Schlingensief and Breton’s Second Surrealist Manifesto

In June 1996, Schlingensief drew upon the incendiary language and revolutionary fervour of French Surrealist Andre Breton in a performance that was part of the Volksbuhne's Praterspektakel, an annual three-day program of short performances in the Prater Garten in Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin. Titled Andre Breton's Second Surrealist Manifesto, Schlingensief's contribution involved actors and members of the audience from his Rocky Dutschke '68 theatre production whom he enlisted after the show to accompany him out of the theatre and to the Prater venue. Carrying a large scale puppet of the then CDU Chancellor Helmut Kohl, the participants chanted slogans as they entered the venue and, on the open-air stage, parts of Breton's 1929 manifesto were read aloud whilst the Kohl puppet was put in the stocks and abused. A press scandal ensued thereafter, however, Schlingensief's avant-gardist aktion with its aesthetics of attack and shock can be seen as an epilogue to the current state of political inertia that his Dutschke '68 production thematized. This short performance with its theatricalized revolutionary style rhetoric and violence, will be examined in relation to one of Breton's own performative events, titled, The Trial of Msr. Maurice Barres by Dada, which, ostensibly, could have informed Schlingensief's own quasi-tribunal of Chancellor Kohl.