Elfriede Jelinek: from a figure who brought shame upon her homeland to a beacon of Austrian culture

For Jelinek, this re-evaluation began whilst she was still alive, at the latest when she received international recognition with the Nobel Prize. Since then, her standing has grown exponentially in Austria too, and today she is regarded within literary circles as a leading figure on the Austrian literary scene of the second half of the 20th century.

To mark his 80th birthday, the Salzburg Festival and the Burgtheater staged his latest work, *Fra animali* (Among Animals), a series of monologues by animals observing humanity, published last June by Rowohlt (*Unter Tieren*): an indictment that once again places the economy and the devastating consequences of unbridled free-market capitalism at the centre of the debate.

Once again, the main co-protagonist of the text is language: acrobatic, at times terse, at times ironic or sarcastic, at times surreal, with witty and almost always surprising puns.

In Jelinek’s plays, the characters are conveyors of words and concepts, and the author herself seems to encourage directors to experiment and even to make those expressions their own, describing what she provides them with as ‘text sausages’.

And, buoyed by his prior approval, the directors cut, paste and rework the material to create productions that are at times magnificent, such as “Ein Sportstück”, directed in 1998 by Einar Schleef, or *The Rechnitz Massacre*, staged in 2008 by Jossi Wieler, or *Winterreise*, created by Stefan Bachmann in 2021. At other times, however, the productions that emerge from an engagement with his works fail or struggle to make the leap from the written page to the stage.

In Nicolas Stemann’s stage adaptation, the brilliant *Fra animali* – which, from a distance, seems to echo George Orwell’s *Animal Farm* – has been transformed on stage into a boisterous kaleidoscope.

In addition to the two performances, in Vienna – Jelinek’s adopted city – an agreement has recently been reached whereby part of the author’s literary archive, comprising manuscripts, typescripts, correspondence, documents and a press clippings collection she herself had compiled over the years. This acquisition is certainly smaller than the €2.1 million deal struck by the Austrian state in 2022 to transfer Thomas Bernhard’s archive to the National Library, but in Jelinek’s case it certainly does not represent her entire archive, and the current agreement, which includes a commitment to subject the materials to in-depth study and make them accessible to the public, offers hope that the collection will be completed in the future.

Its location at the Wienbibliothek im Rathaus means that it is, moreover, housed alongside many other archives and collections of correspondence belonging to distinguished figures from Vienna’s cultural, artistic and political spheres, including Franz Grillparzer, Karl Kraus and Arthur Schnitzler, as well as Schubert and the Strauss family.

The programme of events to mark her 80th birthday, organised by the Elfriede Jelinek Research Centre, the Viennese university centre dedicated to research on the author, ranges, amongst other things, from a series of lectures and talks by the director, Pia Janke, at Austrian cultural institutes in Paris, Warsaw, New York, São Paulo and Tokyo, to a screening series at the Metro KinoKulturhaus in the Austrian capital, featuring films adapted from her works.

In Italia this autumn, the University of Udine is organising (on 18 November) a tribute to Jelinek and, in particular, to her work as a playwright, featuring a discussion with the scholar Ute Degner, coordinated by Elena Polledri.

The main place to keep up to date with Elfriede Jelinek’s latest developments remains the website elfriedejelinek.com, where she has been publishing texts, commentaries, announcements and appeals – most recently an analysis of the Palestinian situation, calling on the Austrian government, which is set to be a member of the UN Security Council in 2027 and 2028, to make the most of that ‘small window of opportunity’ to give a voice to the victims.