By Wijbrand Schaap (photo by Arno Declair)
Since Wednesday 9 June 2010, the Netherlands has been looking a bit more like Austria again, even though our mountains are in the south-east, instead of the west. And there is another difference: we are allowed to read the stage work of the Austrian Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek still see it, while the strict writer banned it in her own homeland. Because, according to her, the people don't deserve it. Because she thinks they are narrow-minded petty bourgeois who have been able to wallow in their victimhood for too long during WWII. We know that too.
As in the Netherlands, with the climbing of the years since the Holocaust, the lines between right and wrong are blurring, causing a sharp rise in the number of cases to be hushed up.
In Austria, for example, there is the murder of 180 Jewish prisoners, committed by a bunch of drunken revellers in the unsightly town of Rechnitz, two days before the end of the war. An atrocity, of which remarkably few witnesses remain, and whose evidence was untraceable for years.
Jelinek wrote a play about it, which can best be described as an ingenious construction of language, in which banality, hyperintellectualism and Euripides' classic Bacchantes are interwoven in an inimitable way here and there. Jelinek, whose weapon is language, actually makes it impossible for her listeners to agree or disagree with anything. This is a torment, because she does not allow us to be angry with the Austrians, who, after all, cannot do anything about their stupidity, but neither can we be angry with ourselves, because we are so eager to feel complicit in the crimes of our ancestors. Orgies of violence, such as those in Rechnitz, but equally those in classical Thebes described by Euripides in Bacchantes, cannot be attributed to higher powers either. They are embedded in our genes and woe betide us who declare them a thing of the past, because it can happen again tomorrow.
We now see Jelineks Rechnitz in the Holland Festival, performed by just about the best actors in the German-speaking world. Which is just as well, because if we had to rely on director Jossi Wieler alone, the evening would have mostly gone down in history as ponderous. To the collection of messenger stories that is Rechnitz, he adds a series of acts that is little more than some superficial commentary: guns falling out, a pizza dripping, some sensuality and finally a Sachertorte (chocolate cake) that ends up more on the clothes than in the mouth.
The question, however, is whether it is down to Wieler that the performance remains aloof. It is also Jelinek's fault that she doesn't actually want to let us into her infuriating work. And that makes you feel a bit more Austrian anyway, even before the outcome of the election is known.
Seen: Rechnitz by the Munich Kammerspiele on 9 June 2010 at the Stadsschouwburg Amsterdam. There still on 10 June. Enquiries: www.hollandfestival.nl
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