About the work
Angabe der Person (roughly: Personal Particulars) is a text for the theatre by Elfriede Jelinek, which Rowohlt also published as a book of about 190 pages in November 2022. The text does not prescribe a fixed cast. The world premiere took place on 16 December 2022 at Deutsches Theater Berlin, where Jossi Wieler divided the text among three actresses and cut it by about half.
Plot
The starting point is a tax investigation into the author herself: German tax investigators searched her premises, examined private e-mails and tried to prove that the centre of her life was in Munich rather than Vienna; the case was dropped. From this scrutiny of her own person, Jelinek turns to her father's Jewish family and to relatives who were driven out of Austria, deported and murdered. At the same time the text traces the paths of money, from looted Jewish property and neglected restitution to the families of Nazi perpetrators who got their estates back, and on to cum-ex trading and the Wirecard scandal.
Cultural significance
The text was nominated for the Mülheim Drama Prize in 2023, and in the same year the Berlin premiere production won the Nestroy Theatre Prize for best German-language production. Translations exist in Italian, Dutch, Polish and Romanian, among others; the Austrian premiere followed on 9 May 2025 at the Landestheater Niederösterreich in St. Pölten.