The Massacre will be Televised: Splatter Aesthetics, Media Politics, and the Horrors of Reunification in Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker

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.