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  Director Christoph Schlingensief Faces Mortality: 'I Have No Desire to Go to Heaven'

Director Christoph Schlingensief Faces Mortality 'I Have No Desire to Go to Heaven'

Part 2: 'I Still Have Some Battles Left to Fight'

SPIEGEL: Now you're putting us in a good mood.

Schlingensief: Let's put it this way: I'm trying. I'm probably weeping deep inside. Basically, every person with cancer has the chance to find his own way. If someone wants to keep playing the same record until the end, that's fine. Or he wants to do Qigong or yoga, that's okay too. The worst thing is when you don't get it, despite all the treatment and advice, when you constantly think to yourself: If I had just gotten around to doing this or that. It would be a good thing if people with cancer could be pulled out of their despair, out of this crisis of confidence. Hospitals ought to provide us with a helper to discuss the fear and explain to us the mechanisms of fighting fear. Instead, we get caught up in these Internet forums, which only make us sicker. I'm fortunate to have a doctor who sees me as a person, who speaks openly and gently with me and doesn't employ the American approach and say: "Let me tell it to you like it is. You're finished!"

SPIEGEL: Have you ever been seriously ill before?

Schlingensief: Yes, once, when I was 18, in my last year of high school. I had eaten fish sandwiches at a local fair and ended up in bed at home with stomach pain. I was treated for fish poisoning, but my appendix had actually ruptured. By the time I was taken to the hospital two days later, I was unconscious. They spent seven hours removing pus from my stomach. After the operation, I was in intensive care for six weeks, then in a regular ward, with an intestinal obstruction. I saw people being wheeled out of the operating room, and I also saw a few people dying. That was very tough.

SPIEGEL: Does your artistic obsession with sickness and death stem from that time?

Schlingensief: I can't exactly say. My father was a pharmacist, and I had my fill of listening to sick people. I never really believed in complete health.

SPIEGEL: Do you feel that you really have to get down to work now?

Schlingensief: I don't fool myself into believing that work is keeping me alive. It's nice to think that you're needed, but it's much more important for me to have found a girlfriend, Aino, who fights for me and gets me out of bed when all I can do is sigh. Aino is such a godsend that the thought of losing her makes me want to cry. I have no desire to go to heaven, and I have no desire to play the harp and sing and make music and sit around on a cloud somewhere!

SPIEGEL: How is your cancer being treated?

Schlingensief: I'm taking pills, for now. They don't know yet whether the drugs enter the lungs and stop or shrink the metastases. I thought of killing myself at first. I didn't want to turn yellow and green and blue, and die after the fifth or sixth round of chemotherapy. But I've decided that suicide is out of the question. I will remain a Christian no matter what, even though I reject the Catholic Church in its current form, which is a ludicrous, infernal machine on earth. The only thing I don't want to experience is pain. But I have some very good people who will help in that respect, to dull the pain. Jesus was also stabbed in the side to shorten his suffering, and he lost blood and water as a result. That was assisted suicide! But tell that to someone in the Catholic Church!

SPIEGEL: Is this also a subject of your new theater project in Vienna?

Schlingensief: Yes. It's about illness, of course, about the rotating universe in which we remain, even when we are gone. And it's about Africa and the opening of a festival hall that I want to build there, so that artists from Europe can spend some time there and rip off the Africans officially and not secretly, as they have done in the past. Those are the set pieces. Elfriede Jelinek gave me the text, and a composer is currently writing the score for the singers. The premier will be at the Burgtheater on March 20. I can't sing or compose music, so I have to rely on other people. It's something I have learned recently. This method of directing from afar is an old dream of mine: You build a train in which you will no longer be a passenger one day, and then others take over and continue driving the train, exploring unknown places.

SPIEGEL: You have announced that when your time comes, you want to go to Africa to die. Why there?

Schlingensief: Not because I feel particularly tied to it or anything like that. I do feel, since the first time I was there almost 30 years ago, that I could find peace there. It's a spiritual thing. But I can't die that quickly. I have a long way to go before closing the book. I'm not at peace with myself, and I'm not about to give up yet. I still have some battles left to fight!

SPIEGEL: Mr. Schlingensief, thank you for this interview.

Interview conducted by Anke Dürr and Wolfgang Höbel

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