“Hollow Men” and Übermenschen : The Aporia of Competing Intertextual Motifs in Elfriede Jelinek’s Rechnitz (Der Würgeengel)

Abstract:Elfriede Jelinek’s 2009 play, Rechnitz (Der Würgeengel), concerns the 1945 massacre of approximately 180 Jewish men in the eponymous town of Rechnitz. Like much of Jelinek’s oeuvre, the play brings Austria’s fraught relationship with its National Socialist past into question, for which the Rechnitz massacre is an analogy. In the postdramatic appropriation of the Greek chorus that dominates her work, Jelinek crafts a distinctive pastiche of (often creatively [mis]appropriated) intertextual imagery to decidedly satirical effect. The diametric contradiction between the intertextual motifs of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Übermensch and T. S. Eliot’s “hollow man” in Rechnitz (Der Würgeengel) poses a double standard and a fundamental aporia. On the one hand, the perpetrators’ weakness is applauded, while on the other, the massacre victims are derided for being too weak to prevent their own deaths. Such a contradiction signals Jelinek’s trademark postdramatic satire, and in turn the duplicitousness she posits as inherent to the myth of Austrian non-participation in the Holocaust.