Christoph Schlingensief Research Articles

Matter’s Performance in Christoph Schlingensief’s “Animatographische Editionen”

German director Christoph Schlingensief’s Animatographische Editionen (2004-06) included a series of three geographically-distinct labyrinthine walkthrough installations with a constellation of rooms and rotating platforms, leading to an Animatograph – a spinning carousel of material upon which videos were projected. Diverging from the current tendency in Schlingensief scholarship towards Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory, this paper focuses on the role of material in the Animatograph to show how it sympoietically enfolds autopoietic systems of communication. In particular, I investigate how humans explored the installations’ tight spaces, foul smells, swirling sights and cacophony of sounds, transforming materials and animals into performers. To do so, I derive concepts from Rebecca Schneider, Karen Barad and Donna Haraway to argue that in the encounter with the human, matter looks, touches back, and performs. In addition to providing a compelling site to investigate the intra-active entanglements of humans, animals, and materials in an aesthetic context, Schlingensief’s Animatograph allows us to see the ongoing (re)configuration of these entanglements, putting posthumanist performativity on display and highlighting the aesthetic contributions of the non-human.

Götterdämmerung im Ruhrgebiet: Christoph Schlingensiefs Wagner-Rallye

This article focuses on Christoph Schlingensief's Wagner-Rallye (2004), a work described as a counterpart to his staging of Wagner's Parsifal in Bayreuth. Inspired by Kluge's short story "Götterdämmerung in Wien," the Rallye radically reworks Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk concept by dispersing the sound of his operas in the public space. With Rancière, I describe the becoming-material of Wagner as "aesthetics of the torso" and discuss its emancipatory potential while simultaneously examining it withing the specific context of the Ruhrfestspiele; a festival founded as counterpart to established cultural institutions in an attempt to bring culture to the working class.

Über artivistische Interventionen. Invektivität, Medien, Moral

Abstract On the basis of two aesthetic interventions of Christoph Schlingensief and the Center for Political Beauty (ZPS) this article analyses the relationship between artivism and invectivity. In each case the underlying theatrical dispositifs are being discussed. With this, the article inquires into the respective procedures of disturbing the audience and the public. Whereas Schlingensief’s politics of form aims at creating a sphere of ambiguity, the ZPS is all about stimulating moral indignation. This also reflects the diametrically opposed capabilities of artivistic art: Controversy on the one hand, partisanship on the other.

‘Truth’, technology and transmedial theatre in Europe

Recent scholarship has expanded upon the concept of populism as performance to include a focus on how it employs digital technologies. However, what happens when theatrical performances appropriate far-right populist discourse to potentially parody how it frames its nationalist rhetoric as an appeal to ‘the people’? How do the relationships between performers and spectator-participants in such artistic works differ from those forged through the public manifestations of populist politics? How have artists who engage with populism employed technology to increase the reach and interactivity of their performances, and how does this engagement seek to undermine, and/or generate a troubling ‘belief’ in, the supposed ‘reality’ of such projects? This article critically reassesses the transmedial theatre of the late German artist Christoph Schlingensief and the Tallinn-based theatre company, Theatre NO99, in relation to current understandings of populism within an increasingly digitized, post-truth society. Schlingensief and NO99 might be seen to employ strategies of ‘subversive affirmation’ and ‘over-identification’ in their aims to resist the rise of far-right populism. Yet, we argue that these approaches can be dangerous: artists can reinforce far-right populist agendas if audiences fail to self-reflexively decode and reject subtle yet effective forms of mass manipulation – which is more likely when the components of such projects are dispersed across multiple media platforms through which counterfactual information also increasingly circulates.

The Art of Resistance: Cultural Protest against the Austrian Far Right in the Early Twenty-First Century by Allyson Fiddler

 Reviews Allen’s conceptualization, crucially, supports the established ideas of periodization while also challenging and differentiating the monopoly of these ideas through his selection of case studies and split chapters. Second, the selection of films is a refreshing mix of the canonical and films that so far have received little or no academic attention, organized in well interwoven and thematically cross-referenced chapters. Most of all, Allen appreciates the artistic complexity of these films as the contributions of directors who believed in socialism and socialist art as contributors to a better humanity. is allows him again to prove that reading these films and artworks as merely a reproduction of political ideology or as examples of life under a dictatorship would be to disregard their aesthetic complexity. Instead, he demonstrates that laying greater emphasis on the aesthetic and the struggle to create something entirely new under difficult conditions is the appropriate approach to doing these films justice. Or, in Allen’s words: [T]hroughout its history, East German cultural policy oscillated between two poles: on the one hand, the desire to portray itself as the contemporary embodiment of a long-established tradition of German classical humanism; and, on the other, as the realization of a new kind of political entity that had broken with the bourgeois traditions of the pre-war period and was committed to a modern, internationalist form of socialism. In part, the polemical character of many of the cultural debates that took place over the forty years of the GDR’s existence is a reflection of the impossibility of reconciling two such contradictory projects (p. ) U C D S E e Art of Resistance: Cultural Protest against the Austrian Far Right in the Early Twenty-First Century. By A F. New York and Oxford: Berghahn. .  pp. £. ISBN ––––. Allyson Fiddler’s excellent new book e Art of Resistance, ‘the first large-scale study of the creative work of protest against the ÖVP–FPÖ coalition’ of the early s (p. ), examines the range of artistic and cultural responses to the entry of the far-right Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ), then led by Jörg Haider, into the Austrian coalition government in , aer the party obtained its hitherto largest ever share of the vote (. per cent) in the  general election (p. ). In , as Fiddler traces, the FPÖ had polled  per cent of the vote and ended up being a very minor coalition partner with the then Sozialistische Partei Österreichs. e much larger share of the vote in  and openly xenophobic policies of the party gave the international community much more cause for concern, leading to diplomatic sanctions against Austria by the EU, Israel, and the United States (p. ). Inside Austria , a wave of protests sprang up almost immediately following the  elections, which persisted until the coalition’s demise in . An important precedent had already been set here with the Waldheim affair of the late s. e generation of artists and intellectuals that protested against the election of former UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim to the presidency of Austria in , on account of his deception regarding his Nazi past, is widely regarded as having been instrumental MLR, .,   in the formation of a civil society in Austria (see Dagmar C. G. Lorenz: ‘e Struggle for a Civil Society and Beyond: Austrian Writers and Intellectuals Confronting the Political Right’, New German Critique,  (), –). Indeed, many of the protagonists of the  protests would be closely involved in the protest movements in Austria at the beginning of the twentieth century. Fiddler’s study examines not only works by well-known authors and artists, such as the Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek, Robert Menasse, Christoph Schlingensief, and Marlene Streeruwitz, but also those of others who are less familiar. Fiddler’s book stands out for the range of works in different media that she discusses . ese include acts of everyday protest (demonstrations, speeches, graffiti, dance, etc.), as well as literary texts, films, and dramas. e Introduction and first chapter set the political context in which these various cultural responses to the Austrian Wende occurred, before proceeding to detailed analyses of texts, films, and forms of protest. e majority of the works analysed were...

Christoph Schlingensief und die Avantgarde by Lore Knapp Sven Lindholm Sarah Pogoda

MLR, .,   plex current within the broad stream of cultural modernism in which biological discourse is the chief referent. U  C D M Christoph Schlingensief und die Avantgarde. Ed. by L K, S L, and S P. Munich: Fink. . vii+ pp. €. ISBN –– ––. is highly rewarding book is welcome in at least two respects. Deriving from a conference held at the University of Bielefeld in February , it is far from a volume of proceedings and reads more like a collection of commissioned essays and supplementary contributions. e high level of critical engagement with the subject, which is sustained throughout, is matched by the contributors’ shared conviction that the work of the theatre and opera director, film-maker, and all-round action artist Christoph Schlingensief (–) mattered. He emerges as a central political and artistic presence during the first two decades of the Berlin Republic. Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey, for example, examines how in April  he got the better of both Interior Minister Otto Schily, and what Schlingensief saw as Schily’s flawed programme for rehabilitating young Neo-Nazis, and the Swiss Nationalist Party (SVP) by inviting young adherents of the far right to take part in his production of Hamlet at the Zurich Schauspielhaus. e performance outside the theatre—in the pages of newspapers but also on the streets of the city—is revealed here to be as important as what was presented on stage. For all Schlingensief’s disruptiveness, however, he could also be a unifying national figure, to the extent at least that he was as interested in the former East of the country as much as the former West, where he grew up. Moreover, he undertook some of his most significant work in German-speaking cultural centres outside Germany, notably Vienna as well as Zurich. However, it is mainly for his work at the Volksbühne on Rosa Luxemburg Platz, in the centre of old East Berlin, under the direction of Frank Castorf, that he will be remembered, alongside performers such as Sophie Rois and Irm Herman, and the directors René Pollesch and Christoph Marthaler. eir names pepper the eighteen academic essays presented here, though they occur probably less oen (sadly the book has no index) than those of Joseph Beuys, a lifelong inspiration for Schlingensief, and Alexander Kluge, whose own artistic production across multiple genres and art forms is more readily understood in the contexts elaborated in this book. e volume begins with a discussion between the editors and some of the participants at the original conference. It is valuable, not so much as a way of introducing the contributors as for establishing an ethos of common endeavour. ere are six thematic sections of unequal length: ‘Erinnerungen’, ‘eorie’, ‘Bezüge zum Dadaismus und Surrealismus’, ‘Film’, ‘Raum, Performance, Bildende Kunst und Musik’, and ‘Aktionismus’. ‘eorie’ or rather ‘Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Avantgardtheorien für das Verständnis der ästhetisch-politischen Strategien Schlingensiefs’, the second of two contributions by Wolfgang Asholt, consists of a survey of recent  Reviews theorizers of the avant-garde (Bürger, Bourdieu, Luhmann, Mann, and Reckwitz). e editors want us to understand Schlingensief’s self-positioning above all historically and also at the cross-overs of art and non-art, within and without institutions and with respect to the institution of art itself. But Schlingensief himself probed and poked fun at such categorizations and does not appear to have shown extensive awareness of avant-garde theory. What he did know, however, was the ‘classical avant-garde’ of the s and s, and this volume shows that his productions and performances have to be interpreted against this history; he engaged with it in vital ways, which could be every bit as provocative in the s as the original interventions seventy or eighty years earlier, as the essays by Jasmin Degeling and, in particular, Sarah Pogoda demonstrate. e volume ends with a scholarly apparatus, including lists of works by Schlingensief and works about him. e written accounts and interpretations of his achievements would already fill several shelves, which is testimony to his posthumous reputation in the academic world and beyond. As is the case with all live performers, however, most of Schlingesief’s own works le fewer...

The Wounded Self: Writing Illness in Twenty-First-Century German Literature by Nina Schmidt

Reviewed by: The Wounded Self: Writing Illness in Twenty-First-Century German Literature by Nina Schmidt Franziska Gygax (bio) The Wounded Self: Writing Illness in Twenty-First-Century German Literature Nina Schmidt Camden House, 2018, xii + 235 pages. ISBN 9781640140165, $75.00 hardback. At the beginning of her comprehensive and excellently argued study of autobiographical representations of illness in contemporary German literature, Nina Schmidt refers to Virginia Woolf's On Being Ill and her canonical statement that illness has not acquired the crucial status of a serious literary topic that it deserves. To serve as a striking example of this inadequate judgment and of the necessary theorization of and explanation for the contrary, Schmidt takes as one of her primary texts Christoph Schlingensief's cancer diary So schön wie hier kanns im Himmel gar nicht sein! Tagebuch einer Krebserkrankung (It can't possibly be as beautiful in heaven as it is here! A diary of cancer, 2009), and the ensuing attack in the feuilleton that illness narratives are not real literature. Furthermore, the fact that numerous illness narratives have been published in the past twenty years (not only in the German-speaking world) and that they have received both public and scholarly attention demonstrates the need for further recognition and serious literary criticism, which has actually already been the case in the Anglophone world for quite some time. Besides Schlingensief's cancer diary, Schmidt focuses on Charlotte Roche's 2011 Schossgebete (published in English as Wrecked, 2013), Kathrin Schmidt's Du stirbst nicht (You aren't dying, 2009), Verena Stefan's Fremdschläfer (Alien sleeper, 2007), and Wolfgang Herrndorf's Arbeit und Struktur (Work and structure, 2010–2013), and she convincingly explains her selection by the different range of genres and narrative forms of these texts. These specific narrative forms and aesthetic strategies are the main objectives of her study, and they bring to light the crucial themes of illness, disability, and dying as they appear as lived experiences. In her introduction, Schmidt points out the difficulty of differentiating between illness and disability. She relies on insights from the field of disability [End Page 508] studies, and elucidates how readers often adopt a discriminatory attitude toward narrative on disability (and illness), considering it as deviating from the norm, which seems to be "ablebodiedness." Thus, Schmidt's approach is very much grounded in challenging normative values inadequately based on binary thinking, such as healthy vs. ill and disabled, external vs. internal, or heterosexual vs. homosexual/lesbian in Stefan's Fremdschläfer, and "Selbstbild" (self-image) vs. "Fremdbild" (externally determined image) in Kathrin Schmidt's Du stirbst nicht (71). Additionally, she emphasizes her goal of highlighting the intricate relationship between the autobiographical and the (auto)fictional, a highly contested, but necessary contemporary debate, to which she contributes with a meticulous discussion of her exemplary texts. Her decision not to proceed chronologically in her analysis of the four texts is clear because of her focus on exploring and theorizing "the relation of the portrayal of illness to the author's own life experience" (33). Thus, her first chapter addresses the boundaries between fact and fiction in Roche's trauma narrative Schossgebete, and she speaks convincingly of an "aesthetics of disgust" (vividly represented in bodily descriptions) that Roche employs to deal with the protagonist's traumatic experiences (34). Schmidt's careful close reading and insightful references to Roche's own life experiences make evident the thin line between the protagonist's and the author's personal experiences. According to Schmidt, this autofictional form lends itself best to the retelling of traumatic experience by the vulnerable subject (author/protagonist). Here one could critically add that clearly identifiable autobiographies enable and empower their authors to narrate their traumata. Analyzing the "autobiographical novel" Du stirbst nicht (66), Nina Schmidt returns to the concept of the stare from disability studies to develop her argument of the successful restoration of the protagonist's self-image (after a brain hemorrhage): because of her illness experience she has become a "staree" (72), but at the same time she begins to stare (back) and recognizes the illusory notion of normality and ablebodiedness. Nina Schmidt establishes an intriguing connection between the protagonist...

Class Relations: Diagnoses of the Present in the Films of Julian Radlmaier and Max Linz

AbstractThis article examines the work of Max Linz and Julian Radlmaier, two German directors born in the mid-1980s. It traces their academic and practical training in film studies and film directing and highlights their aesthetic and political approach as an attempt to counter the cinema of the Berlin School. Amalgamating various German and international influences, from Christoph Schlingensief, Alexander Kluge, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Linz) to Roberto Rossellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and the classical avant-gardes of the 1920s (Radlmaier), their student shorts and feature films combine a playful eclecticism with an acute sense of contemporary political issues like precarious working conditions, gentrification, and the commodification of art and culture.

The Art of Resistance: Cultural Protest against the Austrian Far Right in the Early Twenty-First Century by Allyson Fiddler

Reviewed by: The Art of Resistance: Cultural Protest against the Austrian Far Right in the Early Twenty-First Century by Allyson Fiddler Joseph W. Moser Allyson Fiddler, The Art of Resistance: Cultural Protest against the Austrian Far Right in the Early Twenty-First Century. New York: Berghahn, 2019. 214 pp. Austria has undergone tremendous political changes from 1986 to the present, which transformed the once politically quiet and consensus driven post-war country to a fundamentally politically polarized nation, in which a significant part of the political resistance is conducted by means of cultural productions. Kurt Waldheim's election as president and the simultaneous rise of Jörg Haider and his Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) in 1986 contributed both to Austria gradually shedding the founding myth of the Second Republic as the first victim of Hitler's aggression, but it also led to the rise of new right-wing populism. The formation of coalitions with the FPÖ and the Austrian People's Party (ÖVP) in 2000–2002 and 2002–2006 as well as 2017– 2019 led to a diverse range of cultural protests against the Austrian far right, which Allyson Fiddler—one of the leading experts on this topic—carefully examines in her book The Art of Resistance, focusing on the turn of the millennium and the ÖVP-FPÖ coalitions from 2000 to 2006. The first chapter provides an overview of political developments from 1986 to 2000 as well as the cultural protests in those years, which furthermore provides readers with an overview of how Waldheim and Haider polarized the country. The second chapter, entitled "Performing Politics: On the Sounds, Symbols and Sites of Resistance," examines protests in the early 2000s from Christoph Schlingensief's "Ausländer raus!" shipping container and Paul Poet's 2002 documentary film about this project to a series of political musical performances. Very importantly, this chapter also emphasizes the enacting of everyday cultural resistance in Austria. In chapter 3, "Novel Responses: Protest in Prose," the author examines Ernst Molden's Doktor Paranoiski (2001), Erika Pluhar's Die Wahl (2003), Marlene Streeruwitz's novels and Walter Wippersberg's trilogy of political thrillers. Additionally, [End Page 127] Fiddler examines a wide range of short stories by Paulus Hochgatterer, Eva Jancak, Dieter Schrage, El Awadalla, Luca Kilian Kräuter, Hoppelmann Karottnig, Richard Weihs, Brigitte Tauer, and many more, closing the chapter with a discussion of Gerhard Haderer and Leo Lukas's graphic novel Jörgi der Drachentöter (2000). The fourth chapter, "Projecting Protest: Resistance on Screen," deals with film, of which Ruth Beckermann's Homemad(e) (2001) and Peter Kern's 1. April 2021—Haider lebt stand out among several other shorter films. The fifth chapter, "Staging Resistance: Dramatic Themes and Interventions," focuses on plays by Elfriede Jelinek, Franzobel, Streeruwitz, and Robert Menasse and also shows how theater could be brought to the streets of Vienna. This book overall offers a rich selection of well-known and also more obscure artists and their cultural productions. In her conclusion, the author argues that while Austria did not have a far-right government between 2006 and 2017, that does not mean that art did not have any reason to protest. This can be seen in Elfriede Jelinek's Schutzbefohlenen (2013), which deals with the so-called refugee crisis. Robert Schindel's novel Der Kalte (2013), his sequel to Gebürtig (1992) and Ruth Beckermann's film Waldheims Walzer (2018), as well as further episodes of Marlene Streeruwitz's So wird das Leben are mentioned, as well as Tony Glasberg's Land im Sumpf (2017), which is a fictionalized portrayal of what would happen if a neo-Nazi group took over the government. And Fiddler makes it clear that this topic is an ongoing work in progress for the artists who will continue to produce works of resistance, and there is no doubt that there will be other new artists who will become known in years to come to work on this issue. This book is remarkable for closing an important gap in Austrian Studies scholarship on contemporary politics and specifically the cultural responses and resistance to far-right wing governments in Austria. The political situation in a country...

Paul Poet transforms Christoph Schlingensief’s Container Project: Performance into Image

Paul Poet transforms Christoph Schlingensief’s Container Project: Performance into Image Birgit Tautz (bio) An Event, its Effects and Discontents Wiener Festwochen (Viennese Art Festival), June 2000: long considered the enfant terrible among European performance artists, Christoph Schlingensief (1960–2010), is at it again. In a fortress-like compound made of shipping containers and placed next to the opera house, Schlingensief stages a weeklong Aktion (political performance). Formally akin to the then-booming Big Brother television show, the performance stages an “intervention.”1 The “houseguests” have applied for asylum in Austria and several are recent refugees, people displaced by the civil and ethnic wars in former Yugoslavia or forced into migration by famines in Africa. The “show” is (co-)produced by members of the public passing by on their way to and from the city center but also lurking online. To top it all, the happenings in the compound are streamed live, 24/7. Online, the audience votes for their “favorite refugee,” with the vote enabling the foreigner to stay in the country after an arranged marriage to an Austrian, while votes taken over the phone expel a houseguest from the compound. S/he is to be escorted from the premises live, each night at 7 p.m.2 Schlingensief’s Aktion meant to uncover any subtle (and not so subtle) workings of prejudice and xenophobia in the immediate aftermath of right-wing electoral success in Austria in 2000. Beginning with the title, Bitte liebt Österreich! – Erste Österreichische Koalitionswoche (Please love Austria: First Austrian Coalition Week), it invited protests by all those it targeted, from the (anonymous but vocal) public to the (inter-) national and boulevard press, all the while involving them in the production. Public, press and other media organizations, as well as artists, but also accused politicians became co-producers of “factual” declarations, name-shaming, and “misreadings.” While pedestrians’ protests proved to be self-revealing—as they confirmed accusations of xenophobia—and are well documented on film, television, and in newspapers, Kronen-Zeitung, the largest, most populist daily in Austria, feigned protest. It [End Page 50] riled up the public over the originally chosen, but ultimately retracted subtitle “Konzentrationswoche” (concentration week, in allusion to concentration camp), while revealing a performance script that had the layout of the compound but was captioned “Lagerplan” (camp plan) rather than “Lageplan” (location map).3 Ultimately though, Krone only proliferated any and all insults by endlessly repeating them. Xenophobic media slogans, along with actual and fake brand logos, decorated the container walls, emphasizing insult and offensiveness through their loud, in-your-face visual presence. The signs were so omnipresent that leftwing protesters mistook them for xenophobic overreach, climbed the outer walls and tore them down. The project’s message seemed ubiquitous: xenophobia is everywhere, as is latent fascism. Schlingensief’s intent was more complex, though, as he aimed to move beyond exterior signs and expose internalized habitus: “Everybody was meant to read xenophobic Austria as a character, a role or a person that anybody can inhabit and that everybody has internalized.”4 The declared intent aimed to transcend the performance itself, lifting temporal art into a realm of experiencing a human condition, up to and in all its (self-) destructiveness.5 In its volatility and controversy, the performance revealed, as Anna Teresa Scheer observes, that left- and rightwing ideologies (and respective attributions by the other side) may be entirely insufficient to discuss the issues at hand.6 And yet, this snippet-like account can only convey parts of the performance. The project website (with clips from www.freewebTV.com) and an out-of-print book contain elements of the original design, scripts, and media-materials commenting on the weeklong happening.7 They inventory and archive them, presumably, without any editorial intervention or any efforts to organize the visual material. But these media, like any other, fall short of preserving the nature of the performance action. As it had played out live across different spaces, multiplied and augmented in several media, it resisted and undercut any unified message. (The different titles underscore the latter point.) Rather these aspects point to an event that yielded multidirectional...

Objectifying the subject: On the staging of artists in pain

Painful injuries or wounds are common elements in performance art in the context of a declared 'ascetic' practice. Artists like Marina Abramović or Joseph Beuys once stood bleeding in front of an audience. In this contribution, the staging of German artist and director Christoph Schlingensief (1960-2010) shall be contrasted with these iconic situations to approach and examine the 'archiving' of the artist. Schlingensief's late plays include scenes that show him crying and pleading from pain, and they have been received as autobiographical and in a sense documentary. By contrast, this contribution will argue for the dissolving of the artist's identity by exemplary investigation of the phenomenon of authenticity within the mode of representation between fact and (auto)fiction. Schlingensief's productions invoke and negotiate general and broader question of how the artistic subject can mediate a subjective affect of intense pain within a mode of identification and an actual objectivization.

Within a Labyrinth of Gazes: Exhibiting Christoph Schlingensief

Some voices questioned if it would be possible to exhibit Christoph Schlingensief’s work without him, following his death in 2010, due to its performativity and the artist’s role. Indeed, the German Pavilion at the 2011 Venice Biennale became more of a memorial to the artist. Its design was finished without Schlingensief, and instead of setting up an African wellness center, the abandoned set of The Church of Fear of the Stranger in Me (Die Kirche der Angst vor dem Fremden in mir, 2008) was installed, accompanied by films and other documents on Schlingensief’s Opera Village Africa in Burkina Faso.[1] Accordingly, the Schlingensief retrospective at Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin in 2013–2014 was perceived as a “ghost train” and confusing “obstacle course” by some critics.

Disjointed Confessions: <em>Adikia</em> and Radical Deradicalization in Schlingensief’s <em>Hamlet</em>

In 2001, in Zürich Switzerland, German director Christoph Schlingensief staged a version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In this version’s famous mousetrap scene, in which Hamlet wants to force his uncle to confess to fratricide, all the players of the mise en abyme are portrayed by a group of neo-Nazis endeavouring to separate themselves from the right–wing scene. In a dramatic break from Shakespeare’s text the group go on to share their own personal experiences with the audience. The production attempted to comment on and create debate about the ‘rottenness’ of the State, not just Switzerland, amid the rise in approval ratings and growing influence of far-right parties in the surrounding countries. I posit that Schlingensief’s project is a form of radical deradicalization (i.e., a radical method of deradicalizing neo-Nazis). This paper analyses Schlingensief’s Hamlet by utilizing the concepts of adikia (disjointure, dislocation, injustice) and dike (jointure, ordering, justice), which go back to the oldest extant Greek text: the Anaximander fragment. Drawing on Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida’s reinterpretations of adikia and dike I endeavour to illustrate how Schlingensief’s work attempts to intervene in the disjointure caused by the contemporary politics of fear by bringing adikia to the production of Hamlet itself.

Christoph Schlingensief and Richard Wagner #CheckTheirPrivilege

In honor of Christoph Schlingensief, Germany’s enfant terrible opera, film, and theater director, let me start with a bit of sacrilege: I preferred his work in a museum to experiencing it live. For almost a decade before his early death (at forty-nine, of lung cancer), Schlingensief maintained cult status in Germany, his name metonymic for an entire style of theater and art practice. He spawned many imitators. Their work is easily recognizable: fake blood, shouting, “ironic” racial slurs and misogyny, time-lapse videos of small animals being consumed by maggots. David Hughes very aptly describes Schlingensief’s aesthetic as “constant excess within an enclosed space.”1 Schlingensief’s performances managed to combine the two dominant strands of twentieth-century theater, weaving together the Dionysian rituals of Antonin Artaud with a Brechtian self-reflexivity and attention to the historically and socially contingent gestus of performers. Deeply influenced by Joseph Beuys, Schlingensief’s events existed somewhere between theater, political activism, and performance art. He appealed to those in the art world inclined to see theatre as inevitably retrograde and he appealed to theatregoers who wanted to believe theatre was on the cutting edge of radical artistic practice. In his final years, Schlingensief became an opera director. He managed to maintain his reputation as a provocateur while getting commissions from some of the most institutional of all houses: the Bavarian State Opera, theDeutsche Opera in Berlin, the Bayreuth Festival.

In the name of the Other? Refugee theatre and the value of “illegal” life in Britain

Drawing on refugee theatre performances by companies such as ice&fire, this article explores the politics of Testimonial Refugee Theatre in Britain and how illegal life is performed in contemporary verbatim theatre productions. Within the realm of narratives of flight, political drama holds an important position as a genre, because of its ability to create intimate immediacy. In theatre halls and post-performance gatherings, audiences can feel ready to inquire about politics. The variety of theatre productions dealing with refugee issues is enormous and refugee theatre adds new dimensions to discussions concerning Britain as a post-racial society. Contemporary refugee theatre in general, and its two major subgenres Container Plays and Testimonial Refugee Plays in particular, function as dramatic buffer zones which signal post-racial dimensions while re-inscribing alienation into the cultural and social make-up of British society. The plays discussed include Kay Adshead’s The Bogus Woman, Sonja Linden’s I Have Before Me a Remarkable Document Given to Me by a Young Lady from Rwanda, Clare Bayley’s The Container and Sylvie Hoffmann and Aimé Kongolo’s White Goods. Influential international productions such as Théâtre du Soleil’s Le Dernier Caravanserail (Odyssées) directed by Ariane Mnouchkine and Christoph Schlingensief’s container performance spectacle Big Brother, Foreigners Out! (Ausländer Raus! 2000) serve as background screens against which the arguments unfold.

The Efficiency of Ideology and the Possibilities of Art: An Althusserian Account

Louis Althusser’s theory of ideology allows us to account for all kinds of joyful obedience performed by individuals. This theory does not require any assumption of lacking knowledge or “false consciousness” on the side of subjectivated individuals. Therefore, it provides the crucial tools for explaining the specific political efficiency of art. This efficiency does not stem from any new “information,” as the predominant tendencies in alleged “political” or “documentary” art since the 1990s have presupposed, and as the popular notion of “artistic research” may still suggest. On the contrary, in order to be politically efficient, art has to tackle not the knowledge but the specific subjectivations individuals have undergone. When one augments Althusser’s fragmentary account of subjectivation by the distinctions between “belief” and “faith” introduced by Octave Mannoni, and additionally introduces as a third category that of “paranoia,” then one can specify the predominant types of subjectivation in current Western societies—as well as the exits that critical art can offer from these subjectivations. Artistic exit strategies from forms of faith and paranoia will be analyzed with regard to works by John Heartfield, Bernard Mandeville, and Christoph Schlingensief.

Confronting Cancer Publicly: Christoph Schlingensief’s So schön wie hier kanns im Himmel gar nicht sein! Tagebuch einer Krebserkrankung

The year 2009 saw articles across German feuilletons reacting to a striking new wave of illness narratives, among them Christoph Schlingensief’s cancer diary So schön wie hier kanns im Himmel gar nicht sein!. The integrity of authors like Schlingensief was challenged by critiques such as Michael Angele’s provocatively titled ‘Wer hat geil Krebs?’, as was the literary quality of their texts. However, for Schlingensief, the desire to record and disseminate his own experience of illness in diary form seemed to override the risk of a potentially hostile reception. With insight from trauma studies, the help of diary theory (Philippe Lejeune) and research into autothanatography (Susanna Egan), this article explores the reasons for this choice. It argues that it is in the diary that we witness a first reframing of Schlingensief’s creative work, setting the direction of his ‘Spätwerk’. I investigate the way in which the diary form is suited to the task of writing the dying self, and how the use of the diary as exploratory space maps on to or departs from Schlingensief’s previous work.

Cinema and Social Change in Germany and Austria ed. by Gabriele Mueller and James M. Skidmore (review)

Reviewed by: Cinema and Social Change in Germany and Austria ed. by Gabriele Mueller and James M. Skidmore Jennifer L. Good Gabriele Mueller and James M. Skidmore, eds., Cinema and Social Change in Germany and Austria. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2012. 304 pp. Cinema and Social Change in Germany and Austria, edited by Gabriele Mueller and James M. Skidmore, includes fifteen chapters that examine twenty-first-century film and “filmmakers’ interventions in discourses on the concept of ‘national cinema,’ the effects of globalization on social mobility, and the emergence of a ‘global culture’” (18). Cinema has been analyzed as a reflection of culture and society and has been identified as social critique, a form of resistance, and an agent of change as well as singled out for its ability to emancipate since the very first films were made. This volume recognizes and draws on the critical engagement in German-language film studies that situates these most modern examples within the realities of a changing media landscape and, increasingly, changing relationships in a global landscape. The authors provocatively open the conversation in the first chapter by [End Page 131] exploring the usefulness and limits of the concept “cinema of consensus” that came into use after 1990 as well as its possible opposite, a “cinema of dissent.” In this introduction, Mueller and Skidmore attend to the transnational elements at play in contemporary cinema, ranging from aesthetics to funding sources and benefactors to the themes of the films themselves. Categorizing multiple chapters that reveal the complex relationship between society and contemporary German-language film proves difficult, but three broadly defined groupings provide the frame of the book: “Challenging Viewing Habits,” “Reassessing and Consuming History,” and finally, “Questioning Collective Identities.” The first section, “Challenging Viewing Habits,” includes three chapters that analyze films focused on how social realities in film are projected to fuel social critique and action by arousing the discomfort of the viewer. Marco Abel’s chapter, “The Counter-Cinema of the Berlin School,” describes how “Berlin School” directors increasingly reject the character/viewer dichotomy, instead opting for suspending the audience between those two worlds. Sophie Boyer’s chapter on Austrian film director Michael Haneke’s oeuvre and Morgan Koerner’s on Christoph Schlingensief’s Freakstars 3000 analyze these two vastly different filmmakers as they confront the audience by setting traps for society’s blind spots. The middle section of the book, “Reassessing and Consuming History,” features six chapters. Four of the chapters treat specific films, Das Leben der Anderen, Heimat 3: Chronik einer Zeitenwende, Schtonk!, and Mein Führer—The Truly Truest Truth about Adolf Hitler and assess their reinterpretions of history in a postmillennial context. Joanne Leal and Mary-Elizabeth O’Brien take more thematic approaches; Leal tackles the legacy of 1968 in three films, Oskar Roehler’s Die Unberührbare, Christian Petzold’s Die innere Sicherheit, and Hans Weingartner’s Die fetten Jahren sind vorbei. Her study reveals both a more positive than expected assessment of the 1968 generation and a challenge to contemporary Germany “not dissimilar to the 1968 generation’s own authoritarian, anti-capitalist, and anti-imperialist stance” (115). O’Brien’s chapter considers Die fetten Jahren sind vorbei and adds Marcus Mittermeier’s film Muxmäuschenstil as she illustrates the filmmakers’ use of a politicized “‘creative chaos’ whereby established patterns of behavior are disrupted through playful or innovative acts in the hope of generating wide-spread cognition of society’s failures and the need for a new social order” (134). Each chapter identifies a fundamental dissatisfaction with the accepted narrative where [End Page 132] history and contemporary life intersect, with the authors appraising the potential of the film to seek explanations, antecedents, and even attempts to ameliorate inherent conflicts. Questions of identity, deeply interwoven with historical contexts, are the subject of the four chapters in the “Questioning Collective Identities” section. These chapters center on filmmakers’ efforts to restructure and refocus questions of identity: Myriam Léger addresses the context of German-Jewish identity in Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Ein ganz gewöhlicher Jude; author Jakub Kazecki surveys four contemporary films related to the German-Polish borderlands; Michael Zimmermann examines intra- and inter-German questions of minorities in Germany...

From Information to Experience: Christoph Schlingensief's Quiz 3000

When German artist Christoph Schlingensief died in 2010 he had amassed an impressive body of work spanning a diverse range of fields, including film, television, theatre, art, radio, activism, and opera. Although he gained a certain notoriety for his early film and performance work, it was through his politically engaged re-enactment of a series of reality television programs that his public profile in Germany was cemented. This article focuses on the pilot episode of Quiz 3000 that was staged at the Volksbühne in 2002 and that was modelled closely on the popular reality format Who Wants to be a Millionaire? As Schlingensief has made clear in an interview with Alexander Kluge, his interest in re-enactment as a critical strategy is not driven by a desire for total verisimilitude, but by the inconsistencies that are generated in the re-enactment process that serve as catalysts for reflection and debate. In Quiz 3000 it is the nature of the questions posed to the contestants (such as: 'The rape of members of which minority group is, according to the German criminal code, less heavily penalized?' and 'How many conscientious objectors from Kurdistan have, since 2001, been tortured to death in Turkey after being deported by Germany?') that generates the inconsistency in question. Drawing on Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno's writings on information and experience, I argue that Quiz 3000 transforms the information-driven focus of television quiz shows into a source of experience for viewers and contestants alike by encouraging them to reflect on political issues and debates in an autonomous, affective, and meaningful way.

Christoph Schlingensiefs Bilderstörungsmaschine

The mechanisms of disruption in paradigmatic performances of Christoph Schlingensief like »Talk 2000« and »Chance 2000« which established his reputation as »agent provocateur« are to be investigated in this paper. With his artistic events and stagings that often integrated marginalized people Schlingensief aimed less at creating scandals, but at irritating the ways of perceiving societal reality. The paper illustrates the functionality of the »image disruption machine«, Schlin-gensief’s mode of achieving alienation effects that implies a subversive counter-strategy against commercialization and exclusion.