Abstract (eng)
The following master thesis takes a look on the Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek and her play "Die Schutzbefohlenen" focusing on the terms “fremd” (strange) and “Verfremdung” (alienation), in consideration of the complicated refugee situation in Europe between 2013 and 2016. It is elaborating on the question which aesthetic means are being utilized by Jelinek to display the “Fremde” (alien) and how it becomes tangible for the reader.
Following Bertolt Brecht’s “V-Effekt” (the “A-effect”), intertextual references between "Die Schutzbefohlenen" and Aeschylus "The Suppliants" as well as the booklet "Zusammenleben in Österreich. Werte, die uns verbinden" of the Austrian Federal Ministry of the Interior are shown.
Furthermore, repetitive motifs, characteristics and rhetorical features of Jelinek are presented to demonstrate her process of “Verfremdung”.
Above all, the paper reviews the political situation in forced displacement and its global effects. It comes to the conclusion that in a literary text like "Die Schutzbefohlenen", the theatre space and political reality are colliding and, consequently breaking apart the barriers that used to seperate them. As a result, the author herself gets to act as a (major) participant in social processes of the present reality.