Die Ankunft - schedule, program & buy tickets

(WOLKEN.HEIM. / RECHNITZ - DER WÜRGEENEGL / DAS SCHWEIGENDE MÄDCHEN / DAS LEBEWOHL - NO: DIE ANKUNFT)

Four theater texts by Elfriede Jelinek from almost four decades, written between 1988 and 2025. DIE ANKUNFT is a theatrical marathon at the right time - here, in the land of the mountains, land by the river. And now that even the last firewalls in Europe are beginning to crumble.

1945, the last days of the war: a lavish party is held at Rechnitz Castle in Burgenland. As a highlight, guests shoot around 200 Jewish forced laborers. In the 2000s, a right-wing extremist terrorist cell goes on an unchallenged killing spree through Germany. In both cases, the legal process is slow, witnesses remain silent, evidence disappears. And today? The political center is falling silent, the shift to the right is in full swing, nationalist and radical thinking is becoming socially acceptable again - and frightening continuities are becoming increasingly recognizable.

Elfriede Jelinek distils both contemporary history and the immediate present into great literature. RECHNITZ (DER WÜRGEENGEL) is her central work about Nazi crimes and their legacy, in DAS SCHWEIGENDE MÄDCHEN she deals with the murders committed by the NSU and the subsequent court cases. And in DAS LEBEWOHL - NEIN: DIE ANKUNFT, she escalates the triumphant, doltish rhetoric of right-wing inciters into a breathless hymn of power-grabbing fantasies and fascist nature poetry. Jan Philipp Gloger, who has been exploring the work of Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek for many years in productions, including premieres and first performances, assembles four of her plays into a large mental edifice of repression and return. An evening about the traditional lines of nationalist thought and right-wing violence through the centuries - and an evening that traces the madness and laments the forgetting and silencing. Jelinek's early work WOLKEN.HEIM serves as a prologue, in which Hölderlin, Hegel and other classics already speak in a chorus of national pathos - and thus prepare the ground for the future.

Subject to change without notice.