Abraumhalde

What is the connection between money and faith? Much stronger than first imagined, if money and its exchange value becomes the fourth of the great world religions.

Abraumhalde was conceived as the missing link between Lessing's Nathan the Wise and Jelinek's The Merchant's Contracts. While in Nathan the Wise one stone is carefully laid on top of the other, Jelinek uses a persuasive rant and strong imagery to burn down the house. Abraumhalde is a tour de force through world history, from antiquity to German Idealism, and the holocaust to the present, with all its war and strife, including the incest scandal of Amstetten. Profound questions arise: what prize you put on humanitarianism, morals, and tolerance, and what happens if we can't or won't pay anymore? Jelinek wouldn't be Jelinek without digressing from time to time, leaving her subject behind, just to close in on it even tighter afterwards. «We are God» is the ironic leitmotiv for the text, resulting in no more or less than the deconstruction of the project «enlightenment».