In the fall of 2013, 60 asylum seekers occupied a church in Vienna. In 2014, most of them had been expelled from Austria. Shortly after hundreds of Africans drowned off the shores of Lampedusa. The Austrian Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek wrote Die Schutzbefohlenen as a response to these events. In the text, the refugee disaster from the outermost of the EU borders, the occupation of the church in Vienna, the causes and the consequences are linked to Ayschylos’ tragedy “The Suppliants” in a polyphonic chorus that confronts the European humanity.
