Foreigners out! Schlingensiefs Container

Probably the most socially and meta-politically active filmmaker who has ever lived, eternal enfant terrible auteur Christoph Maria Schlingensief started his own labor union, political party (Chance 2000, Vote for Yourself), TV show shows (both real and imaginary), art action projects (one of which at the Documenta X exhibition in Kassel, Germany got him arrested for posting a sign that read “Kill Helmut Kohl!”), and even staged his own cancer experience (with the ‘ready made’ opera Mea culpa), but undoubtedly one of his most interesting public stunts was setting up a satirical Big Brother-like art project/television show titled Foreigners out! Schlingensiefs Container aka Ausländer raus! Schlingensiefs Container in 2000 where he put twelve nonwhite asylum seekers in a mini makeshift concentration camp and members of the audience could vote who they wanted to be deported during his "Please Love Austria—First European Coalition Week" quasi-carny campaign. Showcased during the Wiener Festwochen (Vienna Festival) in an area next to a bourgeois Viennese opera that is frequented by art connoisseurs and tourists, Schlingensief set up the terribly trash show as a form of active protest and counter-agit-prop against the election of extreme-right politician Jörg Haider, then-leader of the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), into the National Council of Austria. As a leader who made no lie of his disdain for foreigners and leaders of Austria’s Jewish community, as well as man who was vocally nostalgic for National Socialism and a friend/financial benefactor of certain bigwig Arab dictators, Jörg Haider was not your typical cosmopolitan globalist, prostitute-like politician; he inspired sanctions brought against his charming country by fourteen member nations of the European Union, and Western countries also temporarily relieved their ambassadors in protest, even inciting then-U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright – an American Jewess with a kosher bone to pick – to publically announce, “We are deeply concerned about the Freedom Party’s entry into the Austrian government…a party that does not clearly distance itself from the atrocities of the Nazi era and the politics of hate.” In the delightfully deranged documentary Foreigners out! Schlingensiefs Container (2002) directed by Paul Poet (Empire Me: New Worlds are Happening!), one gets to experience the realer-than-reality-TV flagrant furor of political philistines of both the left and right as they are antagonized by the always spirited and sardonic Schlingensief as he bodaciously blows smoke out of his trusty red bullhorn. Featuring post-game interviews with cultural critics, academics, members of the FPÖ, and – most importantly – Schlingensief himself, Foreigners out! Schlingensiefs Container makes for a socio-politically insightful work of postmodern vaudeville insanity – Big Brother Nazi Style!

As Schlingensief explains in the documentary, he got the idea for modern ‘concentration camp containers’ for Foreigners out! Schlingensiefs Container around the time he directed his absurdist action flick Terror 2000 - Intensivstation Deutschland (1994); a work that features crowed ausländer untermensch in what seems like the inside of cattle cars. Throughout the documentary Schlingensief antagonizes and ultimately confuses the audiences crowded around the containers, proclaimed that Austria is the, “Land of the Nazis. Land of the fascist. Here is Nazi central.” As he explains in one of the post-show interviews for Foreigners out! Schlingensiefs Container, he concurs that, “In some aspects this venture was swinish to the highest degree.” Indeed, whatever aberrant auteur filmmaker’s main objective with satirical campaign for "Foreigners Out—Artists against Human Rights,” he certainly managed to bring out the worst in people on both ends of the pseudo-dichotomous political spectrum. While inspiring hypocritical bleeding heart left-wingers to cry, “Foreigners In! Kick out the Krauts,” Schlingensief also managed to inspire joy and nostalgia in elderly old school Austrian National Socialists, even allowing a feeble old man – who can barely hold the bullhorn – to declare that all foreigners must be killed. As an academic explains in Foreigners out! Schlingensiefs Container, Schlingensief utilized a form of social criticism originated by ‘Austrian H.L. Mencken’ Karl Kraus where one need not comment to articulate a criticism, but instead merely cite what you criticize ‘as-is’ in the right context, thus highlighting the absurdity of their political mantras and causing them to figuratively hang themselves with their own rhetoric in the process. Controversial Austrian author and Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek (Wonderful, Wonderful Times, Lust) also lent her support to Schlingensief's sarcastic social experiment, writing a childish puppet show for the foreigners to perform for adoring audiences. Like virtually any great modern Austrian film, actor/director Paulus Manker (Schmutz aka Dirt, Weininger's Last Night) makes an appearance in Foreigners out! Schlingensiefs Container as a guest speaker. Ultimately the genius of Schlingensief’s "Please Love Austria” campaign is getting people out of their houses into the streets like the good ol’ days of street fights between National Socialist and Communist groups during the 1920s/1930s.  Unfortunately, one of the most vehement and violent people in Foreigners out! Schlingensiefs Container is a middle-aged woman whose blatantly aroused nipples are poking out of her shirt as she verbally assaults Schlingensief to a most vindictive degree, as if she is receiving some sort of much needed sexual release. Needless to say, Austria is starving for some modern brownshirts.

In the end, Schlingensief concluded that Foreigners out! Schlingensiefs Container was at least a partial flop due to what he described as the failure of “well-meaning leftie activists” to actually take action. Schlingensief also criticizes a speech by American theatre director Peter Sellars – a typically exceedingly effeminate left-winger who delivers an idiotically sentimental and impotent speech – for mentioning the ‘need’ for containers in NYC and Los Angeles, but not actually taking the initiative to setup such a gallant public spectacle. A female member of Schlingensief’s crew also complains that passive, opportunistic left-wingers used Foreigners out! Schlingensiefs Container as a petty propaganda forum, thereupon diluting the objective of the TV show: bringing attention to the ‘neo-nazi’ political policies of Jörg Haider and the Freedom Party of Austria. Since the release of Foreigners out! Schlingensiefs Container, both Christoph Schlingensief and Jörg Haider have died, thus leaving a vast void in the German/Austrian media and public sphere. Schlingensief's antics in Foreigners out! Schlingensiefs Container were forever immortalized in popular Austrian crime-thriller Silentium (2004) directed by Wolfgang Murnberger where he plays himself as a wacky and intemperate director of oddball yet politically-charged plays. Whatever your political persuasion, one can learn a lot from Foreigners out! Schlingensiefs Container and Schlingensief’s 'active-art' antics in general, as there is no doubt that it takes a certain type of integrity to get docile Westerners off their couch and into the street. That being said, maybe it's about time for David Duke to start an Occupy movement.

-Ty E