Literary History Places Elfriede Jelinek at the Head of a Generation Deemed
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COMEDY, COLLUSION, AND EXCLUSION ELFRIEDE JELINEK AND FRANZ NOVOTNY’S DIE AUSGE- SPERRTEN Literary history places Elfriede Jelinek at the head of a generation deemed to have made the transition from ‘High Priests to Desecrators’,1 reigning as the ‘Nestbeschmutzer’ par excellence. Along with Peter Handke and Thomas Bernhard, she is considered to have introduced an element of dissent into Austrian public discourse, ‘stubbornly occupying a position of difference from within a largely homogeneous cultural sphere’.2 Dagmar Lorenz argues that this level of political engagement is a phenomenon specific to German- language writers and appears inconceivable to an Anglo-American audience. In a special issue of New German Critique on the socio-political role of Aus- trian authors, she notes that ‘their opinions are heard and taken seriously, and they take part in shaping public opinion and politics’.3 The writers’ sphere of influence far exceeds their (often limited) readership, and column inches dedicated to controversial Austrian intellectuals stretch beyond the confines of the ‘Feuilleton’.4 The very public oppositional role of authors such as Jelinek, Robert Me- nasse and Doron Rabinovici reached fever pitch in 1999/2000 following the establishment of the ‘schwarz-blaue Koalition’, which enabled Jörg Haider’s populist right-wing ‘Freedom Party’ (FPÖ) to form a government with the centre-right ÖVP. In the months following the election, large groups of pro- testers took to the streets of Vienna as part of the so-called ‘Thursday dem- onstrations’. Austrian intellectuals played a prominent role in these protests, standing visibly at the head of the demonstrations and giving expression to wider discontent in a series of public readings and speeches, including Jelinek’s ‘Haider-monologue’, Das Lebewohl, which was first performed out- side the Viennese Burgtheater on 22nd June 2000.5 The play’s emphasis on 1 Ricarda Schmidt and Moray McGowan (eds), From High Priests to Desecrators: Contempo- rary Austrian Writers (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993). 2 Matthias Konzett, The Rhetoric of National Dissent in Thomas Bernhard, Peter Handke and Elfriede Jelinek (Rochester: Camden House, 2000), p. 2. 3 Dagmar C. G. Lorenz, ‘The Struggle for a Civil Society and beyond: Austrian Writers and Intellectuals Confronting the Political Right’, New German Critique, 93 (2004), 19- 41 (27). 4 The media scandal surrounding Thomas Bernhard’s 1988 play Heldenplatz exemplifies the prominent position occupied by Austrian intellectuals in public life. Oliver Bentz offers a particularly insightful analysis of the debate in Thomas Bernhard: Dichtung als Skandal (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2000). 5 Elfriede Jelinek, ‘Das Lebewohl (Les Adieux)’, in Das Lebewohl, 3 kl. Dramen (Berlin: Berlin Verlag, 2000), pp. 9-35, first published in Theater heute, 5 (2000), 36-41. Modern Austrian Literature through the Lens of Adaptation Haider’s highly dubious attitudes towards fascism bears out Steven Beller and Frank Trommler’s assertion: If one asks how writers, led by Thomas Bernhard and Elfriede Jelinek, gave lit- erature and theater, at least in the decade from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, an unusually poignant profile in the public arena, one cannot but point to their pre-occupation with the Nazi past.6 Literary prominence and the project of Vergangenheitsbewältigung appear mu- tually conducive in the postwar public sphere. Following on from a more iconoclastic turn in the seventies, ‘the rhetoric of national dissent’ within Austrian literature is frequently esteemed to have reached screaming point in the eighties.7 Considered central to this critical appraisal of national identity, literature’s questioning of Austria’s involve- ment in National Socialism forms the basis for many studies of this period in literary history, when ‘the focus of Austrian writers increasingly shifted to the country’s official historiographical discourse, eventually turning Austria and its handling of the past into their central literary concerns’.8 Following a period of relative political apathy (a myth debunked in Chapter One), so the story goes, Austrian literature underwent a radical ‘re-politicisation’ in the eighties, with increasingly public displays of opposition against Austria’s politics of consensus and the continuing silence surrounding the nation’s participation in Nazi atrocities. Adhering to this narrative, Zeyringer observes that ‘a remarkable number of texts from the eighties aired the dirty of laundry of the repressed, casting a literary and critical glance over the past and present of the country and its inhabitants’.9 In keeping with this trend, Elfriede Jelinek’s Die Ausgesperrten (1980) scratches beneath the surface of 1950s Austrian society to reveal continuing fascist tendencies and the social structures which sustain them.10 Originally created for radio and later adapted into film,11 Die Ausgesperrten follows a gang of youths (Anna, Hans, Rainer and Sophie) whose social frustration 6 Steven Beller and Frank Trommler, ‘Austrian Writers Confront the past, 1945-2000: An Introduction’, New German Critique, 93 (2004), 3-18 (p. 6). 7 Konzett, p. 11. 8 Helga Schreckenberger, ‘Suffering from Austria: Social Criticism in Prose Fiction of the Seventies and Eighties’, in Shadows of the Past: Austrian Literature of the Twentieth Century, ed. by Hans Schulte and Gerald Chapple (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), pp. 107-24 (p. 109). 9 Klaus Zeyringer, Österreichische Literatur seit 1945: Überblicke, Einschnitte, Wegmarken (Innsbruck: Studienverlag, 2008), p. 147. 10 Elfriede Jelinek, Die Ausgesperrten (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1980). Translations are taken from the English translation, Wonderful, Wonderful Times, trans. by Michael Hulse (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1990). 11 Elfriede Jelinek, Die Ausgesperrten: Hörspiel, dir. by Hartmut Kirste (SDR/BR/Radio Bremen, 1979). 142.