Inspired by Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi (1896), Trump gets his comeuppance in Germany. Merde!
“‘Monster’s Paradise,’ lampooning US President Donald Trump, has world premiere at Hamburg Opera,” by Ronald Blum, AP News, February 3, 2026.
HAMBURG, Germany (AP) — Tobias Kratzer spoke in disbelief ahead of the world premiere of “Monster’s Paradise” by Olga Neuwirth and Elfriede Jelinek, which features a gluttonous, ravenous, insatiable President-King, lampooning U.S. President Donald Trump.
“The metaphor has become a reality,” the Hamburg State Opera artistic director said in his office Sunday morning. “I’m really hoping in — what is it, eight hours? — the piece is not completely outdated because up until now it has always gone closer and closer to not being a satire but being reality.”
Jelinek, 79 and winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature, collaborated with Neuwirth for the first time in two decades, the Austrian duo combining on a German-language libretto. The 57-year-old Neuwirth won the 2022 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition, three years after she became the first woman composer with a work presented at the Vienna State Opera. Read the whole article here.
Can a good story make something more valuable? What if it’s entirely untrue? And what if the person telling the story — like, say, a novelist — is a kind of professional liar; does a professional lie give an object more value? And, hey, what if you could buy something like that on EBay?
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“), each of whom is curious about the meaning and value we assign to objects, met in Boston earlier this year, they came up with the idea for the fiction-auction project 
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