Elfriede Jelinek (1946- ...) was born in Mürzzuschlag and grew up mainly in Vienna. Her mother was a middle-class Catholic while her Czech-Jewish father was a socialist. She received an excellent musical education and began studying theatre and art history at the University of Vienna. However, she abandoned her studies to write poetry and prose, and later, plays. In 1974, she married the film composer Gottfried Hüngsberg, who was a regular collaborator of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. She was a member of Austria’s Communist Party until 1991. In 2004, she won the Nobel Prize in Literature for what the Swedish Academy described as her “musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that, with extraordinary linguistic zeal, reveal the absurdity of society’s clichés and their subjugating power”. Her work always sparks debate for the way in which it illuminates thorny issues in Western societies, and her plays are staged regularly, particularly in German-speaking countries. Her novel The piano teacher was adapted with great success for the screen.
 

The main features of her writing are its reminders to her compatriots of Austria’s culpability in respect of the Second World War and the country’s annexation by Germany, as well as a persistent criticism of bourgeois hypocrisy and the vices that it breeds, systemic inequality, and the plight of women in a patriarchal and capitalist world. Her texts are in dialogue through a Marxist and feminist perspective with works from the canon and with pop culture, with the high and the low, often introducing well-known women onto the stage, including Jacqueline Kennedy and Ulrike Meinhof, figures from myth like Eurydice, and characters from the classics such as Ibsen’s Nora. She tackles the themes of alienation, estrangement, the inability to communicate, and rampant commercialisation with irony and originality, and her skilful writing still retains its sharpness and penetration.

 

A short list of her plays:
What happened after Nora left her husband; or Pillars of societies, Illness or modern women, Sports play, Das Lebewohl, Jackie, Bambiland, Ulrike Maria Stuart, The merchant’s contracts, Shadow. Eurydice says.

 

Looking at us with great interest, as if they were seeing themselves in the mirror that’s what people are doing all the time. They see us, but actually they see themselves in us. But a treasure like myself is most appreciated when absent. On the other hand, I can be seen everywhere. (Jackie)