Tax fraud investigators searched private rooms and confiscated papers. Later, the charges were dropped. Still, the Personal Details will remain. Setting out from charges raised by the state, Elfriede Jelinek interlaces the paths of capital with the paths of her life. The attempt to establish a tax debt evolves into a wider questioning of identity. Jelinek delves into rich associations as she considers her parents and grandparents, tells about the Jewish part of her family, recounts expulsion and murder, writes about compensation payments made to the persecutors (not the victims) and about modern-day Nazis. It is also the tale of the end of a story: ‘After me it’s all over with the Jelineks anyway.’ Director Jossi Wieler, who has a long history of staging the Nobel Prize winner’s works, has structured the diatribe into three monologues: Linn Reusse, Fritzi Haberlandt and Susanne Wolff turn prosecution by the state into a prosecution of the state. A defendant turns lawyer and judge.
Susanna Schwarzer, founder jury NESTROY-Prize for Best Performance in the German-speaking world
5 / 6 / 7 June, 7.30 pm
Volkstheater
German
English surtitles
2 hrs. 25 min.
Q & A
6 June, following the performance
Please note age recommendation 14+
Direction Jossi Wieler Text Elfriede Jelinek With Fritzi Haberlandt, Bernd Moss, Linn Reusse, Susanne
Wolff Stage design, Costume Anja Rabes Music concept, Composition PC Nackt Vocal collage Martin Person Light design Matthias Vogel Dramaturgy Bernd Isele Assistant director Friederike Drews Stage design assistance Ev
Benzing Costume assistance Zoë Agathos Stage management Marike Moiteaux Direction internship Moritz
Barner Prompting Bärbel Kleemann Technical direction Rubin Gerull Sound Martin Person, Bernd Schindler
Video Peter Stoltz, Max Hohendahl Props Marco Weihrauch Make-up Franziska Becker, Mike Schmiedel
Production management Herbert Lines-Weber Construction stage, Costumes Workshops of the stage service of Stiftung Oper Berlin Translation surtitles Gitta Honegger (English) Surtitles Katrin Meyberg
Production Deutsches Theater Berlin
executed by the team of the Wiener Festwochen | Freie Republik Wien
Premiere Dezember 2022, Deutsches Theater Berlin
Performing Rights Rowohlt Theater Verlag, Hamburg
FORGING LANGUAGE, FORMING HUMANS
Dramaturge Bernd Isele in conversation with Jossi Wieler
Elfriede Jelinek’s latest theatre texts is also one of her most personal pieces of writing. Rarely before has the Noble prize laureate spoken so openly about writing, about her family and about the ‘path through her life’. The text of this play emerged out of the anger triggered by a tax row; its premiere was directed by Jossi Wieler, who has been one of the playwright’s companions on the stage for three decades. The following conversation took place three weeks before the premiere at Deutsches Theater. We are sitting on the rehearsal stage. Breaktime. Afternoon.
Bernd Isele Dear Jossi, when we first read Personal Details, how was that? What do you remember?
Jossi Wieler We were all of us excited … it is always special to be holding a yet unpublished text for a play by Elfriede Jelinek in your hands. The entire process is somewhat conspiratorial: the file in the inbox, the printer spitting out sheet after sheet without end, 150 pages of tight script and each page triggering that pleasant anticipation, even little bit of explorer’s pride, but at the same time also a slight sense of trepidation in the face of the sheer amount of material. And always having to ask: how do I approach a text like this?
B.I. As a team, we first got to know the text in a flat in Salzburg where you were staging a Wagner opera at the time, an opera that makes an appearance in the play, …
J.W. … yes! Although Lohengrin was less helpful than our reading together. I find it difficult to approach these texts alone; at the start they rise up before me like huge, labyrinthine, multi-storey buildings. It’s not until the sentences are read to each other that the text reveals its contours. These hours of shared reading give us the first
glimpses of the power and amount of profound humour that reside in these texts.
B.I. Deutsches Theater showed almost all the new plays by Elfriede Jelinek in the last years, partly in their main programme, partly in the guest performance programme at the Autor:innentheatertage. The fact that we are allowed to premiere this new text now is also and primarily due to you. The author and you, you’ve known each other for many years.
J.W. I staged her text Clouds. Home. at Schauspielhaus Hamburg in 1993; that was an important work for me. There followed more Jelinek productions in Hamburg, Zurich and Munich. The last time was the premiere of Rechnitz (The Exterminating Angel) at Münchner Kammerspiele in 2008. Each of theses encounters was intense.
B.I. While Elfriede Jelinek is not there in person during our rehearsals, she is still there: she writes emails, she asks how things are going, she sends regards, but she does not intervene in the production. She is one of the few authors who always place the scenic translation of her texts totally and utterly into the hands of the theatre makers.
J.W. She is incredibly generous in that regard. What is cut and what is not cut, whether the text is spoken by few or by many, in dialogue or in a chorus: she leaves all that up to others. It’s a degree of freedom that can be frightening, but which also makes the entire scope of the theatre available to the texts: there are many ways of staging Jelinek.
B.I. And your approach in this has always been particular: since the 1990s, Elfriede Jelinek’s
plays have increasingly been shown as performance-like spoken word and visual theatre. That has remained an important approach to her works until this day. You, on the other hand, have tried instead to do the opposite: you have invented concrete spaces and figures that imbue the plays with a scenic framework. In a text about you, Elfriede Jelinek wrote that ‘Jossi Wieler can form people, which is something I unfortunately cannot do.’ Is that a good division of labour? She invents the text, and you the figures?
J.W. Elfriede Jelinek has engaged with music since her childhood: first the piano, then the organ and composition. That has coloured her writing; I think that she hears her texts, but she doesn’t imagine them on the stage. It is no coincidence that Personal Details also mentions music a lot: citations from Wagner, church hymns, German Schlager songs; also Schubert and Schumann as her constant companions. For her, language is music and composition. It is not primarily character voice.
B.I. And yet during the rehearsals it is tangible how very much those lines were written for the stage …
J.W. Absolutely! In Personal Details, there are four actors on the stage, three female and one male, who prove that point during each rehearsal. To learn and appropriate a Jelinek text is first and foremost hard work. But then there follows the point where the text is available to you: then this language provides the actors on stage with such freedom, such attitude and power. That is incomparable. Fritzi Haberlandt, Linn Reusse, Susanne Wolff and Bernd Moss are congenial partners in this process. Every day it gives me joy to see how much autonomy and mutual respect these four intuitive artists bring to co-inventing the theatre night.
B.I. This is not supposed to become an introduction to the topic; but maybe we can touch on the title: Personal Details, that places us right at the centre of one of the text’s fundamental questions.
J.W. First of all, the title is a fairly precise description of the content, because there is a person speaking from this text, a person who on the one hand provides details and on the other – in a deliberate double entendre – details her achievements. The complicated and special fact of the matter is that this ‘person providing the details’ calls herself ‘Elfriede’; she recounts the story of ‘the Jelineks’ and of the fact that she wrote the text and how she did so. A literary first person as the author, an author as the literary first person. It is a soliloque that permanently reflects on its own process of creation – the passion of writing, the cause of writing –, e.g. when the first person narrator confuses the two Nazi criminals Baldur von Schirach and Arthur Seyß-Inquart and trips over this research error to fall into an irate outburst about the entire Schirach family, about Baldur’s wife Henriette, about the grandson Ferdinand von Schirach. This openness is disarming, but at the same time also unsettling, because the author does not hide anything. It is a very intimate, in parts also a sore text. Elfriede Jelinek is relentless in her writing, also towards herself.
B.I. The play sets out from a tax investigation that the author had to endure for six years before it petered out for lack of substance. Because of the fact that the author lives not only in her family home in the Vienna district of Hütteldorf, but partly also in Munich, the Bavarian exchequer had ‘cast an eye upon her’ and confiscated documents.
J.W. The case draws through the entire text. We hear German officialese, judges and prosecutors speak. It is a setting she has written about time and again. Her play Ulrike Maria Stuart deals with the conflict between the state authorities and Ulrike Meinhof, and in her play Winterreise Elfriede Jelinek recounts the case of Natascha Kampusch, Das schweigende Mädchen is about the accused Beate Zschäpe. Personal Details also deals with a scandal of the law, but it concerns herself.
B.I. This assault gives her cause to look back at her own ‘path through life’ and then beyond it: Elfriede Jelinek talks about her ‘Cousin Walter’ Felsenburg, who had to flee from the Nazis together with his wife Claire. About the latter’s sister Lotte, who survived the Nazi’s extermination camps. About Walter’s father Adalbert, who lost an arm in Dachau concentration camp and committed suicide after the end of the war … Over the course of the rehearsals, there emerged a family tree with wide-reaching branches. The names and pictures of over twenty close and distant relatives are hung up on the walls of the rehearsal stage.
J.W. The author addressed some aspects of her own family life before: her tyrannical mother, for example, in the novel The Piano Teacher, and her father’s mental illness in No Problem – A Little Trilogy of Death. But it is, as far as I know, the first time that the author has written about other relatives and about her husband Gottfried, who died recently.
B.I. Why now, do you think?
J.W. Because it’s where the text takes her. Maybe also because the time has come for it. The first person narrator considers herself the final voice: ‘After me it’s all over with the Jelineks anyway. There are none of us left, no one after me. Spare me!’. That’s why it is for her to talk about the dead. At the same time, she wonders whether it is even possible to give a voice to the dead. Who is allowed to speak for them? Is the stage a place for the dead? Personal Details is a theatre text that writes against oblivion.
B.I. I’d be interested to know how much these stories touch you personally. You grew up in Kreuzlingen, on the Swiss side of Lake Constance. Your father established a Jewish community in this border town to Nazi Germany in 1939, after the community in Constance, in the immediate vicinity, had been forced to disband.
J.W. There are stories like these in almost every Jewish family. Also that special way of talking about it, this particular tone of voice somewhere between jest and pain, is very familiar to me.
B.I. If you read the whole text, you will find a cornucopia of other themes. The play is a spotthe-mouse game: Heidegger, Wagner, Pontius Pilate, Boris Becker, Cornelius Gurlitt … Elfriede Jelinek talks about tax havens, cites Camus, Gauland, the bible, Celan’s Death Fugue, the Bavarian anthem and a lot of newspapers. ‘I am a sort of diaper for the world. I keep it all in’ writes the author.
J.W. That is a fitting description of herself. This Jelinek-diaper catches the present, especially where it stinks to high heaven. The text unites hawking, autobiography, documentary, history, and at the same time it is also an apologia and a furious monologue about Germany. I find it very fitting that the play will be premiered at Deutsches Theater – the ‘German theatre’.
B.I. Is the text also a legacy?
J.W. It sometimes seems so, especially on the final pages: there, the text speaks about old age, about fighting, about losing and about one’s own disappearance. Also about Elfriede Jelinek’s husband Gottfried, who died quite suddenly just before we started rehearsals and who is missed sorely. At times you might imagine that you’re reading a final play, if there wasn’t still that moment of jest: ‘My strength has almost dried up. Not completely yet.’ says the first-person narrator towards the end, ‘don’t worry.’
Elfriede Jelinek, who was born in 1946 and grew up in Vienna, now lives in Vienna and Munich. She has received numerous awards for her literary works, which include not only novels but also plays, poetry, essays, translations, radio plays, screenplays and opera librettos. Her awards include the Georg Büchner Prize and the Franz Kafka Prize for Literature. In 2004 she was awarded with Nobel Prize for Literature. Elfriede Jelinek is a member of the Council of the Republic as part of the Vienna Festival | Free Republic of Vienna 2024.
Jossi Wieler was born in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland, and studied directing at the Theatre Department of Tel Aviv University. As a theatre director, he worked in Heidelberg, Bonn, Stuttgart, Basel, Hamburg, Zurich, Berlin and at the Kammerspiele Munich as well as repeatedly at the Salzburg Festival. He staged several of Elfriede Jelinek’s plays and was voted Director of the Yeas in 1994 for his production of Wolken.Heim. His theatre productions were invited to numerous national and international festivals. In 2002, he was awarded the Konrad Wolf Prize by the Academy of Arts Berlin, in 2005 he received the German Critics’ Award and in 2009 his staging of Rechnitz (Der Würgeengel), which was part of the Wiener Festwochen 2010, won the Nestroy Award. This, along with his productions of Kleist’s Amphitryon (1986), Euripides’ Alkestis (2002) and Mittagswende by Paul Claudel were also invited to the Theatertreffen Berlin. Since 1994, Jossi Wieler also works in the field of opera, mostly in Stuttgart and together with Sergio Morabito. Ariadne auf Naxos (2001), Doktor Faust (2005), Alceste (2006) and Die Nachtwandlerin (2012) were each selected as Performance of the Year. In 2002, Wieler and Morabito were voted Direction Team of the Year and in 2006 and 2012, they received the theatre award DER FAUST in the category Best Opera Direction. From 2011 to 2018, Jossi Wieler was artistic director of the Stuttgart Opera. In 2020 he was distinguished with the highest award in Swiss theatre, the Grand Prix Theatre/Hans-Reinhart-Ring. PUBLICATION DETAILS Owner, Editor and Publisher Wiener Festwochen GesmbH, Lehárgasse 11/1/6, 1060 Wien P + 43 1 589 22 0, festwochen@festwochen.at | www.festwochen.at General Management Milo Rau, Artemis Vakianis Artistic Direction (responsible for content) Milo Rau (Artistic Director) Text credits The interview was provided by Deutsches Theater Berlin. Picture credit Cover © Arno Declair Produced by Print Alliance HAV Produktions GmbH (Bad Vöslau)
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