»Germany search ’99« – Christoph Schlingensief: Larger Than Life

Germany just doesn’t want to go under. You can still see, rocking in the distance, packed in a suitcase while the waves of the Hudson River pluck on him. Does this picture make you optimistic? Or would Germany first sink. Freed from scrap, turned through the sausage machine so that we can try again. No reconstruction. But a new beginning. That would be nice.

May 2, the day on which the protection of the constitution classifies a party sitting in the Bundestag as secure right -wing extremist, reminds us of how optimism works. And a film shows us the little what it takes: a hard-shell case, a portable cassette recorder, a self-knitted Germany scarf and-yes, well, if it is somehow, a fairly exclusive horde of journalists who joined joastfully when the suitcase full of Germany-souvenirs flies over the railing. “Sinking Germany” is the name of an action by the performance artist Christoph Schlingensief, who died in 2010, which gave its way into the new National Gallery as a video installation at the opening of the Berlin Gallery Weekend. Whereby “keep in” should be completely without euphemism.

The fan bubble of the artist had gathered in the fan bubble of the artist on the occasion of the donation of the work – it was donated by Schlingensiefs Widow Aino Laberenz. Klaus Biesenbach, director of the new National Gallery, and Matthias Lilienthal, future director of the Berlin Volksbühne and long -time producer and dramaturge of Schlingensiefs Performances, dropped superlatives such as “surprisingly”, “Disruptive” … Biesenbach put the way in which he said, this artist was simply: “Larger Than Life.” And so many spoke from the heart.

In fact, Christoph Schlingensief was an artist who understood to help explosion the dynamics of our complicated coexistence in order to see more clearly through the swaths of smoke. In 2000, he called six million unemployed people swimming in the Wolfgangsee with the intention of triggering an flooding, which should have met Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s holiday home and his labor market policy. In the end, around a hundred came, the water level hardly rose, but the image of the “(self -proclaimed) marginal” was in the world.

What did Christoph Schlingensief drove, asks Klaus Biesenbach. “The truth?” – “Big pictures,” replies Matthias Lilienthal. He wanted to create larger pictures throughout his life than Germany’s hero in Hollywood Wim Wenders. Schlingensief’s »Germany search ’99«, in whose dramaturgical sequence “sinking Germany”, was also a major media project, which wanted to pursue the not exactly handy question, which it means to be a German in the 21st century. The four-part performance series started with the authorally “Wagner lives-sex in the ring” through ten German-speaking cities, was a guest at the Hamburg Schauspielhaus and the Berlin Volksbühne as a “first and second international camaraderie evening and ended as a Wagner rally in the Namibian desert.

Intermediate was on November 9 of 1999, the historic date of the Wall Fall and the “Reichspogromnacht”, the performance “Sinking Germany” in New York, which had come about at the invitation of the Museum of Modern Art, where Biesenbach was chief curator at the time. The video of the campaign, which can now be seen in the context of a larger room installation for the “search for Germany” in the new National Gallery, shows Schlingensief in the clothing of a rabbi standing on a ship and speaking in various cameras. A journalist asks whether he could open the suitcase once. – No, that doesn’t work. – But what is in it? -a beer mug, a ladies’ bandage, the “please don’t disturb” a door sign of a Chemnitz hotel … “If you look at the suitcase, you have Germany in your head.”

In particular, the accompanying television interviews in the exhibition show how helpless the press was at the time – and how Kühn Schlingensief reacted. For example, he was asked why he was attracted as an Orthodox rabbi. Because he can hardly participate in the nomadic search, because one can hardly participate in this Germany, although at the same time it is of course a deception – but not wrong, because he simply has the wrong shoes for that.

So it went back and forth, alternating between the concerns and infection, reality and fiction every second. A global game that created facts that escape into impressive pictures. “These pictures,” says Schlingensief in an interview, “I give myself.” And with that he gave them to you and me too. He always went out on his own initiating concerns that affected everyone – the stress with capitalism, the trouble with fellow human beings, fear of death. From this he gave birth to iconic moments, which never only took place behind the raised walls of the art business, but always on streets, squares, in public places, that is, in the middle of society.

According to Biesenbach, Schlingensief was not only a public intellectual, but also – like Joseph Beuys – a public artist who preferred to spend his vacation, as Lilienthal added. His thinking was rapid and demanding, his concerns for everyone to understand: He wanted to understand why he was on earth, Schlingensief said on the ship on the Hudson River. And of course: who doesn’t want that?

As an eternal searcher with unbeatable humor, turmoil and integrity. He was the modern version of a medieval trickster who brought momentum through his inopplate tunes to society without stagnating any coexistence. For Schlingensief himself, according to Biesenbach, the world went down every day. And every day his art straightened her up again. He was a “utopian character” (Biesenbach) who wanted to show us how cultural optimism works.

So what if …? This question comes in the room installation »Germany search ’99«, which was curated by Klaus Biesenbach and Lisa Botti and is embedded in the current collection presentation ». Art between politics and society. Collection of the National Gallery 1945–2000 «, not around it. What if there was an artist like Schlingensief today, what if he was still alive today?

“We are in capitalism, but we think elsewhere,” Christoph Schlingensief had called on the Hudson River of New York. Between then and today, decades have been. What once dawned politically is crystal clear today. And yet this sentence is worth memorizing: the times when we live may look pessimistic. But we should think optimistically.

»Christoph Schlingensief. Germany search ’99 «, New National Gallery, Potsdamer Straße 50,

10785 Berlin.