Rechnitz, and the Merchant's Contracts

Throughout her career, Elfriede Jelinek was maligned by the media for her unrelenting critique of Austria’s refusal to account for its complicity in the Holocaust and her provocative deconstructions of pornography. But her central role in shaping contemporary literature was recognized internationally when in 2004 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for for her musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society’s cliches and their subjugating power’.
However, few of her works are available in English translation, least of all her ground-breaking plays. This volume collects two of her recent dramatic works,Rechnitz: The Exterminating Angel (2008), which won the prestigious Mulheim Dramatists Prize, andThe Merchant’s Contract (2009). In Rechnitz a chorus of messengers reports what they have been told about the circumstances that led to the massacre of 180 Jews, which actually took place towards the end of World War II during a wild party for provincial Nazi administrators at a castle in the Austrian/Hungarian border town of Rechnitz. Rather than being a docu-drama’, Jelinek’s text focuses on the transmission of historic memory.
If Rechnitz is Jelinek’s best performance text, then The Merchant’s Contracts, her comedy of economics’ is her most accessible work. With capitalism having gone global and Wall Street as its neo-mythical Walhalla, English has taken over as the market’s universal language. Even in their respective native languages, speculators’ lingo and media spin is babble to the ears of most small investors, who, after all, were and continue to be the biggest losers worldwide in the economic crisis. The play nevertheless has the alienating effect and universality of a Brechtian fable. In the age of global economy, Jelinek turns a merchant of Vienna into a universal comedy of errors.
Along with an extensive introduction by the translator that contextualizes and analyses the two brilliant texts, this volume is accompanied by a DVD of performances of both the plays, which further testify to the power of Jelinek’s work.

Elfriede Jelinek was born in Vienna in the aftermath of World War II and became a leading, if controversial, member of Austria’s first generation of post-war artists.Gitta Honegger is professor of theater at Arizona State University. She is the translator of many plays and texts, including Thomas Bernhard’sThe Making of an Austrian.