Elfriede Jelinek for Christoph Schlingensief for “Remembrance 3000″, November 6, 2010, Volksbühne Berlin
The Squanderer
Something affected this man, affected Christoph Schlingensief, that made him positively hurl forth anything he absorbed, made him pour out all his good gifts—from such a pouring-forth comes the word profuse. He always gave away everything within him. And no one understood how so much had ever gone into him in the first place. Perhaps because he had already given it before it could even really take its place in him (perhaps also because he was already occupied, already possessed by other things he would probably also have given away again at once?). A man everything was torn through, as though hurled up into the air by a storm, and across to us. That’s how I see him. He couldn’t possibly take as much as he gave. Letting everything in as though in a fever, the evil germs as well, everything, everything was welcome to Christoph, since that’s what it was supposed to be good for, to make something out of it and then, with his friends, collaborators, to steer it back across to us. The animatograph, a sparkling carousel of life, that invited everything and gave it all away again as a gift. But there cannot be so many gifts given, someone must pay for it all. We paid for no more than an admission ticket, and often not even that. Christoph picked up the whole bill. He gave it all away and then paid the bill on top. It was impossible to him that he would leave everything he sucked in with himself, keep it as insight, as the result of something, as spirit, as whatdoIknow, to consider it a sort of profit and cash in on it, for himself alone, he could not hog it, he always had to hurl it away at once, not in the sense of throwing it away, he hurled it toward us, and so became ever more effective for us without becoming any less for himself. Only something began to rave within him over which he then no longer had any power. He probably squandered himself in giving. The more he gave in his art (or whatever you want to call it), the more imbued by life he would comport himself, and then there was no longer any recognizable difference between inside and outside. A rich man who always made others ever richer. Christoph didn’t lock himself up, he did the opposite, he unmoored himself from himself in his work, he thrust out into a lake as children thrust a stick into an anthill or indeed as mariners put out to sea. He freed that sea of its shores and cut the ropes. And in the end he was life itself, and life became he, literally transformed into him; he could identify himself with life in his work, and his life was destined by his giving everything away that would have let others live ten lives, provisions included. But it was expropriation as appropriation. One hopes that he got all of it back and is still getting it. He was the one who gets and the one who has given everything, and it was by this one-to-one that he defined himself, that was his life. That, in fact, was that. Was precisely: everything.
