“Abortion Is Not an Option”: How steirischer herbst Failed to Premiere Elfriede Jelinek’s Burgtheater

9.5.2025 / Herwig G. Höller

In this blog, steirischer herbst research fellow and journalist Herwig G. Höller shares his discoveries in the festival archive. They frequently reveal surprising connections between steirischer herbst and the world of—local as well as international—politics.

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On 18 May this year, Elfriede Jelinek’s Burgtheater premieres in a production by Milo Rau at the Burgtheater itself as part of the Vienna Festival—forty-three years after the play was published in the literary magazine manuskripte, forty years after the Posse mit Gesang (Farce with Songs) was first staged in Bonn, and twenty years after its Austrian premiere by the company Theater im Bahnhof at Graz’s Heimatsaal.

As early as 1983, the then-director of steirischer herbst, Peter Vujica, had put great efforts into having the play premiere in Graz. Ultimately, letters in the festival archive suggest, he failed because of the self-censorship of potential partners.

“I still think your Burgtheater is excellent, and I am pregnant with this project; abortion is not an option,” Vujica wrote to Jelinek on 5 July 1983 in a letter that began with the salutation “Schönste” (Prettiest).

The festival’s ambitions had already become public: Burgtheater was to be directed by the acclaimed Hans Hollmann, and Jelinek was certain that the performance could trigger the biggest theater scandal of postwar Austria, the Südost-Tagespost reported on 19 May 1983. The conservative party paper noted that “the absurd play fiercely satirizes the behavior of a famous and ‘holy’ Viennese acting dynasty during the Nazi era”—without mentioning the names Wessely or Hörbiger.

Right from the start, it was clear to Vujica that staging Burgtheater would be no easy task. On 11 January 1983, he wrote to Frankfurt-based director Horst Zankl that people in Graz were “somehow afraid of legal consequences” and that he needed the municipal theater’s manager to agree to the project.

Seven months later, in a letter to Jürgen Bansemer, Jelinek’s German publisher, Vujica indicated that a premiere at steirischer herbst was unlikely. Because of the way the festival operated, he had no building and no ensemble at his disposal.

“To my regret, the Vereinigte Bühnen Graz [the umbrella organization of the city’s public theaters] have not yet shown me any love. There are various reasons for this—including the fact that they don’t want to offend the sacred Burgtheater. Dr. Hollmann also suggested to me that he would like to make changes, because, of course, he doesn’t want this production to forever bar him from the Burgtheater,” Vujica stated. He went on to explain that he would nevertheless try to interest Berlin’s Schillertheater and its general manager Boy Gobert in the play. If that didn’t work out, he would try Schauspielhaus Graz for a third time.

Why these further efforts failed isn’t clear. In any case, Burgtheater premiered in Bonn on 10 November 1985 and—according to the Vienna Festival—established Jelinek’s reputation as a Nestbeschmutzerin (nest-fouler).