Das schweigende Mädchen

Elfriede Jelinek expands her play about the National Socialist Underground (NSU) trial in Munich into a tribunal of biblical proportions. At its center is a blank space – the main defendant, the last survivor of an infernal trio, who persistently keeps her silence about the bloody murders of which she and her male accomplices have been accused. Others soon begin to see this young woman as Holy Virgin who brought two “saviors” into this world to free her homeland from foreigners. Angels, prophets, judges, and even God Himself appear, angry, perplexed, and bewildered, to query a history that did not just begin when three neo-Nazis went underground and then killed ten people. The roots of this story reach far down into the past, and they will most likely keep growing in the future.

The Silent Girl transforms the ongoing NSU trial into the antithesis to stories of religious salvation and to the Last Judgment of our times. Not just the perpetrators stand before it, but also the state security who kept their eyes shut; the media, which trivialized the matter; and finally, Germany as a whole which silently kept ignoring that the murderers emerged from within.