ACFNY RECOMMENDS | LECTURE | Rechnitz: Austria’s Dirty Little Secret – A Rare Conversation with Nobel Laureate Elfriede Jelinek
Professor Gitta Honegger, a childhood friend of 2004 Nobel Laureate Elfriede Jelinek, will give a talk about Jelinek’s recent internationally acclaimed play Rechnitz. The play recounts the murder of 200 Hungarian Jews in the Austrian town of Rechnitz on the eve of the Russian army’s arrival in 1945. The massacre was initially shrouded in secrecy until several witnesses went public with an intriguing web of half-truths and deception transforming this crime against humanity into myth. The events at Rechnitz, while speaking directly to Austrian involvement in the Holocaust, also resonate around the globe today where ethnic violence exists. Professor Honegger’s lecture about Rechnitz will also include excerpts from a rare and exclusive video conversation with Elfriede Jelinek.
Elfriede Jelinek is an Austrian novelist and playwright who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004. Her books include The Piano Teacher, Wonderful, Wonderful Times, Lust, Women as Lovers, and Greed. Born in 1946, she represents the first post-World War II generation of Austrian writers struggling to come to terms with their country’s involvement in the Holocaust. The examination of Austria’s ambivalence in dealing with its past has been a driving force in her many plays and novels.
Professor Gitta Honegger (Arizona State University) is a Fulbright and Guggenheim Fellow. She has translated plays by Elfriede Jelinek, Thomas Bernhard, Peter Handke and Elias Canetti, among others and is the author of the award winning cultural biography Thomas Bernhard: The Making of an Austrian.
This event is co-presented by the Leo Baeck Institute.
For more information, please visit the YIVO Website.
VENUE
YIVO Institute for Jewish Research
Forchheimer Auditorium
Center for Jewish History
15 West 16th Street
New York, NY 10011
Tel 212-246-6080
Admission: $15 general, $10 YIVO members
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