMANN
He has been professor of dramaturgy at the University is a freelance curator. She lives in Cologne.
of Music and Theater, Leipzig, since 2006.
WERNER NEKES
IRM HERMANN is a film director and lives in Mülheim an der Ruhr.
is a stage and screen actress and lives in Berlin.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST
JOHANNES HOFF is a curator and the co-director of the Serpentine
is a theologian and teaches systematic and philosophical Gallery, London.
theology at the University of Wales.
PETER RAUE
ANDY HOPE 1930 is an attorney and a patron of the arts. He lives in Berlin.
is an artist and lives in Berlin.
CHARLOTTE ROCHE
ELFRIEDE JELINEK is an author, singer, and moderator. She lives in Cologne.
is a writer and lives in Munich and Vienna.
THE AUTHORS 359

IMAGE CREDITS TEXT CREDITS
Cover, 60–62, 256 © David Baltzer / bildbuehne.de 165–68 Based on an interview with Frank Castorf by Maria
6–7, 128 (top), 129 (top), 130, 131, 132 (top), 133 © Georg Soulek Seifert (ORF Austrian Broadcasting) on August 23,
198 (bottom right), 366–67 2010.
28 © Heta Multanen 169–71 © 1958 by Hannah Arendt Bluecher Literary Trust.
30–53 © Roman Mensing, artdoc.de in collaboration with Permission by Mohrbooks AG, Zurich.
Thorsten Arendt, artdoc.de 191–96 A German version of this text was first published in
67–99 © Filmgalerie 451, Christoph Schlingensief Lettre International 90 (2010).
67, 73, 79, 83, 89 © Filmgalerie 451, Design: Carmen Brucic 241–44 A German version of this text was first published in:
95 © Filmgalerie 451, Design: Assmann / Stock Alexander Kluge, Das Bohren harter Bretter: 133 poli-
106, 118, 119 © Thomas Goerge tische Geschichten (Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2011).
107, 114 (bottom) © Thomas Goerge, Francis Kéré 259–65 The conversation between Matthias Lilienthal and
108, 111 (bottom), 113 (bottom), 114 (top) © Francis Kéré Franz Wille was conducted in September 2010 and
63, 109 (top), 110, 111 (top), 112 (top), 115 (bottom) © Christoph Schlingensief first appeared in print in the magazine Theater heute
116 (top), 198 (center right), 208 (October 2010).
113 (top), 115 (top) © Christoph Schlingensief, Aino Laberenz 297–307 This interview was conducted during the Marathon
109 (bottom) © Perfect Shot Films Talk Prelude: Spaceship Berlin at Hebbel am Ufer /
112 (bottom), 117, 128 (center, bottom) © Aino Laberenz HAU Berlin, on November 1, 2008, as part of the festival
129 (center, bottom), 132 (bottom), 253 Fressen oder fliegen. Art into Theatre—Theatre into Art.
116 (bottom) © Sibylle Dahrendorf 323–26 A German version of this text was first published in
137 © Helke Bayrle KUNSTZEITUNG 169 (2010).
156–57 © Marcus Leith 341–48 This text is an edited version of “Theatre of Self-ques-
159 © Jan Windszus tioning: Rocky Dutschke, ’68, or the Children of the
198 (top left) © Gudrun F. Widlok Revolution,” in Christoph Schlingensief: Art without
198 (top right) © Ahoi Media Border, eds. Tara Forrest and Anna Scheer (Bristol:
198 (center left) © Bayreuther Festspiele GmbH / Jochen Quast intellect, 2010), 57–70. Translated from German by
198 (bottom left) © David Gierth Michael Turnbull.
210 © Margarita Broich
238 (bottom) © Katja Eichbaum
242 © Christoph Schlingensief, Walter Lenertz,
Alexander Kluge
269 © Jan Bauer
272 © Franz Bergmann
284 © Eva Meyer-Hermann
315 © Aino Laberenz, overpainting by Charlotte Roche
318 © Wilfried Petzi, Haus der Kunst
IMAGE CREDITS / TEXT CREDITS 361

FILM CREDITS
A Church of Fear vs. the Alien Within Length: 81 min.; Format: 16mm; black and white Christoph Schlingensief, Oskar Roehler; Editing:
Concept / Direction: Christoph Schlingensief; Stage © Filmgalerie 451 Andreas Schumacher. With: Udo Kier, Kitten Natividad,
Design: Thomas Goerge, Thekla von Mülheim; Joachim Tomaschewsky, Johanny Pfeiffer;
Costumes: Aino Laberenz; Lighting: Voxi Bärenklau; Egomania—Island without Hope Production: Christoph Schlingensief; Production
Film Editing / Video: Heta Multanen; Sound: David Direction: Christoph Schlingensief; Camera: Dominik Location: Harare, Zimbabwe; Length: 79 min.; Format:
Gierth; Dramaturgy: Carl Hegemann. With: Margit Probst; Editing: Christoph Schlingensief; Music: Tom 35mm; Color
Carstensen, Angela Winkler / Anne Tismer, Mira Dokupil, Christoph Schlingensief, Helge Schneider, Ella © Filmgalerie 451
Partecke, Komi Mizrajim Togbonou, Stefan Kolosko, Johson. With: Udo Kier, Tilda Swinton, Uwe Fellensiek;
Karin Witt, Horst Gelonnek, Kerstin Grassmann, Production: Christoph Schlingensief; In Production: Interview Film
Norbert Müller, Achim von Paczensky, Klaus Beyer; March 1986; Production Location: Hallig Langeneß, Direction / Interview: Frieder Schlaich; Camera: Elfi
Singers: Friederike Harmsen, Ulrike Eidinger; Hamburg; Length: 84 min.; Format: 16mm; Color Mikesch; Editing: Robert Kummer; In Production:
Composition / Percussion: Michael Wertmüller; © Filmgalerie 451 5/1/2002; Production Location: Massow;
Répétiteur / Organ: Dominik Blum; Gospel Choir: Length: 77 min.; Color
Angels Voices and Children’s Choir of the Aalto-Theater 100 Years of Adolf Hitler—The Last Hour in the © Filmgalerie 451
under the direction of Alexander Eberle. Fuhrerbunker
A production of the Ruhtriennale. World Premiere on Direction / Script: Christoph Schlingensief; Camera: Remdoogo—An Opera Village in Burkina Faso:
September 21, 2008 in Duisburg. Voxi Bärenklau; Editing: Christoph Schlingensief; The Search
Music: Tom Dokupil. With: Volker Spengler, Brigitte Travels with Christoph Schlingensief to Cameroon,
16mm-Projections from A Church of Fear vs. Kausch, Margit Carstensen, Dietrich Kuhlbrodt, Alfred Mozambique, and Burkina Faso, in search of a site for
the Alien Within Edel, Udo Kier; In Production: 11/28/1988 (8:30 a.m.) an opera house. From January 2009 until summer
Camera: Christoph Schlingensief, Voxi Bärenklau, –11/29/1988 (2:30 a.m.); Production Location: 2010. A 15 minute selection of documentary footage
Heta Multanen; Editing: Christoph Schlingensief, Heta Mülheim (Bergstraße Bunker); Length: 60 min.; Format: from the construction of the opera village to the opening
Multanen; Lighting: Voxi Bärenklau; Scenography: 16mm; black and white of the school in fall 2011. Distribution: Filmgalerie 451,
Thomas Goerge; Costumes: Aino Laberenz. Included in © Filmgalerie 451 Frieder Schlaich; With: Christoph Schlingensief, Francis
these films is footage created for previous productions: Kéré, Celina Nicolay, Aino Laberenz, Peter Anders,
Camera / Editing: Walter Lenertz, Meika Dresenkamp, The German Chainsaw Massacre—The First Hour Matthias Lilienthal, Henning Mankell, Thomas Goerge,
Kathrin Krottenthaler, Hermann-Josef Schlingensief of Renunification Meika Dresenkamp, Gaston Kaboré, Irene Tassembedo,
Direction / Script: Christoph Schlingensief; Camera: and many others. A film by: Sibylle Dahrendorf, Ingo
Via Intolleranza II Christoph Schlingensief, Voxi Bärenklau; Editing: Ariane Brunner, Phil Thornau, Christoph Krauss, Bianka
Concept / Direction: Christoph Schlingensief; Stage Traub; Music: Jacques Arr. With: Karina Fallenstein, Schulze, Oliver Karsitz, Mohamed Yameogo, Lena Trunk,
Design: Thekla von Mülheim, Christian Schlechter; Susanne Bredehöft, Artur Albrecht, Volker Spengler, Michael Bogár and many others.
Costumes: Aino Laberenz; Lighting: Voxi Bärenklau, Alfred Edel, Brigitte Kausch, Dietrich Kuhlbrodt, Reinald © Sibylle Dahrendorf, Michael Bogár, Perfect Shot
Michael Dietze; Film Editing / Video: Meika Dresenkamp; Schnell, Udo Kier, Irm Hermann, Eva Maria Kurz, Ingrid Films 2010
Sound: David Gierth; Dramaturgy: Anna Heesen, Carl Raguschke, Mike Wiedemann; Scenography: Uli
Hegemann. With: Brigitte Cuvelier, Kerstin Graßmann, Hanisch; Assistant Director: Udo Kier; Production Panorama-Projection
Mamounata “Kandy” Guira, Friederike Harmsen, Location: Duisburg; Length: 63 min.; Format: 16mm; Camera / Editing: Lionel Some, Burkina Faso, 2011
Claudia Sgarbi, Isabelle Tassembedo, Jean Marie black and white
Gomzoudou Boucougou, Jean Chaize, Issoufou Kienou, © Filmgalerie 451 In Search Of
Stefan Kolosko, Amado Komi, Johannes Lauer, Ahmed Camera: Christoph Schlingensief;
Soura, Nicolas Ulrich Severin Tounga, Abdoul Kader Terror 2000—Intensive Station Germany Editing: Aino Laberenz, Constantin Hartenstein
Traore, Wilfried Zoungrana. A production of Festspiel- Direction: Christoph Schlingensief; Script: Oskar
haus Afrika gGmbH, in coproduction with Kampnagel, Roehler, Uli Hanisch, Christoph Schlingensief; Camera:
Hamburg; Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Brussels; and the Reinhard Köcher; Editing: Bettina Böhler; Music: Kambzi
Bayerische Staatsoper, Munich. In cooperation with Giahi, Jaques Arr. With: Margit Carstensen, Peter Kern,
Burgtheater, Vienna; Impulstanz; and the Festwochen, Susanne Bredehöft, Alfred Edel, Dietrich Kuhlbrodt,
Vienna. World Premiere on May 15, 2010 in Brussels. Udo Kier; Scenography: Uli Hanisch; Production
Coordination: Renée Gundlach; Production: Christoph
Menu Total Schlingensief; Production Location: NVA Barracks
Direction / Script / Camera: Christoph Schlingensief; Massow, near Teupitz, 30 km from Berlin; Length: 79
Editing: Eva Will; Music: Helge Schneider. With: Helge min.; Format: 16mm; Color
Schneider, Wolfgang Bertzky, Alfred Edel, Dietrich © Filmgalerie 451
Kuhlbrodt; Production: Christoph Schlingensief; In
Production: May 1985; Production Location: Mülheim United Trash
and surroundings (Speldorf, Zeche, Rosendelle); Direction / Camera: Christoph Schlingensief; Script:
FILM CREDITS 363

COLOPHON THE EDITOR WOULD LIKE TO THANK
This book was published on the occasion of the exhibition of works by Christoph Schlingensief at the German Christoph Schlingensief Bianca Knall
Pavilion, 54th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, June 4–November 27, 2011. Hans-Georg Knopp
Voxi Bärenklau Stephanie Kratz
GERMAN PAVILION Sternberg Press Florian Berktold Clemens Krümmel
Caroline Schneider Klaus Biesenbach Martin Kurz
Curator: Susanne Gaensheimer Karl-Marx-Allee 78 Michael Bogár Clemens Kusch
Artistic Consultation: Aino Laberenz D-10243 Berlin Ulrike Bretschneider Aino Laberenz
Dramaturgy: Carl Hegemann www.sternberg-press.com Claudia Buhmann Klaus-Dieter Lehmann
Stage Design: Thomas Goerge Oliver Canis Matthias Lilienthal
Light Design: Voxi Bärenklau ISBN 978-1-934105-42-9 Bice Curiger Helge Malchow
Film Editing and Video: Heta Multanen Sibylle Dahrendorf Roman Mensing
Film Program: Filmgalerie 451 / Frieder Schlaich, All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction Willy Decker Elke aus dem Moore
Constantin Hartenstein in whole or in part in any form. The following catalogue— Chris Dercon Markus Müller
Press and Communication: Bureau Mueller / including all texts, contributions, photographs, and other Norbert Draszanowski Heta Multanen
Markus Müller, Ulrike Bretschneider, James Thomas image material—is copyright protected. Any use or re- Leonhard Emmerling Hans Ulrich Obrist
Project Management: Christine Kaiser production of the contents or images is strictly prohibited. Tomas Ewald Brigitte and Arend Oetker
Schlingensief Office: Meike Fischer Harald Falckenberg Ludwig von Otting
Technical Realization: Ruhrtriennale / Every effort has been made to contact the rightful Hartwig Fischer Cornelia Pieper
Joachim Janner, Harald Frings owners with regards to copyright and permissions. Meike Fischer Chris Rehberger
Architectural Supervision: Clemens Kusch, We apologize for any inadvertent errors or omissions. Harald Frings Petra Roth
Martin Weigert For queries regarding copyrights, please contact Peter Gauweiler Nicolaus Schafhausen
Assistant in Venice: Natasa Radovic mail@sternberg-press.com Christine Gemmer Friedolf Schiek
Project Coordination until December 2010: Thomas Goerge Frieder Schlaich
Eugenia Teixeira © German Pavilion, 54th Venice Biennale, 2011, Monika Grütters Christian Schlechter
Commissioner: Federal Foreign Office in collaboration Estate Christoph Schlingensief, Tatjana Günthner Rosa Schmitt-Neubauer
with the Institute of Foreign Cultural Relations (ifa) Courtesy Hauser & Wirth, Ruhrtriennale, Thyssen Constantin Hartenstein Caroline Schneider
Partners: Goethe-Institut, AXA Art Insurance, Bornemisza Art Contemporary Carl Hegemann Robin Schönefeld
MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main, © Legal Succession Christoph Schlingensief: Hans Friedrich Heimann Elisabeth Schweeger
Friends of Museum Folkwang Essen, Bionade Aino Laberenz Hans Markus Heimann Felix Semmelroth
Media Partner: Deutsche Welle DW-TV © All Feature Films: Christoph Schlingensief, Margarethe Franziska Lionel Some
Graphic Design: Double Standards, Berlin Filmgalerie 451 Heimann Ulrike Sommer
© The Photographers Michael Helmbold James Thomas
PUBLICATION © The Authors Christina Henneke Rainer Traube
© 2011 Sternberg Press Patrick Hilss Regine Rack
Edited by: Susanne Gaensheimer Stefan Horsthemke Natasa Radovic
With the Assistance of: Eva Huttenlauch Eva Huttenlauch Oliver Reese
Copyediting: Leah Whitman-Salkin Gerrit Jackson Andreas M. Vitt
Translation: Gerrit Jackson Joachim Janner Martin Weigert
Transcriptions: Clemens Krümmel Alex Jovanovic Leah Whitman-Salkin
Image Research and Consultation: Patrick Hilss Christine Kaiser Iwan and Manuela Wirth
Installation Documentation: Roman Mensing, Francis Kéré
artdoc.de, in collaboration with Thorsten Arendt, Alexander Kluge And all the authors
artdoc.de
Graphic Design: Double Standards, Berlin
Printing and Binding: GGP Media GmbH, Pößneck
COLOPHON 365
Via Intolleranza II, Arsenal, Vienna, June 12, 2010 367

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CHRISTOPH SCHLINGENSIEF

GERMAN PAVILION, 2011

WITH THE ASSISTANCE OF

135 HELKE BAYRLE

139 KLAUS BIESENBACH

155 JOHN BOCK

165 FRANK CASTORF

169 THOMAS DEMAND

173 CHRIS DERCON

183 DIEDRICH DIEDERICHSEN

Wellness Center “Africa”

GERMAN PAVILION, 2011

STAGE INSTALLATION FROM

A CHURCH OF FEAR VS. THE ALIEN WITHIN 29

EGOMANIA—ISLAND WITHOUT HOPE

100 YEARS ADOLF HITLER—THE LAST

THE GERMAN CHAINSAW MASSACRE—

TERROR 2000—INTENSIVE STATION

Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker /

PLANNING AND BUILDING OF THE

MODELS BY FRANCIS KÉRÉ – JANUARY 2010

COLLAGE BY THOMAS GOERGE & FRANCIS KÉRÉ

Photo: Amone Rokiatou

Photo: Samandoulgou Fassala

Photographs by Burkinabè children between

Photo: Sargho Ftinata

Photo: Samandougou Abdoul

Photo: Samandougou Abdoul Agig Photo: Samandougou Abdoul

Photo: Yacomba Kéré

Photo: Tamagda Celina

Photo: Samandoulgou Fassala Photo: Tamagda Inouasa

Photo: Zerne Osmane Tenke Bogo

Photo: Dialo Rainatou

Photo: Zongo Abdoul Rasume

VIA INTOLLERANZA II Performances in Brussels and Vienna, 2010 133

I WANTED TO CAPTURE EVERY-

KLAUS BIESENBACH 141

KLAUS BIESENBACH 143

KLAUS BIESENBACH 145

KLAUS BIESENBACH 147

KLAUS BIESENBACH 149

KLAUS BIESENBACH 151

KLAUS BIESENBACH 153

Christoph Schlingensief, Zoo Bayreuth

Christoph Schlingensief, Remdoogo II

Christoph Schlingensief, Remdoogo II

JOHN BOCK 163

FRANK CASTORF 167

From Hannah Arendt, “Karl Jaspers: A Laudatio,” in

CHRIS DERCON 175

CHRIS DERCON 177

CHRIS DERCON 179

Kluge: Where does the soul reside?

CHRIS DERCON 181

COMBATING DISCURSIVE SCAR-

DIEDRICH DIEDERICHSEN 185

DIEDRICH DIEDERICHSEN 187

DIEDRICH DIEDERICHSEN 189