The German Chainsaw Massacre

October 3, 1990. Berlin is celebrating reunification at the Brandenburg Gate. Far from the sententious political speeches about unity and freedom, East German Clara stabs her abusive husband, then flees to the West in their rickety Trabant car. But when she hooks up with her lover, Artur, at an abandoned factory complex, he is massacred by the family headed up by master butcher Alfred. While Clara manages in the end to escape the aggressive, incestuous tribe, an East German couple falls victim to their bloodthirsty frenzy… Just 23 days elapsed between East Germany’s merger with the Federal Republic and the premiere of this satirical splatter film, inspired by Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) and Tobe Hooper’s horror classic The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). For the governmental incorporation of the former East German states, Christoph Schlingensief devised genre images that were as provocative as they were iconically pop culture, insofar as The German Chainsaw Massacre’s bloodthirsty scenes celebrate the literal physical assimilation of the eastern “brothers and sisters”: “They came as friends and left as sausage”.