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Elfriede Jelinek was born on 20 October 1946 in the town of
Mürzzuschlag in the Austrian province of Styria. Her father, of
Czech-Jewish origin, was a chemist and worked in strategically important
industrial production during the Second World War, thereby escaping
persecution. Her mother was from a prosperous Vienna family, and Elfriede
grew up and went to school in that city. At an early age, she was
instructed in piano, organ and recorder and went on to study composition
at the Vienna Conservatory. After graduating from the Albertsgymnasium in
1964, she studied theatre and art history at the University of Vienna
while continuing her music studies. In 1971, she passed the organist
diploma examination at the Conservatory.
Elfriede Jelinek began writing poetry while still young. She made her
literary debut with the collection Lisas Schatten in 1967. Through contact
with the student movement, her writing took a socially critical direction.
In 1970 came her satirical novel wir sind lockv?gel baby!. In common with
her next novel, Michael. Ein Jugendbuch für die Infantilgesellschaft
(1972), it had a character of linguistic rebellion, aimed at popular
culture and its mendacious presentation of the good life.
After a few years spent in Berlin and Rome in the early 1970s, Jelinek
married Gottfried Hüngsberg, and divided her time between Vienna and
Munich. She conquered the German literary public with her novels Die
Liebhaberinnen (1975; Women as Lovers, 1994), Die Ausgesperrten (1980;
Wonderful, Wonderful Times, 1990) and the autobiographically based Die
Klavierspielerin (1983; The Piano Teacher, 1988), in 2001 made into an
acclaimed film by Michael Haneke. These novels, each within the framework
of its own problem complex, present a pitiless world where the reader is
confronted with a locked-down regime of violence and submission, hunter
and prey. Jelinek demonstrates how the entertainment industry's clichés
seep into people's consciousness and paralyse opposition to class
injustices and gender oppression. In Lust (1989; Lust, 1992), Jelinek lets
her social analysis swell to fundamental criticism of civilisation by
describing sexual violence against women as the actual template for our
culture. This line is maintained, seemingly in a lighter tone, in Gier.
Ein Unterhaltungsroman (2000), a study in the cold-blooded practice of
male power. With special fervour, Jelinek has castigated Austria,
depicting it as a realm of death in her phantasmagorical novel, Die Kinder
der Toten (1975). Jelinek is a highly controversial figure in her
homeland. Her writing builds on a lengthy Austrian tradition of
linguistically sophisticated social criticism, with precursors such as
Johann Nepomuk Nestroy, Karl Kraus, Elias Canetti, Thomas Bernhard and the
Wiener Group.
The nature of Jelinek's texts is often hard to define. They shift
between prose and poetry, incantation and hymn, they contain theatrical
scenes and filmic sequences. The primacy in her writing has however moved
from novel-writing to drama. Her first radio play, wenn die sonne sinkt
ist für manche schon büroschluss, was very favourably received in 1974.
She has since written a large number of pieces for radio and the theatre,
in which she successively abandoned traditional dialogues for a kind of
polyphonic monologues that do not serve to delineate roles but to permit
voices from various levels of the psyche and history to be heard
simultaneously.
Jelinek's most recent published works for drama,
the so-called "princess dramas" (Der Tod und das M?dchen I-V, 2003), are
variations on one of the writer's basic themes, the inability of women to
fully come to life in a world where they are painted over with
stereotypical images.
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