Der Teilnehmende Zuschauer: Spectatorship, Community, and Violence in Elfriede Jelinek’s Ein Sportstück

This article discusses the critique of sports spectatorship in Elfriede Jelinek’s 1998 play Ein Sportstück. In contemporary sports-obsessed society, the stadium is often regarded as a model for a type of activated or participatory spectatorship that sublimates individuals into a crowd and builds communal identities. This article argues that Ein Sportstück shows that the commodification of such experiences engenders a narcissistic mode of self-spectatorship where no true deindividuated crowd can coalesce. Instead, the stadium becomes a site where “anything goes” in the pursuit of heightened individual experience, while theories of crowd behavior are selfconsciously invoked to excuse violently transgressive activity. In this sense, this article shows that Jelinek sees sports fans specifically and spectatorship in general as re-instantiating many of the most pernicious modes of conduct that have plagued Austrian society since 1945.