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MyTH, INTERCULTURALITY, AND RELIGION IN ELFRIEDE JELINEK’S AND FALK RICHTER’S WORK... everything one does not want to be and establishes social oppositions from the viewpoint of the hegemonial German to the “other”: “We are loud! You are quiet. We are primitive, you are cultivated. We are a dictatorship! You are a democracy! We are violent, you are, like, so peaceful. We are anti-women, you are pro-women.” She establishes the migrant as a projection™ of the unconscious self, as Freud, who is then identified as a source to Jelinek’s text, described in his letters to Wilhelm Flief,* or here, as Carl Gustav Jung would probably be an even more suitable reference point, the “collective unconscious”: “[...] weshalb die Mythen der Völker die eigentlichen Exponenten des kollektiven Unbewußten sind. Die gesamte Mythologie wäre eine Art Projektion des kollektiven Unbewußten.”®? Thus the fear of the German population becoming a "mixed people," the "German language being destroyed," German women being “dishonored,” and the general fear of “Islamization” is diagnosed as being a result of self-experience and the Herero Wars. The root of mythology, says Jung, is the projection of a collective unconsciousness into “legends, fairytales, and historical persons.”** The migrant in Am Konigsweg is constructed as a projection, as a character in mythology, just like Oedipus or Creon. His narrative constructs — and conceals — meaning and truth. Jelinek thus apposes Freud’s and Jung’s theories in replacing the dream analysis as the via regia to the unconscious of the individual with the analysis of myth (we will return to this later) to access the foundations of the collective unconsciousness. The narrative of the migrant gives one an easier understanding of the world if, to analyze it, one needs nothing but oneself. And the construction of meaning through myth is done by the unconscious, therefore no fault can be attached to it, but the horizon might be broadened, so that a sense of self gives meaning to more than a “piled-up potential of hate”. This is probably, emphatically put, one of the essential “missions” of art. Or at least it is one way to see it. Art, in its various forms, gives the opportunity for a broader experience and even understanding of oneself and the world we live in. This not only applies to so-called “high-culture” [Hochkultur], where Jilet locates her argument, but also for pop-cultural phenomena such as comedy and pop music. In ending her argument on the opposition of the Christianization of Namibia against the much feared Islamization of the West, Jilet returns the debate to multiculturality and to the question of religious powers. The play itself, as we will see later, uses a number of projections, in a broader sense, images, as well. These give an additional discursive dimension to the play. The text’s references are thus included in the production of the play. ? Sigmund Freud: Briefe an Wilhelm Fliefs. 1887-1904, ed. J. Moussaieff Masson, trans. Michael Schröter, Frankfurt a. M., Fischer 1999, 108-109. 33 Carl Gustav Jung: Die Wirklichkeit der Seele, München, Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag, 1990, $ 325. 34 In my future dissertation, I will address the historiographical aspects of Jelinek’s work. s 199 "
