Christoph Schlingensief

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Christoph Schlingensief (born October 24, 1960 in Oberhausen) is a German film director, theatre director, actor, author, artist, and talkshow host.

He created controversial and provocative theatre pieces as well as motion pictures. One of his main works, the so-called Germany-Trilogy consisting of the movies "Hundert Jahre Adolf Hitler"(a hundred years of Adolf Hitler), "Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker"(the German chainsaw-massacre) and "Terror 2000" which handle three markpoints in German history of the 20th century. While Hundert Jahre Adolf Hitler is about the last hours of Adolf Hitler, Das deutsche Kettensägen-Massaker heads the German reunion of 1989 and shows a few East-German people who cross the border to visit West-Germany and get slaughtered by a psychopathic family with non-running chainsaws. Terror 2000 is about the 1970´s Red Army Faction terror in Germany. All of these films are not supposed to be taken very seriously. Schlingensief is an extremely provocative artist and his major targets are the German and Austrian identity. Therefore it was even more unexpected that he directed Parsifal at the Wagner-Festspiele in Bayreuth. Just a few weeks before this, he went to a Neo-Nazi event in Berlin and ironically suggested publicly to "use the word Judensau (literally: Jewish Pig) in a common and natural way again".

In 1990 - 1993 he directed the Germany-trilogy.

In 2003, he directed Bambiland by Elfriede Jelinek at the Burgtheater in Vienna.

In 2004, he directed Richard Wagner's Parsifal at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus.

In 2004, he created Kunst und Gemuese at the Volkstheater Berlin in Berlin