EThere is a new book by Elfriede Jelinek. The Rowohlt-Verlag announces that in “Angabe der Person” one can find out all sorts of things about the author’s biography that were not previously known. But what does that actually mean? Basically, it’s gratifying when there’s something new to read from her, after all, Jelinek is now 76 years old and has won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
However, this is not uncommon at all, since she publishes a new play almost every year (and as such, “Angabe der Person” will also be shown at the Deutsches Theater Berlin from December), as well as newspaper texts, essays and notes. All of this can be read on their website; among the more than 500 texts collected there, a single book seems almost irrelevant. At the moment, however, the website, which has existed since 1996, cannot be edited by Jelinek. Her husband, the computer scientist Gottfried Hüngsberg, had set it up and managed it for her, but he died suddenly this September.
Her marriage and the associated lifestyle, which meant that Jelinek lived alternately with Hüngsberg in Munich and in her hometown of Vienna, appears right at the beginning of “Personal Information” as the trigger for a tax investigation at Jelinek. The Munich tax office confiscated numerous documents, including private e-mails. The author had to be proven that she was actually also subject to tax in Munich and had evaded taxes. The proceedings were ultimately discontinued. In her book she now turns the tables and radicalizes the “exchange of information”.
After she was forced to reveal things she didn’t want to share in the tax investigation investigations, she now forces information into her text that the tax office didn’t ask her for. The circumstances of your life are as much a result of your personal choices as those choices are the result of external circumstances. A biography, as “Angabe der Person” demonstrates, is a fairly impersonal matter: one’s own measly life is determined by the course of social history, capital and institutionally exercised violence. Jelinek takes action against this in a self-assertion that can be read as a monologue, as a novel, as a soliloquy or pamphlet.
For Jelinek, biography is not interesting as a psychology, it is just a kind of taste in the mouth. Already on the second page of the book, Jelinek calls up her experience with the tax authorities as a continuation of her family history: “My penniless grandfather in hiding with others, my grandfather was a whiner, incessant Geseire, he didn’t want to go here, he didn’t want to go there, in a He didn’t want a safe third country, none offered to him either, he didn’t want to go to a concentration camp either, he was just choosy, he didn’t want to go anywhere, he just wanted to stay where he was, but that wasn’t possible, because of the frequently changing religious beliefs , which no god ever wanted to hear or answer, was also of no use. But he didn’t have any money, so he was barred from entering Switzerland, we’re really sorry.”
