Oldal 194 [194]
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ANNA LENZ and philosophy* — becomes almost cynical within the text as it addresses themes such as xenophobia and war. It echoes a popular metaphor, deforming it, emptying it through the text: the via regia, by the end of the play, is no longer that, but, rather, the path of an egotistical racist and a society that supports him. On the other hand, via regia links to Freud’s famous quote which states that the interpretation of dreams is “the via regia to the knowledge of the unconscious.” An attempt to read Elfriede Jelinek’s play through the same prism might profitably be made. Am Königsweg is exemplary in the popular understanding of so-called “postdramatic theater” — a theater that gets by without character or plot, without dialogue or fable® — in some ways, but it does not give up on an aim to root society’s core, to study a “collective unconscious,” not through dreams but through theater that might explain things such as newly awakened xenophobic tendencies within a political mainstream.’ In this attempt to walk a cracked via regia, Am Königsweg shows the loss of a notion of one unifying meaning that would offer itself to a hermeneutic interpretation. But it does maintain the idea of a normative horizon, values, a social model, a narrative, a religion, or even art that would if not reunite at least fight against a social separation of people. Here, questions of subjectivity, religion, economy, and self are interwoven in her unique rag rug of philosophical, literary, and pop-cultural quotes. The result is a 150-page text, which was published in February, 2020. The play was first produced three years earlier, in 2017, and staged at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg by the German director and author Falk Richter. As this article discusses both the staging and the text, I will briefly introduce both. In 2004, Austrian author Elfriede Jelinek was the first of her country to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. (Peter Handke has since become the second.) The jury praised Jelinek “for her musical flow of voices and countervoices in novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society’s clichés and their subjugating power.”® Her most famous novel is Die Klavierspielerin (The Piano Teacher)? which, in 2001, was adapted into an award-winning film by Austrian director and screenwriter Michael Haneke, starring Isabelle Huppert as the failed pianist Erika Kohut. The novel addresses themes such as the mother-daughter relationship and sexuality and violence as well as female repression, all of which have been canonical in Jelinek’s oeuvre from the beginning. Die Kinder der Toten [The Children of 4 The full metaphor of the via regia, of course, is much more complex than stated here. Sigmund Freud: Die Traumdeutung. Urheberrechtsfreie Ausgabe, 612, ebook. Freud, as we will see, is one of the main references in Am Königsweg. Hans-Thies Lehmann: Postdramatisches Theater, Frankfurt a. M., Verlag der Autoren, 1999. I will speak of the political in rather literal terms: political institutions, personnel, and direct socio-political debates within the media. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/lists/all-nobel-prizes-in-literature. Elfriede Jelinek: Die Klavierspielerin, Hamburg, Rowohlt, 1983. 5 «192 +
