Berlin Show Revives Schlingensief's Provocations as AfD Warning — SkimNews
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- Gropius Bau opened It's Not My Problem Anymore, Deal With Your Own Shit, installing roughly half of Schlingensief's original set from his 2006 play Kaprow City in its neo-Renaissance atrium on the very spot where Joseph Beuys once exhibited his Stag Monuments.
- Schlingensief's 2000 project Ausländer Raus! Schlingensiefs Container placed asylum seekers in a Big Brother-style container beside Vienna's State Opera, with audiences voting two people a day on who should be deported, in direct response to the far-right FPÖ's entry into Austria's government.
- Kaprow City depicted then-Queen Elizabeth II performing a Hitler salute, re-enacted the paparazzi chase that killed Diana, and showed Diana in bed with two men with Down's syndrome — prompting the Sunday Express headline "Fury at German play that shows Queen as a Nazi" and rumours the royals might sue.
- Schlingensief, who died of lung cancer just shy of his 50th birthday in 2010, cast German TV personality Jenny Elvers in Kaprow City precisely because her tabloid-saturated private life mirrored Diana's, according to his widow and stage designer Aino Laberenz.
- The African Twin Towers brought actors including Patti Smith to Namibia's Shark Island, the site of a former German concentration camp where Herero and Nama prisoners endured forced labour and starvation — a project the source flags as feeling "uncomfortable" to revisit, with Namibia reading as "a backdrop for a German artist's grand vision" rather than a reckoning with colonial genocide.
- Schlingensief's production of Hamlet brought former far-right extremists onto the stage at Schauspielhaus Zürich and Berlin's Volksbühne to re-enact Shakespeare's central murder scene amid far-right rock music and Nazi aesthetics, with his quote taped to the exhibition wall: "We're not playing Hamlet, we're playing Germany."
Why it matters: The exhibition lands at a moment when the AfD's 2024 AI video *Remigration Hit* — which the source cites as deploying aesthetic spectacle to humiliate migrants — has made Schlingensief's confrontational anti-fascist theatre read less as shock-art relic than as field manual. His widow Laberenz closes the catalogue argument by refusing to let audiences treat him as a substitute for civic action, insisting "it's up to us... not to hand responsibility over to someone else."
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