Zombies and mourning in Elfriede Jelinek's Die Kinder der Toten

For Jelinek, the language of the victim is almost indistinguishable from lower-middle class clichés. On the other hand, she has not abandoned all hope of genuine communication. A recurring image in the texts could be said to function as a bridge between these two impulses: the dead or undead woman. The vampires in Krankheit oder moderne Frauen and Kinder der Toten, the dead princess in Der Tod und das Mädchen II could be seen as both the critical recycling of pop cultural images and as something more: an existence beyond existence, a life beyond patriarchal consumer culture. In places, female vampires could even be read as alternatives to victimhood, as extrapatriarchal utopian beings. My paper investigates the degree to which Jelinek can be said to have found an authentic alternative to the language of the victim in the image of the zombie.