DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0010 The Massacre will be Televised: Splatter Aesthetics, Media Politics, and the Horrors of Reunification in Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker Kai-Uwe Werbeck University of North Carolina Charlotte Abstract: In this essay, I re-read Christoph Schlingensief ’s 1990 Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker as a metatext that adopts and adapts the sensibilities of the splatter film, a subgenre of horror that caused a veritable moral panic in West Germany during the 1980s� I argue that Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker dissects the nation’s changing mediascapes after the private turn, in particular television’s fluid combination of entertainment segments, news programs, and commercials. To this end, the film “remakes” Tobe Hooper’s 1974 The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and its carnivalesque follow-up The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986) by the same director - both of which were banned by the German authorities - to (a) rip to pieces the sedating media flows surrounding the fall of the Berlin Wall and Germany’s looming reunification and (b) to argue for a body politic that violently mashes East and West into one grotesque mass of reassembled “new” national flesh - a monstrosity, however, that still shares a pulsing artery with the Third Reich� Ultimately, Schlingensief suggests that both the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic were continuations of National Socialism by different means, regardless of the conflicting national master narratives that claimed otherwise� Keywords: media criticism, splatter cinema, German reunification, avant-garde film, horror aesthetics In Christoph Schlingensief ’s 1990 Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker: Die erste Stunde der Wiedervereinigung - the second entry to his Deutschland-Trilogie - West Germans butcher East Germans and reinsert them piecemeal into the free market. While the film works as an allegory of sociocultural cannibalism, Schlingensief once playfully suggested in an interview that the focus on his- 148 Kai-Uwe Werbeck DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0010 torical disenfranchisement and the rapaciousness of neoliberalism may not be entirely sufficient for hermeneutic purposes: 1 “Wovon soll ich hier überzeugen? Dass wir schlechte Metzger haben oder dass wir eine komische Wiedervereinigung hatten? Das kann es nicht sein” (qtd. in Treusch-Dieter 241). 2 Accepting the director’s challenge to read Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker differently, I discuss it as an intervention into German media politics and their effects, paying close attention to Schlingensief ’s decision to adopt and adapt the modalities of the splatter film, a horror subgenre that triggered a veritable moral panic in West Germany in the 1980s� 3 Evoking Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre ( Blutgericht in Texas , 1974; not released in West Germany until 1978) and its 1986 sequel The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 - two titles that were, in fact, banned and confiscated by the German authorities -Schlingensief gestures toward both splatter’s position as an abject cultural object in the Federal Republic - as the story often goes, the most “un-German” of genres - and its alleged potential to disturb viewers� 4 Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker ’s graphic displays of dismemberment, then, not only subverted the narratives of closure and completeness that dominated public discourse during the tumultuous period of reunification, but they also interfered in debates about the limits of representation as Schlingensief blended over-the-top horror film aesthetics with neoavant-garde techniques and trash-TV tropes to critique the widespread rejection of the transgressive image in German mainstream culture� 5 Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker overexposes its audiences to non-normative imagery to which they are not accustomed� 6 In doing so, it makes the nation’s murderous legacies visible through a blood-soaked counternarrative that contrasts sharply with prevailing accounts of reunification that emphasize reconciliation and overcoming the Nazi past� The overlaps between Schlingensief ’s oeuvre and horror cinema have been discussed in scholarship, yet scholars have rarely made them their focus. Kris (Thomas-)Vander Lugt has provided the most thorough and insightful analyses on the topic so far, and her trailblazing work frames my reading of Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker � She notes that Schlingensief “has populated his visual universe with bodies that bleed and bodies that bludgeon, oozing bodies, disabled bodies, bodies in ecstasy and bodies in decay - unsightly bodies that form a part of an overall oeuvre that revolves around splatter as an aesthetic, political, and even ethical element” (Thomas-Vander Lugt 163)� Vander Lugt argues that the director inserts these unsightly bodies, “the racial, ethic, sexual Other; the disabled; the deviant - into mediated versions of violent realities made hyper-visible by the graphic aesthetics of horror […] to expose the realities of contemporary Germany” (Thomas-Vander Lugt 167)� Along these lines, I bring Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker into dialogue with its U�S� American inspirations, the aforementioned The Texas Chain Saw DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0010 The Massacre will be Televised 149 Massacre and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 , to examine how Schlingensief harnessed splatter cinema’s position as the “deviant” Other in the West German 1980s� His unsightly bodies are always mediated bodies whose fragmentations challenge the quasi-mandated “wholesomeness” of Germany’s cultural landscape, “confounding boundaries of taste that are simultaneously bound up with […] ‘proper’ and ‘improper’ ways of dealing with violence - past and present - in Germany” (Thomas-Vander Lugt 164). To be sure, Schlingensief and his unsightly bodies push boundaries on the level of both narrative and form� A brief recap of Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker ’s narrative - such as it is - shows that the film excels at breaking taboos. Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker follows Clara (Karina Fallenstein), who escapes from her Leipzig high-rise apartment after killing her oversexed husband (Susanne Bredehöft). Making it to West Germany after a run-in with half-crazed GDR border guards feverishly protecting a border that no longer matters, she meets with her presumably West German lover Artur (Artur Albrecht) who sexually assaults her� 7 Trying to escape Artur, Clara eventually ends up at the motel “Deutsches Haus” which also houses a meat processing facility� Located in a run-down industrial complex, the motel as well as the nearby “Cafe Porsche” are home to a family of West German cannibals who kill East Germans and turn them into meat products. The family’s patriarch Alfred (Alfred Edel) orders his family members to capture several unfortunate victims, including a severely wounded Artur� Alfred claims to speak for “Father,” who is later revealed to be nothing more than a corpse wearing a steel helmet and a tattered uniform� As Clara frantically seeks to survive the ensuing carnage, Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker not only establishes that the West German cannibal clan has ties to both Naziand East Germany, but also that the members regularly practice incest. Jonny (Udo Kier), for example, is the result of “Blutschande” committed by Alfred and his daughter Margit (Bredehöft in a second role), while Brigitte has an “illegitimate” son, Hank (Dieter Spengler), with her stepbrother. At the film’s climax, Clara appears to have escaped her ordeal when she flags down a pick-up truck, only to realize to her horror that the passengers are Alfred, “Father,” and Artur, the latter still very much alive despite the severe physical trauma that has been inflicted on him. As indicated above, however, it would be reductive to judge Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker by its narrative alone� Equal attention must be paid to the ways in which Schlingensief formally guides the text beyond the horrors of (sociocultural and literal) cannibalism into a critique of the mediascape that framed the Wende � 8 Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker constitutes Schlingensief ’s response to what he saw as a representational and experiential crisis, which television coverage of reunification, specifically, threw into sharp re- 150 Kai-Uwe Werbeck DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0010 lief� Schlingensief described the mass media that covered the geopolitical super-event as a Heuchelmaschine , a hypocrisy machine (Schlingensief, Video interview )� Both televised images and images of television screens permeate Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker : the film frequently features TV sets in its mise en scène , splices full-frame sequences of television programming (often snippets from broadcasts about reunification) into the text, and switches to grainy CCTV footage from security cameras� In his work, Schlingensief consistently interrogated how mass media misrepresented “real” events, supporting the notion that “television […], that axiomatic form of electronic communication, is best seen not as a mirror of reality or of society, but as constituting it” (Hocker Rushing and Frentz 16)� This position places him within the intellectual tradition of Alexander Kluge, sharing with Kluge the conviction that, as Richard Langston notes about the latter’s media theory, “television can still be an agent of social experience like cinema before it” (154). 9 Similar to Kluge - with whom he repeatedly collaborated - Schlingensief attempted to dismantle the Heuchelmaschine from within� He wrestled with the issue that “television is composed of a constant flow devoid of clear beginnings and endings, even though it appears to accelerate and truncate the duration of time in order to accommodate its programming requirements” as it “destroys the temporal gaps and niches essential for cinematic montage” (Langston 153). In contrast to Kluge’s guerilla programming on late-night private television, however, Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker utilized splatter, a popular (even if not mainstream-compatible) subgenre, to leave a mark on Germany’s collective imaginary� 10 Before the viewer is introduced to Clara, Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker opens with syndicated footage of then- Bundespräsident Richard von Weizsäcker delivering his famous reunification speech in front of the Reichstag by night. Flanked by then-Chancellor Helmut Kohl and then-Vice Chancellor/ Federal Minister of Foreign Affairs Hans-Dietrich Genscher, among other prominent Wende -era dignitaries such as Willy Brandt, von Weizsäcker addresses a large crowd that cheers emphatically, holding sparklers and waving flags while intoning the anthem of the Federal Republic of Germany� From this scene of a joyful if somewhat stilted celebration of “Einigkeit,” the film, after its brief, blood-red opening titles and ominous voice-over, briefly cuts to one of the cannibals who, as the viewer later learns, was just run over by Artur� The cannibal, Brigitte (Brigitte Kausch), is lying on the ground in a desolated industrial wasteland, cut in half with her intestines hanging out, yet refusing to die� Like the crowd at the Brandenburg Gate, she, too, sings - not any of the two German national anthems, however, but “Die Gedanken sind frei�” Both images, the exuberant (real) master narrative of unity, and the disturbing (fictional) irritant ripped into two parts, enter a dialectical relation, underscoring the tensions between DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0010 The Massacre will be Televised 151 ubiquitous images of harmony and communality and the ruptures of reunification and violent art� Thus, Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker goes beyond critiquing the “difficulty of merging two ideological systems […] accompanied by intense anxieties, resentments, and projections,” it also injects shocks into the Heuchelmaschine , probing whether Germany’s risk-averse cultural sphere effectively limits critical engagements with the nation’s past and present as the state’s intervention into modes of representation resulted in a sanitized mediascape that failed to capture the tensions of the period (Hake 190). In what follows, I read Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker against the conservative, neoliberal media politics of the Kohl administration before I connect it to the moral panic that still targeted horror films at the time of its release - and the ways in which Schlingensief tapped into the genre’s ability to perturb and disrupt for his filmic assault on reunification euphoria. Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker constitutes a decidedly violent reaction to key developments in (West) German media politics - which had undergone significant changes during the 1980s - that negatively affected the graphic horror films that Schlingensief references on various levels. On 16 June 1984, the so-called “Drittes Fernsehurteil” of the Bundesverfassungsgericht paved the way for the dual system of “öffentlich-rechtliches” and commercial television, which had been, up to that point, disallowed in Germany due to a fear of an ideological misuse of private networks� 11 The privatization of the market not only reshaped the West German mediascape in terms of content - and, some would say, quality - but also opened the floodgates for underrepresented genres, as cinema’s “back catalogue of the previous decades was sold off at cut-down prices to newly emerging cable-TV channels” and “experienced a ghostly renaissance in latenight slots from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s” (Bergfelder 216). 12 While heavily regulated, the first German private networks, RTL and SAT.1, introduced audiences to hitherto hard-to-find horror films from all over Europe, Asia, and the United States� These “exotic” titles would have rarely, if ever, been aired on West German state-sponsored stations. Their presence on private television (in truncated versions) triggered a desire in some viewers to see the films in their uncut form� This often turned out to be challenging due to the nation’s strict media regulation policies, which were tied to both the fears of reemerging authoritarian politics and concerns over the psychological well-being of minors� Ironically (because it was financed by the public subsidiary system), Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker proved to be incompatible with the moral and legal standards of German television and became the subject of heated debates among viewers, who criticized it as a disrespectful treatment of a “serious” issue� An avant-garde splatter film employing taboo-breaking strategies on multiple levels, Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker must be read as a reaction to larger 152 Kai-Uwe Werbeck DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0010 shifts in German media politics linked to the introduction of affordable home video systems� In the late 1970s, Betamax and VHS tapes could be rented at the video stores which were sprouting up across the country� They could also be purchased via mail order or were bootlegged from VCR to VCR� As a result, a wave of unrated horror films threatened to overwhelm West Germany’s regulatory bodies� This cultural home invasion prompted severe objections from several advocacy groups because of the genre’s unprecedented explicit violence and overt, often misogynistic sexuality� 13 As the public became increasingly aware of the widespread availability of these films, calls arose for a state crackdown on the genre due to its presumed negative effects on young viewers. As Roland Seim points out in this regard: War in den 50er und 60er Jahren ‘Sexualität’ der Hauptanlaß für zensorische Aktionen, so traf es in den 70ern vor allem die ‘Gewalt�’ Als einziges Land der Welt trat in Deutschland 1973 mit der Verabschiedung von § 131 Abs. 3 StGB ein Zensurinstrument hinzu, daß [sic] nicht nur die mediale Gewaltdarstellung (bzw. “Verherrlichung von Gewalt, Aufstachelung zum Raßenhass”), sondern auch ein Sympathisieren mit ihr verbietet. (42) Films such as Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre were pulled from theaters and video stores, at times seized in spectacularly authoritarian fashion - operations that illuminated the presence of a censorship apparatus in West Germany, a liberal democracy which claimed that censorship did not exist� While copies of the film were relatively easy to remove from movie theaters, they remained a “viral” presence in West German VCRs� 14 State attorneys and federal judges began to enforce the relevant laws more rigorously - in the case of horror mostly via §131 StGB (“glorification of violence”) - to combat the “dangerous” texts that had found their way into the living rooms of the Federal Republic where they kept multiplying in unknown quantities� 15 The state’s forceful reaction to the perceived threat posed by splatter films informed Schlingensief ’s decision to take recourse to the subgenre for his own project on the horrors of reunification. The implied concern that violent images consumed in private spaces may turn a peaceful nation into a violent (read: fascist) people (again), further explains why Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker so often features the most private screen of them all: television . At the same time, it illuminates the connection between the text’s aesthetics and the dominant form of domestic horror of the Wende period� As much a result of as a reaction to the juridical countermeasures discussed above and the anxieties they fueled, West German micro-budget horror emerged in the early 80s to fill a void for a comparatively small but enthusiastic audience of genre aficionados, a process of disand replacement made possible by increasingly affordable technological DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0010 The Massacre will be Televised 153 equipment which allowed these fans-turned-producers to create their own ersatz-content at little to no cost� To be sure, the formation of the underground scene was both an attempt to recreate what was “not there” and an homage to the films these self-taught directors admired - but it also indexed national fears about the negative effects of media. Along these lines, West German DIY horror became a minor form of resistance for untrained filmmakers to challenge what they perceived as an unjustified suppression and scapegoating of their favorite genre� They adopted, with extremely limited means, the gonzo movie-making approach and aesthetic techniques of European and American exploitation horror in the 1970s and 80s, which was “still tied to an idea of competition which forcibly goes through exhibition and ostentation, in a continuing challenge to the limits of what was acceptable on screen” (Curti 151). While Schlingensief was not an active member of the loosely connected group of filmmakers responsible for the lion’s share of the national horror output during the 1980s, in Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker he adapts their lo-fi aesthetics as a mode of scandalization to critique the state’s intervention into artistic expression� While clearly allegorizing reunification as a highly mediated horror spectacle in its own right, Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker thus also engaged with the nation’s fear of “bad” media and the avoidances, omissions, and distortions to which these fears had led in the name of “good” taste� 16 Schlingensief explicitly addressed his concerns about a lack of artistic freedom when he appeared on the RTL talk show Explosiv - Der heiße Stuhl on 15 September 1992� Moderated by the hyper-aggressive Olaf Kracht, Schlingensief and four other experts polemically debated then- Bundesministerin für Familie Angela Merkel - sitting on the titular piece of furniture, the hot seat -on the issue of violence in the media� Introduced as a horror director, Schlingensief fully embraced his assigned role and argued against Merkel’s claim that the constant presence of murder and mutilation - both fictional and journalistic - on German television resulted in actual violent acts committed by minors, what she, in the broadcast, called “Verhaltensbeeinflussung durch zuviel Gewalt.” 17 When asked about limits of representation, Schlingensief, in full performative mode, replied: “[I]ch sehe einen absoluten Problemfall in dem Moment, wo die Kunst dasteht als ein absoluter Buhmann, weil sie nämlich einfach nur Bilder sucht für einen Zustand und die Wiedervereinigung ist für mich wesentlich gewalttätiger als zum Beispiel jetzt [ Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker ]�” Given his remarks, it makes sense that, two years earlier, the filmmaker had “remade” two of the most controversial entries to the canon of modern horror - films that Schlingensief was intimately familiar with, as he had shown double features of the independently produced The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and the more carnivalesque, studio-backed The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 in his renegade movie 154 Kai-Uwe Werbeck DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0010 theater Club 69 in Mülheim. It should be noted that Schlingensief preferred the self-reflexive second entry, and this bias can be felt all over Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker - which is ultimately an amalgamation of Hooper’s two films refracted through Schlingensief ’s signature cinema of the overdose. While the basic premise of Hooper’s films is darkly mirrored in Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker , it is also their status as controversial artworks that the film draws attention to� 18 The case studies of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and its sequel, henceforth abbreviated as TCM and TCM 2 respectively, well exemplify Germany’s strained relation with horror cinema during the time period. Hooper’s 1974 film is the inaugural entry to the long-lasting cannibal franchise that introduced the world to the chainsaw-wielding killer Leatherface and his degenerate family of hillbillies, the Sawyers, as viewers would learn from the sequel� 19 It revolves around an inbred American family that has turned to human meat for sustenance after modernization has rendered them redundant in the industrialized slaughterhouses of rural Texas� 20 While parallels can surely be drawn between several story beats in TCM - “a tale of counterculture youth set upon by murderously reactionary elements of the traditional order” - and Schlingensief ’s film, it is short-sighted to assume that Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker stages the industrial wastelands of the Wiedervereinigung as a mere double of the American film’s parched badlands (Worland 215). 21 Original and “remake” differ so notably in many aspects that it is more productive to argue that Schlingensief appropriated the abject position of Hooper’s oeuvre within the German imaginary - rather than to merely borrow its central conceit of intranational cannibalism� 22 Taking its cues from independent horror - including the aforementioned West German micro-budget variant that was in turn influenced by TCM - Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker signals its proximity to these boogey-objects in West German culture when it associates itself with Hooper’s work and by extension the repercussions it triggered� Banned by the Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Medien (BPjM), TCM was officially unavailable in uncut form between 1985 and 2014, while at the same time it remained highly “visible” as one of the prime targets - albeit one rarely actually seen, yet frequently misremembered 23 - of the debates about horror’s purported adverse effects on the moral compass of the nation’s youth� 24 TCM 2 did not fare any better in this regard� Set largely in a small-town radio station and - for its second half - in the literal and figurative tunnels of horror underneath an abandoned amusement park, TCM 2 differs significantly from the first film but shares with TCM an unforgiving treatment by the German authorities. A decidedly more graphic film than its predecessor, TCM 2 was also banned, its copies seized in 1990� It remained illegal in Germany until 2016, DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0010 The Massacre will be Televised 155 when it was reevaluated after a lengthy legal battle initiated by rights holders Turbine� Hooper’s follow-up, like Schlingensief ’s hybrid revision, is aware of the slasher genre’s potential to shock or, at least, irritate mainstream viewers� In her influential study on gender in the modern horror film, Carol Clover attests the sequel a “campy, self-parodying quality” and then proceeds to discuss the ways in which TCM 2 brings the archetype of the final girl full circle. 25 Toward the end of the narrative, Hooper hands over the chainsaw to his protagonist, Radio DJane Stretch (Caroline Williams), who for the majority of film’s running time seems destined to meet the grisly fate of the first film’s final girl, Sally Hardesty (Marilyn Burns) 26 - before she evolves into a survivor capable of defending herself, albeit, like Sally, at the price of her humanity and sanity (26). 27 In terms of tone, subtext, and self-reflexivity, TCM 2 clearly proves closer to Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker than the lower-budget 1974 entry� Finally, Hooper’s Spielbergian Poltergeist (1982), which he directed between TCM and TCM 2 , also haunts Schlingensief ’s film. A postmodern ghost story in which America’s violent and unresolved past intrudes into the safe spaces of suburbia in the form of spectral shapes that enter the nation’s living rooms via TV sets, Poltergeist implies that the flickering white noise - marking the end of the day’s broadcast - mimics the salvific light of the afterlife. Leading astray the lost souls of those who have died in the now-colonized frontier region of Questa Verde over the centuries, the face-melting radiation of the “dead” channel has become an integral part of the nation’s cookie-cutter, well-off neighborhoods. Given that Schlingensief knew Hooper’s filmography well, it is difficult to ignore the elements that the more mainstream-friendly Poltergeist shares with Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker : its focus on the uncanny powers of television and the presumed negative impact of the violent (after-)image on the “dreams” of a nation. At this point it becomes necessary to discuss Schlingensief ’s image theory in relation to the poetics of the splatter film. In Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker fountains of blood, intestines, and brain matter continuously disrupt attempts at passive consumption, as images and sounds assault the spectator� Gewalt is at work, as splatter theory posits, even on the most basic physiological level� 28 As Julia Köhne, Ralph Kuschke, and Arno Meteling argue in this context, “der Splatterfilm [provoziert] immer noch aktuelle Fragen nach der Konfrontation von Gewalt und medialer Repräsentation […] vor allem aus seiner Extremposition der Grenze” (10—11). Schlingensief articulated a related concern about the limitations of representation and affect (and, by association, the border of all borders in 1990, the “wound” of the Berlin Wall and its place within the German body politic)� He refracts this concern through the prism of a mediascape from which moments of fragmentation have become absent, with the effect of sedating the audience and diminishing its capacity to emphatically respond to 156 Kai-Uwe Werbeck DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0010 scenes of suffering. In an interview with Gerburg Treusch-Dieter, Schlingensief formulated his tactics for disruption, most prominently via the single graphic image: “Man erfährt plötzlich, das ein einziges Bild reicht -das ist das still , ein Einzelbild, nur einen Moment -, damit es zündet” (qtd. in Treusch-Dieter 226). As Schlingensief further elaborated: “Es gibt diese Splatter-Elemente immer wieder, die ganz viel Kraft frei machen. Erlösende Szenen” (qtd. in Treusch-Dieter 231)� 29 This moment of redemption constitutes a messianic act of extreme violence that breaks the illusion of cohesion and continuity: “Der Gewaltakt in den Splatterfilmen ist deshalb so erlösend, weil ich dann weiß, gleich wird der letzte Atemzug geatmet, und dann ist Schluss” (qtd. in Treusch-Dieter 240). Thus, splatter creates instances of actual closure, finalities that are missing from the aortic spurts of television and the utopian narrative of Germany’s successful reunification forty-five years after the fall of the Third Reich. 30 That the excessive fragmentations that punctuate Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker ridicule the slogan “es wächst zusammen, was zusammengehört” borders on stating the obvious, but the refusal of some of the victims to die despite everyone’s best effort invites another reading: that the process of reunification is in itself a futile exercise as the two Germanys were never truly divided in the first place. Consequently, there can be no stitching together of the German-German body, whether sociopolitically or aesthetically� Yet, despite the graphic dismemberments that permeate Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker , a dangerous, yet more subtle continuity does exist underneath the splatter spectacle - and the film revisits key details from TCM and TCM 2 to tease out these continuities buried under layers of bodily and formal disintegration� About halfway through its runtime, Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker replays a minor reveal from TCM : the fact that the two Hardesty siblings - Sally and her wheelchair-bound brother Franklin - grew up in the same region as the cannibalistic Sawyers� After all, the two protagonists return to a dilapidated property that still belongs to their father, even though the family left rural Texas long ago. The clash of cultures - urban hippie draft dodgers versus deranged rednecks - at the core of TCM is thus one that occurs among members not only of the same nation, but, more importantly, former neighbors� 31 Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker offers a comparable examination of East and West Germany’s shared but “forgotten” heritage and plays with the idea that the shock of reunification, as Johannes von Moltke notes, for many “derived from the disappearance of a projective ‘other’ against which one could comfortably define oneself, whether in the East or the West” (175). In the film, the long-separated people of the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic share a bloodline with their Nazi “fathers�” Thus, Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker complicates its own allegory on national disenfran- DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0010 The Massacre will be Televised 157 chisement when it blurs the lines between Ossi and Wessi and establishes both groups as blood relatives - and turns the processes of cannibalism into an act of self-destruction� To be sure, the West Germans do slaughter East Germans, yet Clara is an equally cold-blooded killer who murders her overreaching husband by slitting his throat in the film’s opening minutes after first massacring the family dog� She also quickly retaliates against her tormentors in outlandish fashion, rendering the vectors of (at times, sexualized) violence multi-directional� As such, Clara follows in the footsteps of TCM 2 ’s retributory Stretch rather than TCM ’s submissive Sally as she embraces violence as her modus operandi and mirrors the West German perpetrators in her behavior� As the narrative suggests, Clara’s vicious disposition dates back to the historical period before the forced separation into East and West when both peoples had rallied behind National Socialism� As is usually the case in Schlingensief ’s output, references to fascism are not subtle in Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker : the long-dead patriarch is a prop that Dietrich uses to voice his subconscious fears about the threatening Other� When he visits his father’s remains, Dietrich warns the corpse, “Vater, wir müssen fliehen, die Ossis kommen,” to which he answers himself in a high-pitched tone, “Fliehen? Niemals […]� Die Ossis gibt es hier seit 1962 nicht mehr�” By including the Freudian Urvater in Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker , Schlingensief evokes Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 Psycho - which in turn inspired TCM - when the narrative reveals that “Vater” is merely a mummified relic of the past� The skeletal body is hidden away inside the house and kept “alive” by one of his descendants, Alfred, who asserts his control by speaking for the patriarch - the Führer ’s commands echoing long after the end of the Second World War� Psycho ’s famous gender-swapping twist that establishes Anthony Perkins’s Norman Bates as the actual killer - while his mother has, in fact, long been dead - is effectively restaged in Hooper’s film. TCM also includes seemingly dead (grand-)parents, but in contrast to Hitchcock’s classic, one of the emaciated bodies in the former comes back to life in an unsettling scene of uncanny horror� In Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker , as briefly indicated above, the patriarchal figure is without a doubt deceased, a (still powerful) caricature of Nazism’s afterlife stowed away in a place externally represented as West German - while the memorabilia that adorn its shadowy halls index the GDR� The cannibals in Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker occupy spaces whose exteriors are coded as “West”: in front of the “Café Porsche” one notes a Coca-Cola vending machine and a West German telephone booth, for example. Yet, while overemphasizing their West-Germanness on the outside, the inside of their home contains signifiers of the Other they seek to fragment and digest. In one scene, several of the butchers sit in front of a large East German flag, which suggests ties to East 158 Kai-Uwe Werbeck DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0010 Germany� Clear-cut family relations and, by association, local as well as national pedigrees, become meaningless� As the prominent placement of the East German flag and the dialogue further implies, the grandfather may have fled from the self-proclaimed anti-fascist GDR or, alternatively, had some personal relation with the socialist state which in turn resulted in an unacceptable affective attachment that triggered his hostility toward the perceived national Other� This is evidenced by the treatment of Hank, for example, who was supposed to be “nach drüben geschafft” in 1962, “nur weil er anders aussah.” As Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker gradually erases distinctions between East and West, it declares the issue of the truly anti-fascist postwar German state a moot one - arguing that both countries were a continuation of the Third Reich� It is for this reason that Clara’s surreal attempt to cross the geopolitically irrelevant but still ferociously guarded border between the East and the West plays out as a Kafkaesque farce in which the moment of transition is impossible to achieve - not because the guards will not let her pass, but because the border has always been, in affective terms, illusionary. To further underscore this lack of differentiating features, the East and West German landscapes are virtually indistinguishable from each other in Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker . These surreal desolations offer little hope for redemption and are a far cry from Kohl’s blossoming landscapes and similar metaphors that implied that reunification was a natural process of beautification brought about by reunified Germany’s own manifest destiny. 32 As Randall Halle notes in his seminal discussion of Wende horror, existence as a “contained self appears to horrify” during a historical period, witnessing the “emergence of the longed-for coherent German political body, a whole country, no longer defined by dismemberment of East-West opposition” (296). I wish to add to Halle’s reading that Schlingensief complicates the idea of the German body as one that aggressively assaults feelings of national unity and stable identity by restaging TCM ’s open ending� Leatherface, allowed to live and haunt the highways (all the way to the urban sprawl of Dallas, in fact) and numerous sequels for decades to come, does his chainsaw dance, while Sally escapes the ordeal as a mental wreck, sobbing and laughing hysterically on the back of a pick-up truck - another instance where the moment of closure is deferred, possibly forever� As the opening scene of TCM 2 informs the viewer via screen-scrawl and voice-over, after telling the authorities about the crime, “[Sally] sank into catatonia�” Her own history has been turned into myth, because “officially, on the records, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre never happened�” For Clara, too, escape eventually proves impossible, if for altogether different reasons: she has always been right at “home” in the East, in the West, and, eventually, in reunified Germany, and thus for her, as for DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0010 The Massacre will be Televised 159 Sally, the massacre “seems to have no end” because Clara truly has nowhere to escape to� In Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker national borders are not only permeable, but meaningless� Thomas-Vander Lugt convincingly argues that Schlingensief ’s film is about “not arriving […], both literally and figuratively” (172). She notes that - in the world of Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker - some East Germans never arrived because they were turned into sausage, but also points out that, in a metaphorical sense, “they failed to adapt to capitalism and fell through the cracks of the system” (172). In addition, as my hermeneutic approach has shown, many never arrived because there was no place to go to within the redrawn borders of reunified Germany. The text thus challenges the narrative of historical closure that accompanied many Wende discourses, laying bare the continuities of fascism that have not ended because of reunification. To make its point, the film operates not in the realist and/ or didactic register, but instead resorts to over-the-top splatter aesthetics, utilizing a rejected subgenre of horror, whose imagery mainstream viewers found simultaneously repelling and fascinating� Produced at the beginning of a decade that would see the reemergence of rightwing politics (the NPD and Die Republikaner come to mind) and escalating neo-Nazi violence applauded by the public (such as the arson attacks on refugee homes in Hoyerswerda in 1991, Rostock-Lichtenhagen in 1992, and Solingen in 1993), Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker takes on a darkly prophetic quality� 33 While the end of Germany’s geopolitical divide may have been cause for celebration, some ties to the past, Schlingensief feared, cannot be severed, even with a chainsaw� The “massacre” will continue, and the responsible “monsters” are indeed Deutsch-Deutsch � The murderers are not only among us, but they are “us” across all borders� Notes 1 It should be noted, however, that in a video interview Schlingensief confirmed that he did indeed consider East Germany the “loser” in the reunification process: “[S]elbst wenn man sich jetzt anguckt, was aus dem Osten geworden ist,” he explains, “das ist weniger als Wurst, das ist ja noch nicht mal Grütze. Also, blühende Felder kann ich hier nicht sehen. […] Auch wie dieser Vertrag ausgehandelt wurde� Das ist alles illegal� Auch das muss nach Den Haag” (Schlingensief, Video interview). 2 Schlingensief admitted that he was appalled by the mediated images of East Germans during the early days of reunification - he calls these images “Murks” - which inspired the idea to interfere in the modes of representation (Schlingensief, Video interview). 160 Kai-Uwe Werbeck DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0010 3 In this essay, the term “splatter” denotes excess and exaggeration as well as a graphic deconstruction of the human body in horror cinema, usually triggered by moments of violent intrusion� Arne Meteling sketches out the modality as follows: “[H]at der Film einmal die Schwelle zur sichtbaren Wundästhetik überschritten, kann er nicht mehr zurück. Aufgrund dieser singulären Szenen, dieser ‘Stellen,’ wird der Realitätsrahmen, den die dramatische Diegese eines Erzählfilms mühsam aufbaut, brutal gesprengt” (58). 4 The standard scholarly narrative claims that the horror film did not survive the Third Reich and “blieb nach den Erfolgen der Stummfilmzeit bis heute marginal” (Vossen 24). Rudolf Worschech argues that “der deutsche Film hat seit den sechziger Jahren ein eher schlechtes Verhältnis zum Genrekino” (336). It must be noted that Steffen Hantke has shown that there is ample evidence to successfully challenge “the prevailing critical opinion that there is no such thing as German horror cinema after 1945” (vii). Kris Vander Lugt further points out that “recent scholarship suggests that horror film ‘reemerged’ in the period surrounding reunification, but this is not the whole story” (Vander Lugt 161). 5 As Sabine Hake states about Christoph Schlingensief ’s “shock aesthetic” in general and his “irreverent reunification farce” in particular: “the subversive energies of violence, anarchy, and the grotesque were repeatedly mobilized for political interventions” (208). 6 Kris Thomas-Vander Lugt calls Schlingensief ’s Deutsche Trilogie “camp-splatter,” in which splatter takes “Brechtian distanciation and reverses it, bringing the viewer into direct - and violent - confrontation with trauma, loss, and the returned repressed” (166). 7 Artur’s national status is not made explicitly clear� Whereas he exuberantly welcomes Clara to the West, he calls for the Volkspolizei when in distress - which suggests that he could be a former citizen of the GDR now living in the FRG� 8 Made with federal subsidies, Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker premiered at the Hofer Filmtage and was subsequently screened in movie theaters, before it aired on Austrian public television, although not on the German networks. Significant portions of the film’s budget came from the Filmförderung NRW (but also from the Westdeutsche Rundfunk and the Norddeutsche Rundfunk), a financing process that, as some critics have pointed out, “imbues television-funded cinema with unadventurous narrative strategies aimed at a mass audience, the need for pleasurable emotion and harmony, and the reluctance toward more difficult subjects” (Mueller and Skidmore 11)� Schlingensief had received around 180,000 DM to fund an altogether different project - and then decided to shoot Das deutsche Ket- DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0010 The Massacre will be Televised 161 tensägenmassaker without telling the subsidy boards about the change of plans� 9 As Richard Langston shows, in the 1980s Kluge began to take aim “at the all but inevitable onslaught of privatized television in West Germany, a country that had long equated its democratic foundation with its federally mandated public service broadcasting system” (153). 10 As Schlingesief remarks, talking explicitly about Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker : “[D]as ist ne schreiende Oberfläche, das ist ein Flirren auf der Oberfläche und gerade durch die Kettensäge ist das natürlich auch nochmal extrem auch symbolisiert, find ich. Dazwischen gibt’s ne Ritze und deshalb ist das was ich da vorne zeige […] dahinter gibt’s noch die Information ‘Wiedervereinigung,’ dahinter gibt’s die Information ‘Menschen im Kampf,’ dahinter gibt’s die Information ‘Menschen kämpfen, weil sie Angst haben’” (Schlingensief, Video interview). 11 For more information on the Rundfunkurteile , see Hans-Jürgen Papier and Johannes Möller’s essay on “Presse- und Rundfunkrecht” (449—68). 12 As Manfred Riepe shows, “nach Einführung des Privatfernsehens im Jahr 1984 zirkulierte dieselbe B-Film-Masse [der Videotheken] zwischen SAT�1 und RTL” (193). 13 For a detailed account, see Riepe� 14 Discussions of the impact of horror films, especially on younger audiences, intensified after “die Presse brandmarkte die neuen Videocassetten als ‘Schmuddelmedium’” (Seim 58). 15 § 131 StGB states that distributing media “die Gewalttätigkeiten gegen Menschen in grausamer und unmenschlicher Weise schildern oder die zum Rassenhaß aufstacheln” are punishable by up to a year in prison or a fine. The ratified version changed the term “Menschen” to “Menschenähnliche” and in general rephrased the paragraph in stricter terms� 16 Lars Robert Krautschick points out that “ausgerechnet die Verbote für indizierte Filme avancieren zum Lockmittel für neugierige Teenager, […]. Videos […], deren Titel Horror, Nervenkitzel und Gewaltexzesse versprechen, werden zu subkulturellen Ritualen” (73). 17 Schlingensief would later imitate and subvert the talk show format in his Talk 2000 , “deploying an aesthetics of exaggeration, of framework rupture or technical failure” (Koch 303—04). 18 Vander Lugt writes that “if horror in the 1980s was primarily concerned with the transgression of bodily borders, German horror films of the 1990s took on the ‘disruption of once stable borders, boundaries, and limits,’ both metaphorical and geopolitical, as reunification prompted a reassessment of German history and German self-identification” (170). 162 Kai-Uwe Werbeck DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0010 19 Together with Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), and John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), TCM exemplifies the shift to post-classic U.S. horror cinema. Kendall R. Phillips also includes films such as Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968), William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973), and Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978) on this list and calls 1974 the “pinnacle year of the American horror film” (101). 20 Hooper’s film is very much aware of and reactive to its historical moment, a period shaped by “urban race riots and traumatic political assassinations” that shook America in the 1960s (Worland 209). Phillips attests TCM an overall apocalyptic tone, pointing out that “Apocalyptic visions […] need not express a literal end of the world but may entail a sense of the inevitable decay of broad social structures and order” (111). Further, he identifies the usual suspects for this turn toward the apocalyptic in (horror) films: the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal, and (the resignation of) Richard Nixon which “fundamentally eroded American faith in the presidency and the federal government” (107). 21 As Rick Worland writes, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, very much like Psycho , is a text full of cuts and splits, nightmarish shocks that find a place even in the mise en scène , for example when “Leatherface yanks Kirk inside the hallway and slams a metal sliding door that merges the industrial slaughterhouse with domestic space” (220). As Jason Zinoman further argues, “what many described as a reckless and raw assault on the senses was also, however, a rather nuanced […] portrait of a dysfunctional family and a disappearing class of people� […]� Country folk left behind in a modern world” (128). 22 In contrast to its German “remake,” TCM , to give one example, opts for a stylized Gothic realism which results in an accomplished genre exercise that, while made on a shoestring budget under gonzo conditions, still largely constitutes narrative terror cinema� 23 See Christian Bartsch, who notes in his essay on TCM ’s history of censorship in West Germany that the BPjM includes in their 1982 justification for the ban “einige Beschreibungen von Szenen, die im Bild definitiv nicht zu sehen sind,” including an “‘Aneinanderreihung bestialischer Folter- und Tötungsszenen,’” which, as Bartsch correctly points out, are not actually shown in the film (7). 24 It is worth noting that Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker did attract the attention of the authorities and was repeatedly seized at German airports when the film was scheduled to be shown at international festivals. 25 Judith Halberstam identifies Stretch as the telos of the type’s lineage and calls her “possibly the most virile, certainly the most heroic, and definite- DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0010 The Massacre will be Televised 163 ly the most triumphant final girl in splatter film” (142). Completing the queering of the final girl, Stretch “represents not boyishness or girlishness but monstrous gender […] much messier than male or female” (Halberstam 142)� 26 As Adam Lowenstein points out, “Stretch’s contorted face and frenzied yelling is not distant from Sally’s madness, but Stretch’s face-mask is decidedly her own” (81). 27 For more details, see Clover 49� 28 Schlingensief claims: “Ich habe DAS DEUTSCHE KETTENSÄGEN MASSA- KER: DIE ERSTE STUNDE DER WIEDERVEREINIGUNG […] schon lange nicht mehr gesehen, aber beim letzten Mal kam es mir so vor, als sei der Film ein endloses Geschreie� Man versteht den Ton kaum, bis endlich wieder eine Passage kommt, die man als Loop laufen lassen könnte” (qtd. in Treusch-Dieter 226)� 29 Schlingensief states that he hoped “in der übertriebenen Situation mehr Wahrheit zu finden als in diesem Zwang [es] realistisch machen zu müssen” (Schlingensief, Video interview). 30 As Schlingensief explains: “Meine Hoffnung ist […] die, dass ich ein Nachbild hinterlasse� Nur einen frame , ein still oder eine Assoziation, aber die muss zugelassen werden, also, die muss man auch selbst zulassen” (qtd. in Treusch-Dieter 241)� 31 In fact, the ostensibly progressive victims in TCM , with their displayed interest in the astrological New Wave and urbane mannerisms of the Age of Aquarius, still operate under rural parameters when they consider it safe - much to the horror-affine viewer’s chagrin - to enter a neighbor’s supremely gothic house without permission� 32 Throughout the film, Schlingensief presents all kinds of borders as leaky and permeable� Attempting to cross the de-facto nonexistent border into the West early in the film, for example, Clara encounters a group of guards still fulfilling their duty. Unable to realize that their watch has come to end, the guards still go through the motions, harassing Clara� Cooperating at first, Clara quickly remembers the new political situation and disregards the impotent GDR authorities, speeding away into the dark� 33 The film thus engages with the “making of the Berlin Republic […] in the context of European unification, globalization, and mass-migration, on the one hand, and increased ethnic and religious resentments and new provincialisms, on the other” (Hake 190). 164 Kai-Uwe Werbeck DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0010 Works Cited Bartsch, Christian� “Die deutsche Zensurgeschichte von Tobe Hoopers The Texas Chain Saw Massacre �” Die Akte TCM . Ed. Christian Bartsch. Münster: Turbine, 2012. 3—15. Blu-Ray Booklet� Bergfelder, Tim� “Exotic Thrills and Bedroom Manuals: West German B-Film Production in the 1960s�” Light Motives: German Popular Film in Perspective � Ed� Randall Halle and Margaret McCarthy. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2003. 197—219. 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