2023-12-20 08:25:23
Jörg Buttgereit actually just wanted to present two of his films at the sold-out Rockefeller Music Hall in Oslo when the police suddenly showed up. The officials said that the screening had to be canceled and the film copies confiscated, because necrophilia is forbidden here in Norway and his film “Nekromantik”, well, it’s about a crime scene cleaner with his girlfriend and a corpse that he secretly steals had, leads to a form of erotic love triangle.
It was October 27, 1992 and not Jörg Buttgereit’s first contact with the authorities. His films have already been confiscated in Germany. There was also an indictment against him for distributing pornographic and violence-glorifying writings, which was giving him a headache. Buttgereit tried to influence the police, explaining to them that the film was not an advertising film for necrophilia, but a horror film. In Norway, he tried to appease the police, murder was certainly forbidden, but crime films would definitely still be shown on television and in the cinema. It didn’t help. The film was confiscated anyway. The performance canceled.
30 years later, Jörg Buttgereit, 59, tall with short blonde hair, sits in a West Berlin coffee house and wonders what crazy times those were, when scores of European countries were prosecuting people for making cheap horror films. You just have to remember that a revolution in the American horror genre had already begun in the 1970s, says Buttgereit, and at that time films that were at least as hard as “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” or George A. Romero’s “Night Of The Living Dead” were made – now all classics. And in Europe? Then the police came. Buttgereit shakes his head, spears a piece of carrot cake and takes a sip of his milk coffee. “Those were crazy times,” he says today.
Buttgereit is the forefather of the hard German horror film
Last year, Buttgereit spent a lot of time revisiting stories like this as he sorted through his old diaries and published them in book form. “Not suitable for young people. “Diary from West Berlin” is what he calls his autobiographical work, which is much more than just a memoir. The book reads like an alternative West German cultural history, like a foray through the subculture, but also like the self-portrait of a man who shaped German underground culture like no other. Buttgereit is the forefather of the hard German horror film. But he is also a theater director, comic book author, the world’s greatest Godzilla expert, radio play author and documentary filmmaker. Jörg Buttgereit is the uncrowned king of German nerd culture. And its story is closely interwoven with the post-war history in Germany.
Buttgereit experienced his pop culture awakening when he was less than six years old when he sat in front of the television with his father and watched “Sinbad’s 7th Voyage,” a 1950s adventure film in which the protagonist has to contend with cyclops and dragons. Buttgereit’s interest in the fantastic film has been aroused. As a teenager, he secretly sneaks into every movie show he can and learns to love Bruce Lee and Godzilla. He becomes a fanatical film aficionado.
In doubt, Godzilla is closer to him than Wim Wenders
One of Buttgereit’s most telling stories is the story in which he traveled to London with his girlfriend at the time and found out that a double show was being shown in a cinema: the first two parts of “Evil Dead”, which was banned in Germany, were being shown – and uncut . His girlfriend can’t stand the first part and leaves the room. Buttgereit stays seated and uses the break in the film to comfort her and explain to her why it would be damn important to see these two films now; he couldn’t make any compromises. He leaves his girlfriend slightly traumatized under the pitying gaze of the popcorn seller. As a result of the very hard scenes, she didn’t speak for a day, but seeing this film at that time, says Buttgereit, made it worth it.
The low-budget production “Nekromantik” caused an international stir. Today it is considered a pearl of hard underground film
Source: Jörg Buttgereit private archive
Buttgereit loves Hollywood, but his heart belongs to trivial culture. In doubt, Godzilla is closer to him than Wim Wenders. He despises pseudo-artistically inflated films like “Sky Over Berlin”. And then comes the music. Buttgereit becomes part of the West Berlin punk scene, which makes breaking taboos a principle. While his friends translate the extended middle finger into snotty music, Buttgereit begins making films. In his two “Nekromantik” parts he deals with necrophilia; his best film “The Death King” is a barely bearable meditation on Thanatos, the human urge to die. In it he varies stories about suicide and murder.
His films are heavy fare, bordering on the bearable, but that’s exactly what they’re supposed to be. They are intended to push boundaries, break traditional viewing habits and approach a taboo subject artistically. Buttgereit looked for a new perspective with which he could approach the subject matter and invented the German underground horror film. “Explicit depictions of violence in my films were always just a means to an end,” he says today, “and of course it was also a provocation. We wanted to rebel against the state’s censorship policy.”
The state took notice of him. And puts him on trial for his film “Nekromantik 2” – which the Norwegians weren’t happy about either. Buttgereit won it, also because an extensive dossier by the renowned media scientist Knut Hickethier highlighted the dimensions of his film’s artistic value. Just as it was possible for Buttgereit to love KISS and the Dead Kennedys at the same time, he also managed to give underground cinema not only a punk attitude but also artistic value in his film work. The trial brought him international attention, but his career as a filmmaker was already over. There was no call from a financially strong producer who recognized the young wild man’s potential.
Jörg Buttgereit: Perhaps the greatest Godzilla expert in the world
Quelle: picture-alliance/obs/WDR_Sibylle_Anneck
Instead, a few years later, WDR contacted Buttgereit and offered him the opportunity to produce radio plays. Buttgereit reinvented himself and discovered other playing fields in which he could live out his love for nerd culture. In the noughties he wrote radio plays such as “Frankenstein in Hiroshima”, made two documentaries about Godzilla and monster film culture, wrote columns and invented the first German superhero “Captain Berlin”, which he brought into comic books and on the theater stage. To date he has not released another feature film.
A lot has changed since the 1990s. The subculture has reached the mainstream, but Buttgereit has never really benefited from this turning point. He alone remains a hero of the underground scene. The artist himself doesn’t let this deter him, he just keeps doing what he loves to do. Most recently he wrote two new comics and made the short film “Schweinchen” with criminal biologist Mark Benecke, in which you watch five dead pigs decompose. He would still rather remain a punk than become a Wim Wenders. Jörg Buttgereit turns 60 on Wednesday. He left deep footprints in the German subculture.
On Wednesday, December 20, 2023, Jörg Buttgereit will read from his autobiography on the occasion of his birthday. From 6 p.m. in the EBENSPERGER gallery in the Fichtebunker/Berlin. Fichtestrasse 6, 10967 Berlin
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