Quinn Slobodian in New German Critique:
The 1990s were salad days for All Things German in North America. Scenes of cheerful anarchy as the wall fell were followed by the mass introspection of Schindler’s List (1993) and the wave of Holocaust memory. Weimar lived. The third section of Madonna’s 1992 Girlie Show tour was “Weimar Cabaret.” Sam Mendes directed a remake of Cabaret, starring Alan Cumming as a twee dead ringer for Otto Dix’s portrait of Sylvia von Harden. Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands (1990) introduced Caligari aesthetics to a younger generation with the protagonist’s haircut borrowed from the Cure’s Robert Smith, whose Wish went platinum in 1992. My college roommate bought two oversize posters that she adorned our house with, one of the Cure, the other of The Kiss by Gustav Klimt. A capstone was placed on the decade with the construction of the Neue Galerie on the Upper East Side, a moodier museum facing the Met, begun in 1996 and completed in 2001. Finally, you could LARP fin de siècle Vienna without leaving the New World. Newspapers were on sticks, and George Grosz paintings grimaced, mugged, and drooled from the gallery walls.
But the seeds of the fall were already on late-night television. When I stayed over at my grandmother’s, I could stay up late and watch Saturday Night Live. In a series of skits our Canadian hero, Mike Myers, hit the mystique of Germany with a laser-guided missile. In a recurring segment he was the host of a “West German television” show called Sprockets with a monkey called Klaus, a fake Kandinsky backdrop, and two authentic-looking Wassily chairs. He introduced Woody Harrelson in an asymmetrical haircut as the “irritant-in-residence at the Bremen Gallery of Modern Art.”1 There was a bit called Germany’s “Most Disturbing Home Videos” and a dream sequence in which Myers was seduced by a leather-clad and Nazi-capped dominatrix named Exclamation Point. At each segment’s end Myers’s barked announcement that it “was the time on Sprockets that we dance” triggered expressionless turtlenecked gyrations in caricature of Egon Schiele—and, by extension, of Iggy Pop and David Bowie.
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