Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek turns 75

She writes about sexuality, violence, mass culture, and repressed fascism. In the 1980s and 1990s, author Elfriede Jelinek was the "inconvenient," sharp-tongued moralist, holding up a mirror to what she saw as the conservative, bigoted and historically oblivious society of her Austrian homeland. With her sarcastic, provocative, sometimes scornful style, she turned half the country against her. She was often considered an "angry" citizen who continues to polarize to this day.

Following Jelinek's award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004, the novelist withdrew from the public eye. She rarely gives interviews, but that doesn't mean she just sits back and does nothing. Even though she won't appear at the Frankfurt Book Fair, the world's largest trade fair for books, her works still have an impact.

She presents her ideas in essays, polemic tirades, obituaries, reflections, and, of course, plays and novels. In 2003, she wrote an article for the Viennese newspaper Der Standard titled "Schreiben müssen" (The Need to Write), which was a tribute to "language, which opens everything and closes everything and closes itself off to everything and is itself everything." With language, which Jelinek considers an "instrument" in the "realm of shaping" things, she is undeniably a literary firebrand.

Jelinek says it like it is

Her thinking often revolves around her role in the world and the relationship of people with one another, often in connection with current events. Her new play, Lärm (Noise), a collage of voices about the COVID-19 pandemic, premiered at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg in early June 2021. It is a torrent of words about news, explanations, rumors, theories and conspiracy myths surrounding the coronavirus. Schwarzwasser (Black Water) is the name of Jelinek's drama from February 2020, which was written in reference to the "Ibiza affair," a political scandal that would partially bring down Austria's government in 2019.

With her play, Anger, Jelinek responded to the terrorist attack on the Paris satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in 2015. The drama revolves around the rage of religious fanatics and the anger of allegedly decent citizens. A group of right-wing extremists had stormed the auditorium of the University of Vienna the year before, when Jelinek's refugee play Die Schutzbefohlenen (The Supplicants) was being performed there. The disruptors spilled fake blood and threw leaflets with the slogan "Multikulti tötet" ("Multiculturalism kills").

Not only in her native country does Elfriede Jelinek have a reputation for being a radical feminist and provocateur. Her texts, even for German-speaking audiences, often seem difficult to access. Many compatriots denounce her as an "art and culture desecrator" and disparage her as a "communist-influenced pornographer."

Jelinek's work encompasses novels, plays, poems, radio plays, essays and screen works. In Austria and Germany, the author — who lives alternately in Vienna and Munich — has won major awards: the Heinrich Böll Prize of the City of Cologne (1986), the Georg Büchner Prize (1988), the Mülheim Dramatists' Prize (2002/2004) as well as the Radio Play Prize of the War Blind (2004). The Vienna Stage Association recently awarded Jelinek with the Nestroy Prize for her life's work. Some of her works have been translated into English, such as her book The Piano Teacher.

Nobel Prize was a surprise

Jelinek, born on October 20, 1946 in Mürzzuschlag in the Styria region of Austria, grew up in Vienna. As a young woman, she was confronted with her own psychological problems and her father's nervous illness. Her mother forced her to take dance and music lessons to become a child prodigy, as she once wrote. She began to write to escape her mother's interventionism, she has recalled.

The debates surrounding her novels, poems and plays are unlikely to have left the author unscathed. Her early book, Lust, denounced the sexual oppression of women. Her 1983 novel Die Klavierspielerin (The Piano Teacher), which was later made into a film, depicts violence in the private sphere. Babel, Die Kinder der Toten oder Stecken, Stab und Stangl from 1995 scandalizes the media and politicians' reaction to the murders of four Burgenland Roma. In her refugee drama The Supplicants (2014), Jelinek questions how people who have fled their homeland are treated.

When the news arrived from Stockholm in the fall of 2004 about herwinning the Nobel Prize for Literature, even Elfriede Jelinek's Berlin publishers were surprised. Yet Jelinek shied away from the award ceremony; she did not attend the event, although she kept the prize money. Every country, one could say, gets the writers it deserves. Austria has been given the writing enthusiast Elfriede Jelinek.

This article was translated from German.