Repertory at Goethe: Germany Trilogy

With an introduction by Steve Macfarlane. Screenings at 3:00, 4:15, and 5:30pm, followed by short intermissions.

There is no appreciating the work of the late experimental dramatist Christoph Schlingensief (1960-2010) outside the context of state arts funding and the public sphere. As with his polarizing adaptations of canonical operas and plays, Schlingensief eagerly blurred the boundaries between theater, activism and performance art. To cite just one example: Schlingensief’s verkakte political party “Chance 2000” enjoined Germany’s six million unemployed citizens to travel to the lakeside village of St. Gilgen and jump in the water at the same time, so as to flood the nearby vacation home of chancellor Helmut Kohl (then nearing retirement.) As a filmmaker, Schlingensief was influenced by Joseph Beuys and the Viennese Actionists, as well as Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Alexander Kluge; Schlingensief made a point of collaborating with survivors of Fassbinder’s stock company, and counted Kluge as one of his mentors, alongside the even less classifiable avant gardist Werner Nekes.

This aligns Schlingensief again with New German Cinema, but also with writers such as Wolfgang Koeppen, Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass, whose postwar concerns Schlingensief updated (often hilariously) for the era of TV sensationalism and viral misinformation. While his work is equally cherished and hotly debated in Germany, Schlingensief’s movies rarely screen here in the United States. This fall, the German Film Office proudly exhibits his signature filmmaking accomplishment, the German Trilogy (1989-1992), whereby Schlingensief ruthlessly skewered anxieties around the reunification of East and West Germany and continued to sound the alarm about nascent xenophobia and revanchism. Perhaps even more so than Nazis (whether neo-or-otherwise), Schlingensief’s unholy satires targeted otherwise liberal Germans whose main wish was for things to change as little as possible.

100 Years of Adolf Hitler: The Last Hour in the Führerbunker

Schlingensief applied the endurance-testing techniques of live theater to the production of this 55-minute hand grenade of a film, which opens with a hilarious rebuttal to Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire. Shot over 16 continuous hours in a shared, claustrophobic bunker space, 100 Years of Adolf Hitler paints the Third Reich’s last gasp as a grotesque slapstick routine, with Hitler (Udo Kier) the perennial butt of the joke; in Schlingensief’s world, there’s no honor in suicide nor glory in defeat. This proudly vulgar, frantic approach anticipates the salaciousness of the true-crime genre—the film is lit by a single diegetic flashlight—while upending the expectations of future generations by rewarding their macabre curiosity with sickening excess.

100 Jahre Adolf Hitler – Die letzte Stunde im Führerbunker
Dir. Christoph Schlingensief
Germany, 1989
55 min.
With Udo Kier, Margit Carstensen, Volker Spengler, Alfred Edel, Dietrich Kuhlbrodt, Andreas Kunze, Brigitte Kausch-Kuhlbrodt, Marie-Lou Sellem, Asia Verdi

The German Chainsaw Massacre: The First Hour of the Reunification

Schlingensief’s follow-up to 100 Years of Adolf Hitler boasted a bigger budget (still miniscule by standard definitions) and cast, and a whole lot more fake blood. In The German Chainsaw Massacre, the reunification ceremony at the Reichstag is offset by news that 4% of those crossing from East to West Germany never completed the journey. While Tobe Hooper’s original Texas Chainsaw Massacre addressed the abandonment of rural America, Schlingensief’s breathtakingly gnarly German export tracks a family of West German (or “Wessi”) sausage-makers who see an inherent opportunity in reunification. Schlingensief’s gloriously campy, proudly un-subtle approach makes The German Chainsaw Massacre a bellwether for post-Cold War globalization and disquieting parody of the idea that Germany had successfully moved on.

Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker – Die erste Stunde der Wiedervereinigung
Dir. Christoph Schlingensief
Germany, 1990
60 min.
With Karina Fallenstein, Susanne Bredehöft, Artur Albrecht, Volker Spengler, Alfred Edel, Brigitte Kausch-Kuhlbrodt, Dietrich Kuhlbrodt, Reinald Schnell, Udo Kier, Irm Hermann

Terror 2000: Germany Out of Control

If 100 Years of Adolf Hitler engaged Germany’s past and The German Chainsaw Massacre its post-Berlin Wall present, the final entry in Schlingensief’s trilogy looks to the new millennium (per its title) and—testifying to Schlingensief’s perspicacity—the problem of anti-immigrant bigotry. Two federal detectives (Peter Kern and Margit Carstensen, both celebrated collaborators of Fassbinder) are sent to enquire after the disappearance of a West German social worker and a Polish family that had been under his care. Their investigation leads them to the fictional town of Rassau, an unmistakable stand-in for the city of Rostock where asylum seekers were attacked by neo-Nazis over the course of several days in August 1992. Two ex-gangsters (played by Udo Kier and Alfred Edel) successfully rebrand themselves as anti-immigrant nationalists, directly evoking the perpetrators of the 1988 Gladbeck hostage crisis. Schlingensief’s interest is not just to keep attention on Germany’s immediate past, but also in the way murderous agitators can successfully harness the attention of Germany’s foaming-at-the-mouth news media and, eventually, curry favor with political leaders.

Terror 2000 – Intensivstation Deutschland
Dir. Christoph Schlingensief
Germany, 1992
79 min.
With Margit Carstensen, Peter Kern, Susanne Bredehöft, Alfred Edel, Udo Kier, Artur Albrecht

Texts by Steve Macfarlane.

Steve Macfarlane is a curator, writer, and cartoonist based in Ridgewood, Queens. He has organized film series at venues including MoMA, Anthology Film Archives, and Spectacle, and is a contributing editor at BOMB Magazine. His debut graphic novel They Saved Biden’s Brain will be published by ACE Theater in 2027.