Elfriede Jelinek wrote a play about the pandemic: “Noise.

Blind vision.

Blind seeing! ".

Or maybe you have to say: She wrote it after all.

Because when the weekly newspaper Die Zeit asked artists, authors, directors and musicians for workshop reports a little more than a year ago and wanted to know what they were working on in times of the pandemic, a wide variety of cultural workers answered all sorts of things - and at the very end of the survey was: " Elfriede Jelinek makes it short: 'I'm not working on anything at all.' "

Julia Encke

Responsible editor for the features section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung in Berlin.

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    This earned the Nobel Prize winner great sympathy.

    The sentence was photographed, shared on social media and quoted, and not only because it was funny after the sometimes long explanations of the others, but because Jelinek made an interruption with her answer - which also contained the refusal to answer .

    A pause at a moment when, due to the corona pandemic, which was still new at the time, the self-evident aspects of social coexistence were suddenly questioned and in a reality that was perceptibly changing every day, even for artistic production, it was not clear whether one could simply continue as before.

    Without interruption

    The artist Hito Steyerl, whose largest retrospective to date is currently on view at the Center Pompidou in Paris, answered the same question in exactly the opposite way. For her there was no interruption at all, nor did she want to create one: “I'm working on the same topics as before,” she said. “They haven't disappeared because of Covid-19, but are also intensifying: social inequality, surveillance, automation through digitization and AI, racism, the art world in crisis. The cultural sector is currently pushing into the virtual world, as if there was something to colonize: in fact, for many this will be a step towards voluntary self-saving. Theaters, museums, libraries, the educational sector: the public space par excellence must not be shifted into the gated communities of digital platforms, not even under pressure to save. "

    In a certain way, in this opposite direction, the central questions for artistic production in times of the pandemic are articulated.

    Was this pandemic - in addition to the often dramatic economic losses associated with it - a fundamentally new experience that also called for new artistic means?

    Was there a productive answer to them at all, or was it just paralysis and silence at first?

    Or did it reinforce the problems that were already there, so that one could simply continue artistically, with perhaps more blatant, but not completely different aesthetic means?

    Tönnies, Ischgl, Lockdown

    Elfriede Jelinek then continued to work and wrote the play that was premiered last weekend under the direction of Karin Beier at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg. It is - as a written text - a monologue about corona, lockdown, animal husbandry, Tönnies, Ischgl, politics, conspiracy theories and corona deniers with which Jelinek captures the talk of the others: “Listen to me when I defend myself. I cannot explain anything that others have not already explained. I cannot show any behavior from which one could recognize something ”, are the first sentences of the text. “You will never be able to decide what I originally scooped, experienced, achieved and what has been copied and talked about. I turn on the light, open the newspaper and copy it down. ”And you realize: Everything as always with Elfriede Jelinek.