Refugee crisis and the politics of exclusion in Aeschylus’ Suppliants and Elfriede Jelinek’s Die Schutzbefohlenen: an intertextual approach

Elfriede Jelinek’s multi-vocal performance text Die Schutzbefohlenen (The Charges) engages in a pointed intertextual exchange with Aeschylus’ ancient tragedy The Suppliants. Both works dramatize a desperate appeal for asylum: Aeschylus’ chorus of Danaids flee forced marriage, while Jelinek’s 2013 text directly refers to the occupation of a Viennese church by contemporary refugees. This paper explores the critical dialogue between these two plays, arguing that Jelinek redeploys tragedy to interrogate modern Europe’s crisis of sanctuary. Moreover, it analyzes how the playwright dismantles the classical concept of sacred supplication (ικεσία) by exposing its rupture within the framework of the European Union’s exclusionary border policies. Furthermore, the paper demonstrates how Jelinek’s postdramatic techniques – a fractured chorus, cyclical structure, bureaucratic jargon, and the refusal of narrative closure – collectively function to unveil the failure of contemporary European states to honour the democratic and ethical foundations they claim to inherit from antiquity. The concluding section traces how Jelinek’s work transcends its classical source by radically re-imagining its core dilemmas with a critical and enduring ‘afterlife’.