Personal Details

An investigation by the tax authorities, which has long since been shelved but which scrutinized even some highly personal emails, prompted Elfriede Jelinek to look back on her ‹path through life›. For the first time in her writing, she tells the story of the Jewish side of her family. Her own ‹personal details› alternate with reports of the fates of relatives who had to flee Austria during the Nazi era, and others who were deported and murdered. The investigation of her own financial affairs also leads her to reflect on global capital flows. To what extent are states still profiting from expropriated Jewish assets? How many high-ranking Nazis were readily granted compensation after 1945? And what are the tax-avoidance schemes and fraud scandals of the present day, from cum-ex transactions to Wirecard?

In this play, at once sarcastic, angry, autobiographical and universal, Elfriede Jelinek looks not only at herself but also at a society that is more interested in perpetrators than victims. She returns to a key theme of her work, and addresses it here more forcefully than ever: ‹the ways of money as one of the biggest secrets of the modern economy, the abyss on which everything is based› (Der Standard).