rein Gold

ein bühnenessay is a prose work by Elfriede Jelinek, the Austrian winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2004, published in 2013 by Rowohlt Verlag.

rein GOLD is cast in dialogic form at the opening of which Brünnhilde diagnoses her father Wotan to be a victim of capitalism because he, too, has fallen into the trap of wanting to own a castle he cannot afford ("This happens in every second family.").

In Jelinek's sarcastic phonetic pun, the letter "h" in the first word of the title is dropped.

Among others, the work is inspired by the mid-nineteenth-century revolution in Vienna (as studied in a publication by Hermann Jellinek in 1848); by The Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (published in London in 1848); by Marx's Das Kapital (1867-1894); and by Richard Wagner's opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen (1848-1874) and a recent study thereof by law expert Wolfgang Schild entitled Staatsdämmerung (2007).

[4] An English translation by Gitta Honegger is planned for January 2021, to be published in the UK by Fitzcarraldo Editions.