German Enfant Terrible Takes on Princess Di

He has portrayed Hitler, violently characterized the relationship between East and West Germans and stirred controversy at Bayreuth's famous opera festival with his non-traditional staging of "Parsifal."

Now German bad boy Christoph Schlingensief is taking on an even more controversial topic -- the last hour of Princess Diana's life before she died in a Paris car crash nine years ago.

Schlingensief is planning to open a play in Berlin this month, which will run in London beginning in October under the name "The Last Hour of Lady Diana." A film version will be released in August 2007 to coincide with the 10th anniversary of Diana's death.

He says these productions are part of a larger project.

"This Diana piece completes my series which started with Hitler," he said in an interview with Bloomberg. "These are all people that have inspired myths around themselves."

New theories

The play is already causing outrage, particularly because of a scene in which Queen Elizabeth is shown giving a Nazi salute. It also features a new take on the death of Diana Spencer.

"I have very interesting information that she really died in London, not in Paris, and reconstruct this new truth," Schlingensief told Bloomberg. "It can probably never be exactly clarified what happened in that hour of her death. Art has the freedom to interpret this."

He announced the film version at the Venice Film Festival Friday just before the premiere of Stephen Frears' "The Queen," a full-length feature about Queen Elizabeth's reaction to Diana's death.

Already, the planned movie is creating a buzz because of Schlingensief's choice of Jenny Elvers-Elbertzhagen to portray the princess. She is probably better known by her presence on the German party circuit than her thespian abilities.

"Jenny is my Princess Diana because she, like Diana, inspires longing in people," he told the German mass-market newspaper Bild. "She resembles Diana in that both of them seem to be in reach but never are."

Secret shooting

Even though it is Elvers-Elbertzhagen's personal life that grabs the spotlight, she did win critical acclaim for her portrayal of a single mother this year in Detlev Buck's "Knallhart (Tough Enough)."

Still in production, the film version has partially been shot in Paris, including at the Ritz hotel from which Diana departed shortly before her death. London is a different matter altogether, he said.

"In London, we will have to work secretly because Diana is holy there," he told Bild. "Everybody goes jittery the minute you mention her name."

Already, the royals are upset, saying that such works exploit the memory of Diana.

No stranger to controversy

Schlingensief is best-known for his Germany Trilogy, consisting of: "Die Letzte Stunde in Führerbunker" ("100 Years of Adolf Hitler"), a spoof of the Third Reich and Hitler's final hours; "Das Deutsche Kettensägen Massaker" ("The German Chainsaw Massacre"), which depicts relations between East and West Germans as a slaughter of easterners by westerners; and "Terror 2000 - Intensivestation Deutschland," featuring neo-Nazis in post-reunification Germany.

He has also caused a stir with theatre productions about rapists, plays featuring real neo-Nazis, a production of "Parsifal" at Bayreuth's famous opera festival that featured a dead rabbit with worms crawling out of it and a movie called "Freakstars 3000," which lampoons the American Idol TV show with handicapped people.

He says that he is deliberately challenging people to lose their sense political correctness and look under the surface.

"As the son of a pharmacist, I knew my father poisoned his customers with small doses," he told Bloomberg. "I’m not provoking but poisoning with small doses of provocation."