Rechnitz by the Austrian Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek was chosen in 2009 by the magazine Theater Heute as the Play of the Year. Director Jossi Wieler took the script in hand with actors from the Münchner Kammerspiele, including André Jung and Hildegard Schmahl, whose fame also extends to the Netherlands. The play derives its title from the similarly named little Austrian town near the Hungarian border, where on March 24, 1945, five days before the Russians arrived, two hundred Hungarian Jews were brutally murdered by a small group of Nazi leaders, SS officers and local notables who had gathered for a soirée at the nearby castle of Count and Countess Batthyány.
Several thousand Hungarian Jews had been transported to Rechnitz in order to work as forced labourers on constructing a line of defence against the advancing Russians. When they arrived, two hundred of them were considered unsuitable for the work, including many old people, women and children. They were shut up in a barn, where they awaited their fate. That soon became clear when the partygoers at the castle armed themselves, forced the Jews to undress, beat them and then shot them to death on the spot. Eighteen people were spared. They were ordered to dig mass graves, after which they themselves also were executed the next day.
The mass grave was discovered by the Russians, but later all proof of this disappeared and the victims could not be traced. In 1946, a judicial inquiry into the mass murder was instigated. But when two important witnesses were murdered and their houses set on fire, most of the other witnesses withdrew their testimonies, or weakened them. Ever since then, an atmosphere of fear and silence has reigned in Rechnitz. Three of the people involved were finally meted out a mild form of punishment for their part in the murder, but the main suspects remained unscathed. The Count and Countess fled to Switzerland with Gestapo leader Franz Podezin and Nazi party member Joachim Oldenburg. When the ground grew too hot under Podezin’s feet there also, he fled with the help of the Countess to South Africa. Joachim Oldenburg later settled in Argentina. The Countess, the eldest daughter of the German steel magnate Heinrich Thyssen, remained in Switzerland without ever having to give an account of her role in this horrible story.
The play
Rechnitz has many levels and alternating perspectives, which are subtly interwoven by Jelinek and also the director. Wieler introduces five messengers who are supposed to tell us what happened that night, like a chorus in a Greek tragedy. But it soon becomes clear that these messengers are not to be completely trusted. They mostly make outflanking movements, express their doubts, exchange roles, contradict one another, deny and play things down. And when they occasionally lift a tip of the veil and refer to the true circumstances, they do it in a whisper, while eating or laughing, never directly and truthfully.
Rather than reconstructing this horrific crime, Jelinek is much more interested in exposing the sinister silence and denial, to show how, sixty years after the fact, the truth is still being endlessly concealed, twisted and withheld. According to Jelinek, the Rechnitz bloodbath is symptomatic for the Austrian attitude toward the war and toward fascism – which, she says, is still rampant.
The Austrian
Elfriede Jelinek is the author of countless novels, poems and plays. In 2004, she won the Nobel Prize for literature. Jelinek was born on October 20, 1946 in Mürzzuschlag in the Austrian state of Stiermarken. Her father, Friedrich Jelinek, was of Jewish-Czech origin. Before and during the war he did important research for the military as a chemist, and accordingly was spared from anti-Semitic persecution. In the early 1950s, he was afflicted with mental illness. He died in 1969 in a psychiatric clinic. Elfriede had an extremely difficult relationship with her mother, who wanted to raise her as a musical prodigy. Later, Jelinek would describe her mother as an extremely intelligent but malicious person. The twisted relationship with her mother is the subject of her novel The Pianist, which was filmed by Michael Haneke.
While still at school, Jelinek began in 1960 to study the organ, the recorder and composition. In 1971, she rounded off her organ studies at the Vienna Conservatory with good results. In 1964, she also began studying theatre and art history at the University of Vienna, but she had to break off her studies after several semesters because of her precarious mental state. During this time she wrote her first poems, publishing her first collection,
Lisa’s Schatten, in 1967.
After 1969, Elfriede Jelinek was active in the student movement and in the literary discussions centring on the magazine Manuskripte. She started to write radio plays; the newspaper Die Presse called her Wenn die Sonne sinkt ist für manche schon Büroschluß the most successful radio play of the year in 1974. That same year, Elfriede Jelinek married Gottfried Hüngsberg, who had been part of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s circle in the 1960s. In 1974, she joined the Austrian Communist party (KPÖ), which she left in 1991.
Jelinek’s work is strongly related to her political engagement. In the early years of her career, this primarily concerned feminism and the struggle between the sexes, the central themes in novels like
Wir sind Lockvögel,
Baby! (We are Decoys, Baby!),
The Pianist and
Lust. Toward the end of the 80s and the beginning of the 90s she became the target of hate from the extreme right in Austria for her fight against Jörg Haider’s FPÖ. Since that time, she has shifted her attention in works such as
Die Kinder der Toten (The Children of the Dead),
Babel and
Rechnitz to social and political criticism, particularly Austria's Nazi past and present-day fascism in her fatherland. She herself has said that she is on a war footing with her fatherland and that her relationship with Austria is actually no longer even a love-hate relationship, like that of her compatriot Thomas Bernard – with her, all that remains is hate.
Jelinek’s work is very diverse and also very controversial. She is praised by many critics for her phenomenal use of language, while others consider her often-sarcastic texts obscene, blasphemous and rancorous. In 2005, Knut Ahnlund walked out of the Swedish Academy in protest against the granting of the Nobel Prize to Jelinek.
Jossi Wieler is a Swiss theatre and opera director who was born in 1951 in Kreuzlingen. He studied directing at the University of Tel Aviv in Israel. His first directing assignments were for the Habima National Theater of Israel. In 1980, he returned to Europe and worked for various theatres in Germany and Switzerland, where he staged classics like
A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
Nathan the Wise and
Peer Gynt. In 1994, Wieler was invited for the Berliner Theatertreffen with his production of
Wolken.Heim (Clouds.Home) by Elfriede Jelinek. The play was chosen as production of the year. Since 1994, Wieler has also been active as an opera director in collaboration with dramaturge Sergio Morabito. Together they have worked on, among other things,
Alcina,
Siegfried and
Norma at the Staatsoper Stuttgart and
Ariadne auf Naxos at the Salzburger Festspiele.
In addition to his directing work for Staatsschauspiel Hannover and Schauspielhaus Zürich, since 2001 Wieler has also directed for the Münchner Kammerspiele. In 2002, Wieler was a guest of the Holland Festival with
Alkestis, the opening show of the Festival. With this production he was also invited for the Berliner Theatertreffen. In 2002, the editors of Opernwelt chose
Ariadne auf Naxos as production of the year and Wieler and Morabito as directing team of the year. That same year, Wieler also received the Konrad Wolf Prize from the Berliner Akademie der Künste. For De Nederlandse Opera in 2004, the Wieler/Morabito duo directed the opera
Lucia Silla. In 2005, Wieler received the German Critics’ Award. Wieler won another award in 2006, receiving the Faust Theatre Award together with Morabito for his staging of Doktor Faust with the Staatsoper Stuttgart.
Wieler is very familiar with Elfriede Jelinek’s work, whose
Rechnitz he is presenting this year in the Holland Festival. After
Wolken.Heim (Clouds.Home), he directed her plays him nothing but him and Ulrike Maria Stuart, among others. As of the 2011-2012 season, Wieler will be manager of the Staatsoper Stuttgart (Stuttgart State Opera).