Christoph Schlingensief's Realist Theater

Ilinca Todorut

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000527711
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Television History & Criticism

This book is the first study of the prolific German filmmaker, performance artist, and TV host Christoph Schlingensief (1960–2010) that identifies him as a practitioner of realism in the theater and lays out how theatrical realism can offer an aesthetic frame sturdy enough to hold together his experiments across media and genres.

This volume traces Schlingensief's developing realism through his theater work in conventional theater venues, in less conventional venues, his opera work focusing on the production of Wagner's Parsifal at Bayreuth, and his art installations on revolving platforms called Animatographs.

This book will be of great interest to scholars of theater, film, and performance art and practitioners.

1 Introduction

Schlingensief and realism

DOI: 10.4324/9781003042778-1

Under the skin

Christoph Schlingensief’s prodigious artistic output stretching from the 1980s to 2010, the year of his premature death from lung cancer, stands in defiance against attempts to draw quick overviews. And yet, I will begin by saying something simple: Schlingensief’s trendy, trashy, intermedial, outrageous performance projects can be subsumed under a decrepit-sounding aesthetic agenda: realism. The tension between visible surface and occluded depth gives momentum to both theatrical realism and Schlingensief’s work.

Schlingensief first emerged as a filmmaker at the cusp of German reunification, making a local splash with DIY-aesthetic movies that irreverently teased out the crassness of German twentieth-century politics in genres such as the soft-core bunker craze film-noir of 100 Years of Adolf Hitler (1989), or mock dystopian horror that viewed the economic cannibalization of East Germany by West Germany through the lens of Tobe Hooper’s cult classic The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: in Schlingensief’s The German Chainsaw Massacre (1990), Wessies hunt Ossies to make sausage out of them. Schlingensief’s next movie, Terror 2000 (1992), which together with the previous two forms the German Trilogy, blends splatter-film aesthetic with action-movie film tropes to create a cocktail of scenes replete with gangsters and businessmen, priests and miracle healers, Polish refugees, Treblinka camp inmates, nazis, and chancellor Helmut Kohl. Terror 2000 caught the attention of the leadership team at the Volksbühne theater in Berlin, which was planning a reform in the artistic programming and institutional outreach of the East German theater under threat of closing down due to major cuts in state funding after reunification.¹ Frank Castorf, the Volksbühne Intendant, invited Schlingensief to stage his first theater project, 100 Years CDU: Games Without Frontiers, which premiered in 1993 and continued the themes of the German Trilogy. From here, Schlingensief exponentially branched out into theater, television, opera, radio, print, visual and performance art, voraciously devouring artistic media and genres, producing over the span of two decades a variegated and prolific body of work. Diedrich Diederichsen good-naturedly makes fun of Schlingensief’s diva-like thirst for public attention noting that Schlingensief “fundamentally belonged to the theater” because he craved the “energy rush that only a large audience can provide.”² Odd as it may be to connect the word “theater” with “large audience,” it was through the orchestrated media scandals surrounding Schlingensief’s performative works that he slithered into notoriety. Schlingensief belongs to the theater the way Wagner belongs to the theater: not because the word “theater” subsumes the work but because everything he did rolled over in theatricality like a pig rolling in mud. He was spectacular in his knack for showmanship.

Schlingensief’s theater initially catches the eye because of its vivid brashness manifested through unexpected imagery and loud, scandalous social interventions over which he presided in person, taunting the audience and stringing jokes. The way in which he served hefty, problematic slices of daring with thickly spread charm recalls Nietzsche warning against the “seducer on a large scale” Wagner hexing his audiences.³ Like other realists before him admiringly accused of wizardry,⁴ Schlingensief was a master manipulator who toyed with smoke screens of the visible to destabilize treasured communal myths, from the warm brotherhood of Deutschland über alles brandished in 1989 to other nationalist tales of victimhood, peace-making, and xenomania. Although realism in the theater tends to be conflated with its anal-retentive detailed mimesis of physical surface, its neurosis is rather obsessed with what lies beneath the surface. Not coincidentally, Freud wrote case studies about Ibsensian figures like Rosmersholm’s Rebecca West, the first character on the European stages who dared to bring to the surface of verbal utterances the torrential power of her chthonic sex drive. Konstantin Stanislavski stubbornly maintained that the infamous clutter of visual and auditory detail in the Chekhov era of the Moscow Art Theatre was constructed not for the audience’s visual pleasure but for the actors’ benefit, to help them access the subterranean well of emotional memory through sensory stimuli. The modern realist theater-maker Bertolt Brecht came to the realization that with the real’s slippage into the abstract domain of functionality in developed capitalism, a faithful reproduction or visual copy of material reality doesn’t say much about reality anymore: “from the carefully taken photograph of a Ford factory no opinion about this factory can be deduced.”⁵ A contemporary realist theater-maker like Schlingensief still cared very much about his “looks” and flooded the audience with visual information, but the core impulse reacted against images, setting out to destroy naturalized meanings and pull down screens. The situationists articulated with political know-how the anti-visuality drive militating against the spectacle of consumerist mass culture. In his own lingo, Schlingensief talked about the “dark phase,” the imageless tiny space in between film frames necessary for the film stills to get strung together and set in motion: “I also relate the dark phase to society. For me this dark phase concerns those who stand in darkness. This is the actual power. Not the flash.”⁶ Schlingensief offered his allegiance to the socially invisible: the misfits and outsiders like the unemployed, foreigners, and people with disabilities who invalidate by their marginal existence the fronts of equanimity, democracy, and community. Schlingensief’s dark powers operated on the spaces between images or the immediately visible as he spelled out the goal to “make the invisible visible.”⁷

Schlingensief’s operations of exposure to reveal the hidden behind deceiving surfaces may be compared to Walter Benjamin’s efforts to see properly in crepuscular times. Deciphering the truth of our age etched into menial material objects, Benjamin divined that “fashion, like architecture, inheres in the darkness of the lived moment, belongs to the dream consciousness of the collective. The latter awakes, for example, in advertising.”⁸ Schlingensief’s lush imitation of commercial culture imagery disseminated through channels such as advertisements, news pieces, and slogans tampered with the darkness that masks the collective fear, and scratched at wounds inflicted by the injustices and cruelty of our social reality. Schlingensief eagerly adopted Joseph Beuys’ motto “show your wounds!” Schlingensief’s work dove after the residual hope huddled in the dark corner that our constructed world is not eternal and hardly the only possible one. Historical specters, echoes of other timelines, and obsessions with precedents squirmed their way through his projects. Using spirits to exorcise spirits, these apparitions rendered our collective reality as a field of dreams and mass repressions, a realm of treasured appearances designed to mask social nightmares, and a surface of fictive constructions devoid of reasons to be maintained in perpetuity. In what Benjamin called a “turn of remembrance,” ragpicking through the historical past unearths beneath the mounds of war and destruction the golden nuggets of missed opportunities, of other ways of being that have been pushed aside, of relentless dreaming for another world.⁹ The remembrance of buried moments of alterity can initiate a collective awakening. Susan Buck-Morss explains that Benjamin borrowed the phrase “darkness of the lived moment” from Ernst Bloch, who meant by it “the momentary, fleeting experience of fulfillment simply anticipatory of a reality that is ‘not-yet’.”¹⁰ In his autobiographical account Ich weiß, ich war’s, Schlingensief wrote:

You see an image and think this is the world, but you forget that there are many images of the world. That even within yourself there are many images, ideas, desires that you could not fulfill, but you’re still hanging on to them… . And I believe that everyone has such a dark phase in themselves. Everyone sits every now and then in such an empty, dark space in which the images and the desires live on. And maybe they can still happen if you don’t ignore this darkness.¹¹

The dark phase stood then also for an anti-“manifest imagery” laboratory where dismissed alternatives and barely remembered possibilities may be re-amplified and tried out collectively. The idea of theater practice as a research facility goes back to Brecht, who saw realist theater instructing participants by modeling a practice of alternatives.

Yet from the physical surface of his own persona, the notoriously loud and brash “boy-next-door from small-town Oberhausen”—to use one of the catchy, semi-discrediting labels assigned to Schlingensief in the press, along with such facile tags as “provocateur” and “enfant terrible”—seems to have little in common with the imposing and more hirsute classical realists in the theater world, like Ibsen or Stanislavski. Even the mid-century revolutionary realist Brecht appears to mock with his cool smirk Schlingensief’s earnest, wide smile. As with their artistic products, however, there’s more than meets the eye to a realist’s personal style: a carefully cultivated appearance gleams on the surface of their deep-rooted recalibration of the artist’s role in society. Ibsen’s serious demeanor rejected all French frou-frou and embodied the image of an artist who does not want to deliver light, Scribean, fashionable dramatic entertainments but urgent theatrical fares that challenge the worldview of their spectators. Brecht’s working-class, frumpy artist belittled Wagnerian velvet, Schillerian tossed curls and entranced wide eyes: Brecht’s theater aimed for a down-to-earth social usefulness distinct from idealistic conceptions of art’s intrinsic nobility. Brecht’s fixation on the social aim of art, however, fastened him to predecessors like Schiller and Wagner, who plotted art’s political purport in the romantic lingo of societal regeneration through organic, aesthetic states and face lifts. A look into nineteenth-century artistic production discloses just how tenuously the dividing lines get drawn between romanticism and realism, two eclectic movements sharing one beating heart of Utopia. Like Brecht, and to a significant extent through Brecht via film-makers like Fassbinder and Kluge, as well as through his fascination with socially active artists such as Joseph Beuys and Richard Wagner, Schlingensief’s obsession with the relationship between art and society encircled him within the branches and various artistic movements of a German engagé family tree. Schlingensief talked about his beloved “kitschy” tendencies when he felt the pull of the grandiosity and sublimity of German idealism, as well as of the loftiness and revolutionary scale of German materialism, both thriving in popular culture. His art stuck out from amidst the high art sophistication and experimentations of the postmodern art scenes through its social grit, almost messianic humanism, and a relentless enthusiasm for change that was bound to be read as artlessness.¹² Despite his own self-doubts and self-exposures of futility and inner nazis, Schlingensief chose imperfect (and often questionable) interventions over melancholic aestheticism and ironic detachment. “I’m also extremely pathetic,” he wrote, “I’m very romantic… . I’m everything that has to do with embarrassment. But I’m not a cynic in the modern sense.”¹³ With the allusion to modern cynicism, Schlingensief hinted perhaps at his occasional collaborator Peter Sloterdijk’s idea that we are today fully aware of the brutality of our constructed reality, but we accept it anyways in the absence of (or belief in) alternatives. Jean Baudrillard’s notion of the hyperreal, for example, cancels hope in substantial change. But Schlingensief’s image of a person sitting in a dark space to block the shine of the spectacle (an inverted Platonic cave analogy) illustrates Raoul Vaneigem’s dictum that “nobody lies groaning under the yoke of inauthenticity twenty-four hours a day.”¹⁴ Schlingensief kept the concrete materiality of living people in focus. Instead of seeing no way around an entrenched, abstracted reality, Schlingensief insisted that for an artist, there is no way around challenging that perspective. With all the grossness of politics, Schlingensief maintained that becoming a politically active artist almost happened to him against his will. As his frequent dramaturg and collaborator Carl Hegemann recounts, Schlingensief spelled out this point in an action ironically declaring himself a free nation of one where “the new state would re...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Schlingensief and realism
• 2 Rosebud: realist (anti)drama
• 3 Freakstars: realist (non)acting
• 4 Hamlet: there’s something rotten
• 5 Please Love Austria: realist (in)efficiency
• 6 Parsifal: the German revolution
• 7 The Animatograph: realist scenography
• 8 Epilogue: it takes an Opera Village
• Bibliography
• Index