Remembering artist Christoph Schlingensief

"The word all-round artist always sounds odd, but somehow, that's what he was," said Bettina Böhler, who edited Christoph Schlingensief's early films.

Now, Böhler is in the director's seat herself with her debut documentary film, Schlingensief – In das Schweigen Hineinschreien (Schlingensief – A Voice that Shook the Silence), released to mark the 10th anniversary of the German theater director, performance artist and filmmaker's death.

Christoph Schlingensief, who was born in Oberhausen in 1960 and died of cancer in Berlin in 2010, remains one of the most unclassifiable figures of the German arts scene: Was he an underground director, an artistic provocateur, a professional dilettante? Or was the man with the youthful physique even in his late 40s above all a gifted performance artist?

Schlingensief, the enfant terrible of the arts

Characterizations of the artist could easily fill pages: From the youngster who made experimental films with a home movie camera to the director of the Bayreuth Festivaland director of theater productions at  Berlin's Volksbühne, Schlingensief also staged numerous provocative art actions, including at the documenta in Kassel. Representing Germany at the Venice Biennale, he posthumously won the Golden Lion in 2011 for the best national pavilion. Still, Christoph Schlingensief was always a contentious figure.

"During his lifetime, and actually right up to the end, he was terribly controversial; basically, not many people liked and appreciated him," Bettina Böhler said. People tend to forget that, she added. "When someone is no longer alive but has left a work of art behind, he is suddenly stylized as a hero," Böhler argued. "But one must not forget that he faced incredible opposition during his lifetime — and basically never really got the recognition he gets now."

Perhaps Schlingensief wouldn't have been comfortable in the mainstream of the educated middle class. He was much too attracted by provocation, non-conformism and disturbance.

A man of grand gestures

Perhaps they were the essence of his art. Films, plays and operas or performances in shopping malls — Schlingensief loved to provoke with grand gestures, which were often humorous and ironic.

He annoyed politicians and sensitive art lovers as well as large parts of the "regular" public interested in art. But he also had fans: people who wanted to get back at the supporters of Chancellor Helmut Kohl's era, and people who believed art should not be happening beyond subsidized theaters and museums — in short, people who loved provocation, loved what was non-conformist and garish.

Christoph Schlingensief: 'insane amount of empathy'

Schlingensief was a man "who took an unusual look at the world and who simply observed everything that was around him very precisely," Böhler told DW, adding that he used that to express his attitude to the world that surrounded him — with the help of his art, films and theater productions, and in his performances.

It is not enough to describe Schlingensief as an artistic agitator, an artist only interested in attracting attention with flamboyant, politically charged art ventures.

"Schlingensief was someone who looked at people and things with an insane amount of empathy," according to Böhler. "That's what distinguished him, quite contrary to the fact that he was always considered a chaotic person, the kind where you would think: 'Here comes Schlingensief, hold on tight, he is up to no good!'"

That characterization does not go far enough, said Böhler: "Basically, he was a very empathetic and warm person who was just really angry about certain conditions in this country and in this world. And he expressed this anger with this art."

Not one to keep quiet

Anger may have been the source. Christoph Schlingensief was a child of the "generation of '68" West German protest movement. In the 1980s and 1990s, he devised artistic projects to ensure Germany would not forget its past. The protests had brought about social change in West Germany, which Schlingensief felt had either not yet reached the people, or was being choked back in the Kohl era. Christoph Schlingensief tackled that development as best he could.

There is no doubt that he was a political artist, his art a work that stemmed from his generation. He did not protest against the Vietnam War or dissect Red Army Faction ideology — Schlingensief was a child of the '80s and '90s, a "postwar generation and society whose parents were still fully aware of the war and the Nazis, not as perpetrators, but they were shaped by it, they were partly traumatized," said Böhler.

"We were raised by these parents and we were born into this country," said Böhler, who, like Schlingensief, was born in 1960. "And, as we now know, in the first 15 to 20 years after the war, hardly anyone in this country talked about what had happened."

A voice that shook the silence

That explains the title of Böhler's film, which uses only archive material, without any added commentary. "We were born into a silence in a society of immobile structures, a society that of course carried a great deal of shame and guilt, but was unable to talk about it."

Christoph Schlingensief was one of the first to move plays from Germany's subsidized theaters out onto the street through public art performances. 

Whether Schlingensief's last works could be labelled as theater or art is basically irrelevant — the artist never cared about such formalities.

He was driven by a restless preoccupation with society, Böhler said, adding that this is what pushed him to feel "something was not right, he had to shake up society. "That's what moved him."

Schlingensief would find plenty of material for his art today, too. Refugees, racism, conspiracy theories in times of the coronavirus pandemics — it all would have inspired the artist who died 10 years ago at age 49. "There really is a lack of that kind of people today," said Bettina Böhler.