BERLIN — On a hot summer night here, under the twinkling lights of a spinning disco ball, Friedrich Liechtenstein took the stage in a paisley-print silk bathrobe. “My dear people,” the newly minted German media star said, in a sonorous voice, “If things don’t work out tonight, don’t think of this as an awful show. Rather, I recommend you look at it as if it were a film — one that replicates, very precisely, an awful show.”
Mr. Liechtenstein, 55, is an unlikely candidate for Internet fame. He owns no phone, has no computer and only recently moved into an apartment after spending nearly two years living, rent-free, in the stairwell of an upscale eyeglass company’s Berlin office space, then in its showroom, where he served, in the eccentric 19th-century tradition, as an ornamental hermit.
But after the runaway success of a web-only advertisement for one of Germany’s largest supermarket chains this year, the dapper artist can no longer walk down the street without strangers asking to take his picture.
The supermarket clip reprised one of Mr. Liechtenstein’s low-budget music videos, in which he soft-shoed to an electropop beat through the Volksbühne, one of Berlin’s most outré theaters. In the supermarket version, Mr. Liechtenstein again wore his signature tailored suits, dark glasses and full white beard. This time, though, he danced through the aisles of an Edeka grocery store, bathed in milk, made off-color jokes about cats and wholeheartedly pronounced everything from frozen codfish to organic goods “supergeil,” a mildly obscene phrase that translates, roughly, to “super cool.”
The commercial has gotten more than 11 million hits on YouTube, and Mr. Liechtenstein — who, according to colleagues, lives his entire life as if it were a conceptual artwork — has been embraced by the mainstream German media.
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Source link : https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/26/world/europe/Friedrich-Liechtenstein-supergeil-germany.html
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Publish date : 2014-07-25 07:00:00
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