Christoph Schlingensief’s play, “Sterben lernen,” was performed in December 2009 in Zürich. The play gives the audience a primer on “how to die” using the example of the main character, Mr. Andersen, who discovers he has terminal cancer and has to deal with his grim prognosis: 60 minutes to live. The absurdity of his accelerated death and the final, reflective moments of Mr. Anderson’s life serve as a showcase in the play for Schlingensief’s ideas about the meaning of terminal disease as a heightened awareness of a fundamental human reality: that we are not (and perhaps never were) the master of ceremonies of our own bodies and experiences. The master of ceremonies, MC, may seem like us, when we are the agents of our lives, but it can also be MC – metastatic cancer, as was the case with Schlingensief himself when he worked on the production of this play.
Viewers of “Sterben lernen” are treated to a mash-up of Slavoj Žižek’s Lacanian theories on the Other, Meister Eckhardt’s sermons on God’s dependence on mankind, and an expanded idea of art as a happening (Kaprow) or a social plastic (Beuys). In the play, Schlingensief shows how tumors can speak to and through us, and take on immortal lives of their own even as they appear within us, just like art does for an artist. Immortality can kill, according to Schlingensief, and “learning to die” – even if only through the theater-as-simulator – is the most important training of one’s life. It is interesting to situate Schlingensief’s “Sterben lernen” in the context of critical work on cancer and aesthetic production (Sontag). To do so, one must trace the theoretical origins of Schlingensief’s idea of the hidden, corporeal language to be found in the experience of cancer.
In the play, Schlingensief plays the character Pope Mabuse, a reference to the character Dr. Mabuse, the criminal character popularized by the films of Fritz Lang seen as an iconic horror figure in Germany. The figure of Mabuse in Lang’s films is much like Dr. Evil in Austin Powers: he wants to rule the world, even if he has to destroy everything in the process and use others as pawns to enact his terror. With Pope Mabuse, who appears as part of the production to ostensibly offer guidance in Anderson’s death, Schlingensief points to the parasitic nature of the clergy and the Catholic church as a useless power structure utterly unable to support people in life and death matters, more lecherous than life-giving. To underscore this point, he dresses up in an ill-fitting wig with long unkempt hair: ill-fitting on purpose –as is his wont in other plays and stagings. In this case, the long hair signifies the hair that grows after you die – the church is dead, church is the cancer of society. Indeed, when Pope Mabuse enters the stage he is meant to represent the church, he addresses the audience and narcissistically waves to them unaware that a man is dying near him. He rests on the stage and breaks the third wall by talking directly to the audience about “how nice it is here in Switzerland” and then in a voice mimicking Hitler, says: “I don’t want to go back to Germany! I want to stay here!” The church is corrupt and will not give up its monstrous, lustful hold on European society, like the metastatic social cancer that Hitler unleashed on Europe. Schlingensief –as-Pope Mabuse masochistically screams: “I want to be your toilet!” To drive home this point, Schlingensief as Mabuse slithers away off the stage on his belly in a manner that looks suspiciously like the Pope is rubbing himself on the stage. (slide) But also, Pope Mabuse as Hitler recalls the cancerous growth that will not leave, or conversely the patient Mr. Andersen who does not want to die, he does not want to leave here. Schlingensief’s cancer diary has a similar spirit: it’s title “It can’t be as nice in heaven as it is here!” illustrates his forceful disavowal of resignation in death, something quite common for patients of cancer: it is one of the few illnesses where we talk about a person battling it, rather than suffering from it.
In Act I of “Sterben lernen,” Mrs. Andersen comforts her husband about his imminent death, asks him for some tea, and tells him: “don’t worry, the immortal in you will not die. “ But instead of the soul, instead of appealing to Christian principles of the essence of one’s person as living forever, she is referring to cancer. “The foreign in you can live on without you. Cancer lives on.” Cancer too is the other, what Schlingensief calls “das Fremde in mir” – it is ego dystonic, anathema to the self. If it lives the way it wants to, then I cannot. You will die, and the cancer will live on. But if you live, then it may die, but the push/pull will go on. Like Freud’s description in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), of the child’s fort/da game with the wooden spool he throws back and forth to manage the absence of his mother, which for Freud is the initiation game that weans the child into the field of the symbolic. Once entered into the symbolic of one cannot be rid of it: Similarly, you may try to excise cancer but you might just lose yourself in the game.
The paradox Schlingensief sums up in a slogan for the play: Immortality can kill. This refers not only to cancer but also to the divinity – the immortal being that makes the decision whether one lives or dies. To argue against this idea of God decider of life and death, Schlingensief uses Meister Eckhardt’s speeches on God’s unity. Eckhardt, the renegade Dominican Friar who was tried as a heretic by Pope John Paul XXII.
In act 3 of “Sterben Lernen,” when it seems Herr Andersen will die shortly, Mrs. Andersen begins to talk about how God is really not anything one can truly know: the word God is not like the word “green” because the latter signifies something in relationship to other things. In her Saussurian analysis, she says that “green is not blue” but (and here she is directly quoting Eckhardt’s sermons): “God is im-immortal- because God is not like anything. God is a nothing.”:
Nun merket auf!
Gott ist namenlos,
denn von ihm kann niemand etwas aussagen oder erkennen.
Denn Gott ist Nichts;
nicht derart, dass er ohne Sein sei:
er ist weder dies noch das,
was man aussprechen kann;
er ist Sein über allem Sein.
Er ist ein seinsloses Sein
(Meister Eckhart)
God is, according to Schlingensief, is just as screwed up as we are. Because God is not one in himself, we can be one with him. Schlingensief quotes Slavoj Žižek on “The Real of Christianity,”: “Nur dann, wenn ich den unendlichen Schmerz der Trennung von Gott erlebe, teile ich eine Erfahrung mit Gott selbst, mit Christus am Kreuz.” This is, for Schlingensief a comfort and an opportunity.
When Frau Anderson gives her Eckhardt speech, Schlingensief himself bursts on the stage (a tactic he has employed in previous theatre pieces, as well as during his staging of Wagner’s Parsifal at Bayreuth, which led the audience to boo). Schlingensief makes some clarifications on Mrs. Anderson’s soliloquy on God. In effect, he verbalizes liner notes about his inspiration for Mrs. Andersen’s soliloquy. He says he has turned to Meister Eckhardt because of the failure in working with the god with the long beard from the church of his childhood. He tells the story of his youth as an altar boy (Schlingensief has repeated his own story as part of a magical biography about himself that he popularized on his talk show and his MTV show U3000 in 2001). The story goes something like this: he was an altar boy in Oberhausen, son of a pharmacist and when he was smacked on the head by a clergy member because he didn’t know what he was doing when he had to fill in for another altar boy. Schlingensief’s supposed “intimate” knowledge of the church-and his public profession of faith- gives him an air of legitimacy when he discusses the failures of the church (as a Märchenpark). As a catholic, Schlingensief writes openly in his cancer diary published in 2009 about the important roles that the figures of Mary and Jesus played to calm and comfort him as he dealt with his lung cancer diagnosis. But after he became ill, Schlingensief assailed Catholic groups and media suggesting that he be “less noisy” in his death, to be silent and soulful and to relax his way into eternity. In Schlingensief’s manifesto posted on the Theater Neumarkt website prior to the play, Schlingensief writes: “that’s the Catholic idea that dying has to be “quiet, noiseless, wordless and without action. The person dying is apparently supposed to say goodbye as a subject even before he is dead. Do we really have to give up communication with others and go our „own way“ when it wipes us out?“
Tumors have their own symbolic structure: you are the real of cancer’s fantasy: the objet petit a. Herr Andersen discovers in his body that tumors have a language: Tumorsprache. Herr Andersen responds to his wife’s comforts with a revelation he has: that he has a bump on his shoulder, a metastasis that appears when the cancer on the other side of his body is starting to grow again. It is like a sentry (Signalgeber), Andersen says. This other is now speaking a language through one’s own body but as the “host” one does not have really any sense what that other is saying because the body is not unified.
Cancer is the other, the little o that makes us realize the walls that separate us from others we speak to, what Lacan called the “wall of language,” but in this instance, Herr Andersen discovers that his body parts are talking amongst themselves and with the cancer, or perhaps the cancer is talking to itself, using his body parts as metaphors or as raw material. He is no longer the master of ceremonies “Herr der Veranstaltung” and in this way cancer here is equated with the big Other of God. The immortality within one has the power to kill, as God in the believer’s imaginary, has the power allow death. But cancer, indeed any neoplastic disease, is an umbrella term for cells that do not die a normal death. So while the person afflicted with cancer may dream of victory over the cancer and the life over death, it is paradoxically immortality itself that the cancer patient is fighting.
In his manifesto for the play, Schlingensief suggests that the goal is for participants (not audience) to „accept themselves as potential dying people and to determinedly deal with that which one cannot determine.“ But the play underscores the idea that in Western culture, death is largely viewed as the deaths of others. Herr Andersen (take the “s” out and he becomes Herr Anderen, or Mr. Others; take off the –en, he becomes Herr Anders, or Mr. Different) the character dies for us as a way to train us for the inevitable. The substitution is difficult to overcome but should not be accepted at face value. In the Christian religion, that Jesus dies for us, or in one interpretation, that Jesus dies for our sins, is part of the substitution model Schlingensief wants to expose and critique. In the advertisement for the play, the posters shouted the urgency of the need to deal with death: “In the next hundred years, there will be 6 billion dead! At least!”
But far from using theater simply to portray sickness, Schlingensief prefers to show that theater itself is sick: as Pope Mabuse, Schlingensief points to the audience and remarks to the audience: you are lined up there like a graveyard”. In advertising for the play, Schlingensief calls the play “an attempt to make a temporary morgue” out of the Neumarkt Theater. The character, Mrs. Anderson, at some point when another character says, “Come on, Mr. Anderson, just die already!” she retorts: “and then we can go eat pizza.” The stage, actors, “contractually designated sufferers,” “die a thousand deaths” Schlingensief said in aninterview (with Gero von Boehm). Theater itself is sick, and indeed this is the name of one of Schlingensief’s plays, cowritten with the Zimbabwean Hosea Dzingirai: Theater als Krankheit,
In “Sterben Lernen” Schlingensief begins to worry that that stage is outsourcing important aspects of our lives, for example how to die one’s OWN death. And if this is possible, then it might be the location of the true art in Schlingensief’s cosmology.
Performance however, is false consciousness. And Schlingensief has been described by several critics, rightly, as having “staging mania”: the desire to perform everything, to turn life into a set. But the theater is also a confined space whose boundaries must be overcome. When Herr Andersen is about to die, and he doesn’t want to, a character says to him: “You don’t have to die, we are in the theater, and the theater has its limitations “ meaning: in the theater, you will not get to the real. Schlingensief’s serial practice of excessive staging undermines theater’s own integrity as an art. Schlingensief breaks through these limitation by expanding the notion of art in the style of Alan Kaprow’s “happenings” and Joseph Beuys fluxus installations in which artist/participant/ audience/ actor/ plot/ is spun around in a chaotic, excessive blender and the cell walls of these organisms begin to blur and decompose. Schlingensief spreads the concept of art of theater by crossing boundaries: The boundaries crossed in “Sterben Lernen” are almost too difficult to number: Schlingensief plays himself, he portrays a character who breaks the 3rd wall, talks to the audience, references previous works he has done in Switzerland by quoting them, the play itself seems to have no boundaries: it is performed in tandem with a piece by Rene Pollesch at another location (Pfauen), and while “Sterben Lernen” is performed, the “other” play (a critique of Calvinism) is transmitted live on a flat-screen TV on the stage. At some point the characters in Schlingensief’s play stop the action of Herr Anderson’s dying to “check in” with the characters in the other play. Then the whole stage of characters in “Sterben Lernen” leave the theater itself and travel in a procession through the streets of Zurich to the venue of the “other play”, (they leave the theater like an outbreak and they invade the stage of the other play like cancer cells invade the host. They come and disrupt the story, tell a bit of their own story, etc and then they leave and return to their original location. The entire production then, plays a sort of fort-da game.
As they travel, the actors take on a different role: Herr Anderson puts on a thorny crown, takes a crucifix and Frau Anderson wears a head covering: they are Jesus and Mary, and the whole production turns into a spontaneous passion play, they have a choir dressed in church robes carrying a sign that reads: “Operation: Die Upstandingly!” and Pope Mabuse is carried along on a stretcher with a megaphone in which he shouts: “I can’t help you!”
Schlingensief’s art, his theater, is not like Fassbinder’s Anti-Theater, but an expansion of the concept of theater so that the concept itself crosses its boundaries, floods its banks and becomes something new. It is part of an expanded concept of art he takes from Kaprow and the installation artist Joseph Beuys, who saw art as what he called “soziale Plastik” For Schlingensief, illness has the same valence as art: in his cancer diary he writes:
“Ich gieße eine soziale Plastik aus meiner Krankheit und ich arbeite am erweiterten Krankenbegriff.” (243) It is Schlingensief’s response to Susan Sontag’s canonical writing on cancer: Illness as Metaphor, written after her own cancer diagnosis in 1974, in which she explores the metaphors of cancer in literary and cultural history. In it, Sontag describes that “the most truthful way of regarding illness (the healthiest way of being ill) is the most resistant to, metaphoric thinking. Yet it is hardly possible to take up one’s residence in the kingdom of the ill unprejudiced by the lurid metaphors with which it has been landscaped. “ She dedicates her work to the elucidation and liberation of these metaphors. With Schlingensief, the metaphoric aspects of cancer are produced with such effusive excess, the impulse to create metaphor itself is not simply something to abstain from (as Sontag suggests), but to take to every possible level and every sort of expression. Art is so intertwined with this process for Schlingensief, he even dedicated a website (called Krank und Autonom) devoted to the idea of cancer and other patients of terminal illness in order for them to present their art.
The deep experience of sickness and death can bring one to a higher state of sanity and health. As Hans Castorp, the main character of Thomas Mann’s Zauberberg also says about his lung ailment: there are “two ways to life: one is the regular, direct and good way; the other is bad, it leads through death, and that is the way of genius.” In this way, “Sterben Lernen” like Magic Mountain, is an art of initiation.
Thomas Mann, in talking about the making of Zauberberg, confessed he wasn’t the able to judge the merit of his own work. Of the artist, Mann writes, “may be [able to judge his art] while is still at work on it and living in it. But once it is done, it tends to be something he has got rid of, something foreign to him; others will know more and better about it than he. One always needs to be reminded; one is by no means always in possession of one’s own self.” This conclusion is the mirror of the idea of “Sterben Lernen”: the divided self that one experiences in cancer is like Mann’s idea of art for the artist and it is the state of being human in which we need to always be recalled back to ourselves. It is our non-self-identification, the self that is also God’s creation.