Waffling Philosophers, Egocentric Politicians and the Great Silence

„Die Ankunft“ – a chronological compilation of four theatre texts by Elfriede Jelinek, staged at the Volkstheater – was greeted by the audience at the premiere with sustained acclaim.

How did it all actually begin and where do we stand today? This question surrounding the rise of right-wing parties around the globe and in Austria in particular is currently being asked by many of those responsible for our theatres. The range of productions extends from future scenarios of society under right-wing governments to explanatory models for the fascination that fascism holds for young men, from retrospectives on the era of National Socialism through to the working through of personal life stories.

With the current production at the Volkstheater, director Jan Philipp Gloger takes a different and interesting path. He takes the question of how it all began literally: instead of designing a single scenario, he traces events and social transformations in Austria and Germany through four of the author's plays. Between the first image, in which Jelinek's WOLKEN.HEIM is staged in condensed form, and the last, entitled DAS LEBEWOHL – NEIN, DIE ANKUNFT, two dramas are embedded that deal with concrete events. In abridged form he places them one after the other, chronologically ordered and furnished with a stage design (Marie Roth) that cleverly visualises the idea that the present state of things is one that builds successively upon what has gone before.

It would smack of presumption to attempt even remotely to reproduce Jelinek's artful linguistic creations. Quotations, too, are deliberately not reproduced here. Her linguistic force has to be heard and seen in order to set in motion what it intends: to re-think, to name, to break the silence and to identify the perpetrators and hold them to account. For many of those born later, it seems, this remains impossible to this day.

With a large ensemble and stylistically varied scenes, a particular perspective on today's political situation opens up for the audience. Right at the outset, in WOLKEN.HEIM, it is derived from a philosophical substructure intended to justify national demarcation both outwards and inwards. Its roots reach back to Hegel's philosophy of the state, in which the state stands above the individual. This way of thinking eventually found one of its chief adepts in Martin Heidegger, played magnificently by Tjark Bernau. He wears a Black Forest philosopher's costume, complemented by mountain boots, a hiking rucksack and a hat with a chamois tuft. (Costumes: Franziska Bornkamm and Anna Lechner) That this line is not a bygone, purely historical one becomes clear in a quotation from Herbert Kickl, who boasts of having thoroughly absorbed Hegel's dialectics. The director likewise extends the arc to further present-day politicians of the right-wing persuasion who, already certain of victory in the growing strength of their movement, are looking forward to the years to come.

How quickly this figure of thought turns into practice is something the audience experiences at first hand: the ensemble picks out two people from one of the front rows, shouts loudly over one another and abuses them to such a degree that they leave the auditorium. Uncomfortable as the scene is in its construction, it nevertheless remains obvious that the people attacked here were insiders who belong to the theatre.

From philosophy the evening shifts into history, or more precisely: to concrete crimes. In RECHNITZ – DER WÜRGEENGEL only the servants of Countess Batthyány have their say, reporting on the events surrounding the murder of 180 Hungarian Jews who were shot following a party at Rechnitz Castle. In this scenario as well as in the following one, entitled DAS SCHWEIGENDE MÄDCHEN, the action shifts in each case into the personal realm.

Despite the skilfully executed cuts to the text, Jelinek's message always remains clear and unmistakable and can be described as follows: fanaticism, going along with the crowd, the will to elevate oneself above others and unbridled ego trips still form a social brew that stinks to high heaven. Added to this is the penchant for repressing and keeping silent. This is realised with particular success in a Rechnitz scene in which the director has one of the actresses age and die within a short space of time – with an iron will, maintained to the very end, to tell outsiders nothing about the mass shooting.

The silence becomes even more haunting in a wordless moment, delivered by Andrej Agranovski. 180 times he strikes his metal shovel hard against the stage floor. 1 blow for each murdered Jew, 180 for all those who were slaughtered in Rechnitz and have remained nameless to this day. During this roughly three-minute wordless act not a single sound can be heard from the audience, no coughing, no clearing of throats. It hits home, and to call the emotions it triggers memorable is an understatement.

From the silence about the victims the evening moves on to the silence of a perpetrator. The third section examines the background to the murders of immigrants by two NSU perpetrators in Germany as well as the trial of Beate Zschäpe. The abysses of the male and female perpetrators that open up here are difficult, if not impossible, to comprehend.

Taciturn as Beate Zschäpe, the accomplice in the NSU murders, shows herself to be in the third image – during her trial not a word was to be heard from her – Jelinek made the dialogue of her two cats all the more talkative. The gist of it, that human beings may well be able to describe and comprehend the divine and the animal, but that the human does not occur in this world at all, not only sounds brutal, it is brutal in its implications. The brutality, and at the same time the absurdity, behind all the murders for which the NSU cell is responsible are analysed in this dialogue with razor-sharp precision and further intensified by the staging in cat costumes. The action on stage undergoes a continuous escalation into the absurd, even as it becomes clear that the absurd has long since arrived in our reality.

DAS LEBEWOHL – NEIN: DIE ANKUNFT is the fourth and final drama of the evening, and its title already makes clear that the spirits believed to belong to the past have not taken their leave but have well and truly arrived in the here and now. Exuberant and drunk with victory, Gloger has the ensemble sweep across the stage in blue business outfits. The association with the Austrian FPÖ – and not only with it – is obvious. However much a "never again" is invoked, the statement is not credible. The tipping point at which it becomes clear what really drives most leading right-wing politicians is a screaming tirade. It comes as no surprise that the first person it brings to mind is Donald Trump. Satisfying one's own ego and, in the absence of any resistance, inflating it beyond all measure now appears to be the order of the day for the leaders of right-wing parties.

The brilliance of the acting and the masterly direction, paired with the artistic quality of the texts, should not obscure how open the social wound is into which the permanent poison of nationalist convictions is being dripped. Should the "us against the others" rhetoric of the foreigners-out movement continue to spread, democratically minded forces would do well to take to heart what the black-clad "Angel of History" advises the audience at the end: "We have to talk!" says former Volkstheater director Emmy Werner in this role.

After so much keeping silent, repressing and falling mute over the course of the evening, this is the most concise conceivable counter-proposal. What an ingenious idea to entrust her of all people with it! Her casting shows how history repeats itself and develops further. Not only was her voice as a woman able to be heard in the art world at a time when having a theatre run by a woman was anything but a matter of course. With her age she also spans the period in which the coming and going of right-wing radicalism in Austria took place, from the twentieth century up to the present day. And last but not least, it was she who first brought Jelinek's texts to the main stage of the Volkstheater, not without being fiercely attacked for it, even physically. At the latest here the circle closes back to the audience abuse of the opening: what was staged there as a game she experienced herself. Seen in this light, the call to talk coming from her mouth is not merely a closing punchline but a deliberately formulated mandate.

The ensemble: Andrej Agranovski, Tjark Bernau, Elias Maria Burckhardt, Katharina Kurschat, Josef Mohamed, Maximilian Pulst, Anna Rieser and Emmy Werner as guest.