INDIVIDUAL DECLARATION

Tax proceedings that involve examining even the most intimate emails give Elfriede Jelinek cause to look back at her life. She writes about the Jewish part of her family for the first time in literary form. Reports about the fate of relatives who fled from Austria during the Nazi era, who were deported and murdered, have found their way into official data. At the same time, her personal financial case also leads her to reflect about global capital movements. To what extent do states still profit today from expropriated Jewish assets? Conversely, how many Nazi bigwigs were compensated without further ado after 1945? And what are the current tax avoidance schemes or actual fraud scandals from Cum-Ex dealing to Wirecard?

As autobiographical as it is universal, as sarcastic as it is angry – Jelinek not only settles a score with herself in Angabe der Person, but also with society more interested in perpetrators than their victims and traces the widely ramified money trails as one of the biggest secrets in the modern economy.