Wonderful, Wonderful Times

Four Young People, One Park

Vienna in the late 1950s. A park at night. Four young people — Rainer and Anna, siblings from a bourgeois family with a former Nazi father; Sophie, the daughter of the wealthy bourgeoisie; Hans, from the workers’ tenements — gather to commit unprovoked violence on strangers. The violence is purposeless to outsiders; to them it is the only honest response to the world they have inherited.

Jelinek’s 1980 novel (translated into English a decade later) diagnoses post-war Austria through these four characters: each embodies a different relationship to the fascist inheritance that Austria refused to examine. The bourgeois family reproduces Nazi psychology while presenting itself as cultured. The working-class Hans is trapped by the class system that fascism promised to dissolve. Sophie performs rebellion from a position of economic security that makes rebellion costless.

The Method of Satire

Jelinek’s technique is that of savage irony — she ventriloquises her characters’ self-justifications at length, then turns the logic inside out. The novel does not describe violence and then condemn it; it shows the internal logic that makes violence feel like authenticity to its perpetrators, and lets that logic condemn itself.

The title is ironic throughout: the wonderful times of post-war economic recovery, the economic miracle that Austria shared with Germany, is shown to be built on the repression of what came before.

What Distinguishes This Book

Among the qualities that set Wonderful, Wonderful Times apart: The class analysis is precise and savage — each character embodies a different relationship to Austria’s fascist inheritance; The violence is not gratuitous but diagnostic — it reveals exactly what it is supposed to reveal; and Jelinek’s ironic ventriloquism is fully formed. These strengths are evident from the first pages and sustain across the whole work.

Themes

The thematic concerns of Wonderful, Wonderful Times give it weight beyond its surface narrative. Post-war Austria constructed an identity as Nazi victim that suppressed its role as enthusiastic participant. Class rage in the absence of political outlet turns into random violence. The family is the primary transmission mechanism of fascist psychology. These ideas emerge from the texture of the work rather than explicit statement, which is the mark of ambitious fiction done well.

The Writing

Elfriede Jelinek’s prose in Wonderful, Wonderful Times is the vehicle through which the book’s ideas travel. The style is calibrated to the subject — neither more ornate nor more stripped-down than the material requires. This kind of precision is less common than it appears, and it is one of the reasons the book repays re-reading: there is more in each page than a single pass recovers.

Limitations

Requires some knowledge of Austrian post-war politics for full impact. The relentlessness of the critique can feel airless. These are worth knowing before starting, though they are unlikely to diminish the experience for the readers the book is written for.

Who This Is For

Readers of The Piano Teacher and Lust ready to explore Jelinek’s earlier work, and readers interested in literary engagements with fascism and class.

Four Young People in Postwar Vienna

Wonderful, Wonderful Times (originally Die Ausgesperrten, 1980) follows four young people in late-1950s Vienna who commit acts of casual, escalating violence: Rainer and Anna, intellectually pretentious twins drawn to nihilistic philosophy; Sophie, a wealthy and coldly amoral girl; and Hans, a working-class youth whose mother is a committed socialist. They beat and rob strangers in the park, not out of need but out of a void where meaning should be — and Elfriede Jelinek traces that void directly to the families and the society that produced them. Most damning is Rainer and Anna’s father, a former SS officer who tyrannizes his household and photographs his wife in degrading poses, a man whose private brutality embodies the fascism that postwar Austria pretended to have left behind. The novel, partly inspired by a real crime, builds with cold inevitability toward a shocking act of domestic violence, and its argument is unsparing: the war did not end the violence; it merely drove it into the home and the next generation.

A Difficult, Essential Writer

This is not an easy or a comforting book. Jelinek — who would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2004 — writes in a deliberately cold, ironic, distancing style that refuses the reader any character to admire or any catharsis to anticipate, and her relentless critique of Austrian society can feel airless to readers expecting conventional narrative pleasures. Some familiarity with Austria’s postwar mythology of itself as Hitler’s “first victim” deepens the impact considerably. But for readers prepared for its severity, Wonderful, Wonderful Times is a powerful early statement of the themes Jelinek would pursue throughout her career: the violence beneath bourgeois respectability, the family as the transmitter of fascist psychology, and the rage that festers where class resentment has no political outlet. It pairs naturally with her better-known The Piano Teacher, and for readers interested in postwar European literature, the legacy of fascism, or one of the most uncompromising voices in contemporary letters, it is essential, if bracing, reading.

Read today, the novel feels disturbingly prescient about the ways unexamined historical guilt and unaddressed economic resentment can curdle into violence, which gives this early work a relevance well beyond its specific Austrian setting. It is a demanding book, but a formidable one, and an essential entry in the catalog of one of Europe’s most uncompromising writers.

Our rating: 4.1/5 — A savage, precise diagnosis of Austria’s fascist inheritance and the class system that perpetuated it.

Reading Guides

• Elfriede Jelinek Books in Order: Complete Reading Guide