Edna Epelbaum, New York University

The Act of Transgression: Elfriede Jelinek and the Politics of the Burgtheater

Elfriede Jeinek describes her work as a constant interpenetration of the past and the present. My paper proposes to explore how the recent Nobel Prize winner unfolds the (Nazi) past of the most famous Austrian theatrical institution – the Burgtheater – and takes a close look at the Austrian glorification of the stage, so as to challenge the persistence of the political and patriarchal past and to engage with the possibility of art itself. Within one of her most contemporary plays, Erlkönigin (1999), Jelinek stages the “continuation of the past in the present” (Jelinek) by means of a revivified Burgtheater-actress. As a figure of the past, the living dead is resuscitated to give one (ever)last(ing) monologue on the stage of inheritance and legacy. Revivified from the underworld, she turns out to be the embodiment of power. As a dead figure the performer is “always legally on the road” (Jelinek) to convince the masses to believe in her as a heroine and as a preserver of the past glory of Austrian politics and traditions. Jelinek, thus, focuses her critique not only on the past events of the cultural institution but also on the every-day life of the masses, who enable the Old and Deceased to stay in power. However, in the vicious spiral of the reiterated past, every repetition produces a critical reworking of tradition. A recommencement is always a reactivation and therefore a variation of the past. In order to achieve the possibility of coming to terms with historical events as well as a different concept of drama and theater, the end has to turn into a beginning which represents again a reproduced past. Accordingly, Jelinek suggests that the present needs to empty itself of its own political and aesthetical past history. Only in this space of nothingness another form of speaking and acting may emerge and establish new possibilities: “I don’t want theater. I want another theater” (Jelinek).