Christoph Schlingensief
In the Eye of the Shitstorm

The author, action artist, talk show host, film, theatre and opera director Christoph Schlingensief died ten years ago. Now a book of conversations reveals his personality, his obsessions, his fears, his hostility towards “cement-like stability.”

By Holger Moos

© Kiepenheuer & Witsch When it came to Christoph Schlingensief (1960-2010), opinions were divided. Some saw him as a narcissistic provocateur and compulsive border violator, others admired him as an artist of the extreme and spontaneous, who worked tirelessly, obsessively and regardless of any losses on the topics he sought out and set for himself. If the word shitstorm had been adopted into the German language back then, he certainly stood in the eye of that storm several times.
 
Kein falsches Wort jetzt  (roughly, “watch what you say now”), the volume of conversations now issued, edited by his widow Aino Laberenz, underlines what drove Schlingensief and what he never wanted: He did not want to be exploited at any price. That was one of the reasons he regularly changed genres, first making films, then doing theatre, becoming a kind of performance artist, founding a party, going on expeditions in television and finally building an opera village in Africa.

(NOT) a wholesale warehouse for provocations

In one of the conversations, the author and filmmaker Alexander Kluge attests of Schlingensief that he “can organise enormous amounts of clutter.” The two obviously hit it off. And Kluge’s characterisation is accurate for that was exactly Schlingensief’s forte: the order of disorder.
 
“Kunst, Kirche, Kanzler & Co.” (art, church, chancellor, etc.) don’t differ much from one another according to Schlingensief, “They all play with knowledge they don’t possess,” which was precisely what he didn’t want to do. His goal was probably not so much anarchy, but rather the greatest possible freedom in his work. “In the freedom of making lies the responsibility – and the pleasure – that I have as an artist.”
 
Under no circumstances did he want to play the role of the artist as a somewhat chaotic, but ultimately harmless, meaningless lap dog of society. Unpredictability was his metier. “I can’t deny that it really bores me when people want me to dance on the table and everyone wants to order a little packet of provocations with neo-Nazis and Hamlet or a container from me. Like a wholesale warehouse for provocations.” Nor was he an educator aiming to promise and create certainty. “There is no clear message! Anyone who claims there is, is lying,” he declared in 1994.

An ASYLum seeker is a hostage, too

Schlingensief would probably have addressed the present refugee situation at Europe’s outer borders in his work. “An asylum seeker is a hostage in our country, too, who’s extradited and used until he’s no longer willing or able,” Schlingensief said in a 1993 interview – a statement that sounds very topical. How would he, who locked asylum seekers in containers, have handled that? Today we can be glad that entertainers Joko & Claas approached this topic in a somewhat unconventional way recently in a 15-minute film about the Moria refugee camp.
 
When, in one of the last conversations in 2009, Christoph Schlingensief was asked how things would continue for him now – with cancer – he replied, “Sometimes artists die young, and being offed is also quite good for their work. Better than just quoting yourself in old age. So, I definitely won’t want to be an artist anymore, I’d rather just live.” He never reached that stage and it’s hard to imagine that he would have let it come to that.