PROVOCATION IS the tool of choice of Austrian writer and dramatist Elfriede Jelinek. Mass walkouts from one of her plays in Düsseldorf, however, suggest that, even for a Nobel prize laureate, it is not necessarily a good idea to mix the Holocaust and cannibalism.
Jelinek's play Rechnitzrelates events from May 1945 when a Thyssen heiress and her dinner party guests massacred 180 Jewish forced labourers. The bodies were discovered by accident 30 years later in a mass grave on the Austrian-Hungarian border.
The play has caused controversy because of how Jelinek chooses to end the evening, with dialogue from the internet chats of German cannibal Armin Meiwes, who achieved worldwide notoriety for killing and consuming a victim in 2001.
Düsseldorf director Hermann Schmidt-Rahmer defended the closing passage – cut from the play’s premiere in 2008 – as “a typical Jelinek claim, to be seen a metaphorical sense”.
"We are taught to think of the Holocaust as a bureaucratic act," he told the Rheinische Postnewspaper, "but Jelinek is telling us that people were eaten up, not in the literal sense, but in a rampage in the style of Dionysus [the Greek God of ritual madness].
“The cannibal text is put in at the end very consciously,” he added, “as a wake-up call that forces resistance through provocation.”
Audiences seem to be feeling more of the provocation than the wake-up call. “I feel sorry for anyone involved in this production,” said one audience member to his neighbour at the premiere.
When the woman said she was the play’s directorial assistant, and proud of it, the man reportedly spat in her face and walked out.
In an effort to calm tempers, the theatre has organised discussions between directors, actors and audiences. “The piece is so disturbing because it sucks you into a slipstream of incomprehension where you can’t escape,” said actor Daniel Christensen.
“The question is whether, in the circumstances of the time, I would have become a perpetrator too,” one woman in the audience said.
“For me the problematic point isn’t quoting the cannibal but the opportunity this gives me to distance myself comfortably [from the piece].”