About the work
Elfriede Jelinek's play was premiered in 2008 at the Münchner Kammerspiele under Jossi Wieler. The work deals with a historical event from the last days of the war in 1945: the Rechnitz massacre, in which about 180 Hungarian Jews were murdered in a single night at the castle of Countess Margit Batthyány-Thyssen — while the company upstairs went on celebrating. The subtitle refers to Luis Buñuel's 1962 film The Exterminating Angel.
Plot
No linear plot, but a collage: messengers tell of the massacre, which to this day has never been legally clarified, because all the main witnesses were murdered or made to disappear in time. The stage is a party scene — champagne, music, dancing — while, unseen, the murdered lament. Jelinek interweaves the guilt of those who knew with that of the perpetrators, Hungarian aristocratic history with the German perpetrator psyche, Buñuel's deranged dinner company with the real Countess Batthyány, who died peacefully in Switzerland after the war. The messengers try to bear witness — but founder on the uncertainty of what has been handed down.
Cultural significance
Rechnitz is Jelinek's most intense engagement with unpunished Nazi perpetration and became a key text for the new generation of German and Austrian directors. The play was performed at the Deutsches Theater Berlin under Andreas Kriegenburg, at the Akademietheater Vienna and on numerous other stages. The Munich production of 2008 under Jossi Wieler was invited to the 2009 Theatertreffen. Countess Batthyány-Thyssen and her connection to the Thyssen dynasty made the play a controversial commentary on the unbroken continuities of German industrialist families.