The enfant terrible: Christoph Schlingensief

"Loud is closer to me than quiet," Christoph Schlingensief once said. No wonder that he often picked up a megaphone. But the enfant terrible of the German art scene was much more: an eccentric genius in theater, opera, film, visual art — and on the political arena. Now his oeuvre is revisited in a new documentary, 10 years after his early death.

Schlingensief began his artistic career as a filmmaker — at the age of nine. Later he applied to a film academy, but wasn't accepted. That didn't stop him, though. He went on to make 20 films. They portrayed elements of German history, but none of them were particularly easy on the eyes: Blood flowed, throats were cut, actors screamed.

In 1998, Schlingensief founded "Chance 2000," erasing the boundary between art and politics. His movement was a real-life election campaign and his party was for the "Unemployed and Excluded from Society." Its campaign slogan: "Failure is a chance." In the 2000 national elections, Schlingensief's party attained 0.058 percent of the vote, but the media attention went well beyond the votes.

The climax of his campaign took place when Schlingensief went swimming in the Wolfgangsee lake, inviting four million unemployed people to join. He wanted to raise the water level and flood then Chancellor Helmut Kohl's nearby vacation house. Instead of four million, 100 people came. But no problem — "Failure is a chance." In the end, art was victorious; the performance went down in art history.

In 2004, Schlingensief staged Richard Wagner's opera "Parsifal" in Bayreuth. The result was a blood-spattered, six-hour marathon. Critics celebrated him and the audience cheered. For Schlingensief himself, Bayreuth was both a dream come true and a nightmare. His fight with the elderly director, Wolfgang Wagner, made the headlines. The artist later attributed his cancer to the stress in Bayreuth.

In January 2008, Schlingensief was diagnosed with lung cancer. The artist reacted offensively and made his illness public. He wrote a kind of requiem for himself, entitled "The Church of Fear of the Stranger in Me." It was an unbearably intense theater performance full of anger and fear. But Schlingensief, the loud artist, also showed his quieter, softer side.

Schlingensief wrote a diary about his fight with cancer, entitled "Heaven Could Not Be as Beautiful as Here: A Cancer Diary." In it, he openly shared insights into his search for himself and the meaning of life. The bestseller was unremorseful and surprisingly unemotional. Schlingensief repeatedly posed the question: Where is God?

During his illness, Schlingensief had time to think about his legacy. He founded a so-called opera village in Burkina Faso, one of the poorest countries in Africa. It was meant to be a cultural center, but also a place where children could learn and the sick could be treated. Berlin-based Burkinabè architect Francis Kéré started building using a plentiful local resource, clay.

Christoph Schlingensief died in August 2010 and was unable to see the completion of his opera village. The following June, the Venice Biennale opened with the German Pavilion dedicated to his last work, "The Church of Fear of the Stranger in Me." Schlingensief was posthumously awarded the festival's Golden Lion and he is now a household name around the world.