Endsieg

“Because all of this is about us.”

The crisis of democracy runs deep. Perplexity is spreading. This makes a text that Elfriede Jelinek published on her website barely two weeks after Donald Trump’s renewed election victory in the USA all the more important: Endsieg, a dark epilogue to Am Königsweg, her play about the US election eight years ago.

Here, too, she uses the power of intelligence to dismantle the populist rhetoric of the “new old king” and counteracts the battle cries of the right-wing rioters with what she herself calls a “poem”. While in the earlier piece there was still a palpable sense of bewilderment that someone like Trump could actually win the election, the current balance is alarming. The triumph of the new right is resounding: in Endsieg, those left behind from Am Königsweg become the “people”, an unleashed crowd who love and admire their leader precisely because of his violent, anti-human and anti-democratic intentions. Jelinek depicts the almost cult-like worship of the “new old king” as a divinely chosen saviour with malicious mockery. She also takes aim at the overpowering shadows behind the king, his political and economic networks. The view of attempts to oppose this movement is completely sobering: “I say there is nothing more, there is nothing else, the other no longer exists, there is nothing to look at, only the One still exists,” the blind seer states, describing the fatal collapse of all opposition.

Endsieg is a political-poetic “epilogue” to the hour that belongs on a stage immediately. Falk Richter, who premiered Am Königsweg seven years ago in a multi-award-winning production at the SchauSpielHaus, and his ensemble have accepted this challenge and are presenting an initial sketch of Elfriede Jelinek’s text on the SchauSpielHaus’s main stage barely four weeks after the US election. Not a normal production, but a scenic approach, to be understood as an immediate political-artistic action