Gitta Honegger:In most plays one wonders what happens next. But in Totenauberg one is always in suspense about what will happen to a given word–the way you start with one word and play around with the root until something quite different comes out at the end of an unbelievable play of verbal transformations.

Elfriede Jelinek: Yes, I don’t work with alliterations, but with the word itself, all the way to the cheapest pun.

Your critique manifests itself in Heidegger’s language itself.

Yes, yes. Oskar Maria Graf also wrote a Text ridiculing Heidegger; that’s very easy, one can expose Heidegger’s most serious philosophical texts as ridiculous. That would have been too cheap for me. It wouldn’t have been appropriate in view of the enormity of the subject – how German thinkers, let themselves be corrupted by Nazis, by – as I said before – unspirit personified. One has only to look at the history of German philosophy: all philosophy departments were brought into line. The Jews were thrown out and institutions changed over seamlessly to nativist, nationalist stuff. It wasn’t just Heidegger. He happened to be the most famous, there were many more.