The children of the dead

This article covers the novel; for the film by Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska (2019) based on it, see Die Kinder der Toten (film) .

Die Kinder der Toten is a novel by Elfriede Jelinek published in 1995 by Rowohlt Verlag , which is widely regarded as her opus magnum .

Die Kinder der Toten was awarded the Bremen Literature Prize in 1996. Next to the internet novel Neid Jelinek, the novel is the most extensive work and is notorious for its variety of characters, its intertwined storylines and its ironic-time-critical cross-references. Depending on the genre, it can be assigned to the postmodern novel and horror literature. Jelinek himself describes it as a “ghost novel in the tradition of the gothic novel ”.

The novel is an intense preoccupation with the memory and repression of the Holocaust . This is accompanied by an associative, language-playing style of writing, which constantly breaks the linear narrative time through looped and repeated narrative strands.

The novel occupies a unique position in German literary history , since all of its characters are undead in a state of decay and are presented as dumb zombies in the manner of splatter . Gudrun Bichler, Edgar Gstranz and Karin Frenzel are the three main undead, unable to speak, sex-obsessed and brutal. Opposed to them is the mass of Holocaust victims who want to regain new life through the couple Gudrun and Edgar. This fails because Gudrun and Edgar are also undead. The novel setting sinks into a mud flood .

shape

The novel is divided into 35 chapters, framed by the prologue and epilogue . The novel opens with thanks to the “ Satanism researcher ” Josef Dvorak on page 4 and a graphic by the artist Eran Schaerf on page 5, whose Hebrew characters say: “The spirits of the dead, who have disappeared so long, should come and their children to greet."

According to Delf Schmidt , the editor of Elfriede Jelinek, this motto is - contrary to unproven interpretations, the saying comes from the Torah or the Kabbalah - Jelinek's own sentence translated into Hebrew. According to Schmidt, the graphic should protect the novel like a mezuzah .

Plot and narrative

The starting point of the story in the prologue is a bus accident in the mountains. The authorial description of what happened in the accident leaves out the cause of the accident, the collision of two buses, and is devoted to the traumatized scenario after the accident. The narrator associates the unemotional removal of the mountains of corpses (in the Holocaust) - after their murder - with the observation of the removal of the wreckage. This sets the theme in the prologue: The follow-up to the disaster no longer touches on the cause, but only deals with the "clean-up work". The novel is therefore an accusation of forgetting the cause of mass murder (under National Socialism ) and formulates a fantastic project of remembrance that wishes to allow the causal past to enter.

Like almost all of Jelinek's literature, the novel is set in Styria and Vienna. The scenes are the Pension “Alpenrose” in Styria, the pilgrimage church Maria Zell , the mountains, valley gorges and a concrete pool in the forest. The scenes in Vienna are the central cemetery , old buildings and cellars of hospitals and the psychiatry " Am Spiegelgrund ", euthanasia facility from 1940 to 1945.

As it progresses, the places that were initially described realistically change in a fantastic way, as we know them from romantic horror stories, and no longer form a fixed point of reference. The Pension Alpenrose is slipping into a different spatial and temporal order, the novel calls it a gender “historical space”. In the last third of the novel, the dead Nazi victims pour into the pension. The old-fashioned suitcases are piled up, on the stairs you can hear the babble of voices and the clatter of feet. In the dining room, however, human hair grows on the furniture and human nails grow on the window sills. In snapshots in Vienna, rough handwashers, the evacuation of Jewish people, or so-called mannequin students are shown, next to the mummy of an old man who died in front of the television: The times go from the 1940s through the 1950s to the present day. The topography and temporality of the novel start to move, the undead figures multiply and are dragged through the ages. Sometimes their movements are trapped in time-lapse and terribly fast. Then, in turn, the characters become victims of rapes and murders, which they witness. In a recurring obsession, the characters masturbate, force each other to have oral sex or penetrate the other violently.

This fantastic, at the same time obscene and brutal way of opening the present to the past by allowing traumatized memories and, conversely, opening the past to the present through the return of the dead, is narrated by quoting mythical narratives of the uncovering of hidden truth in discursive counterpoint . Jelinek quotes those variants of Western narrative that find redemption and truth in the necromantic descent to the dead and in the ascent to light. It becomes the Christian redemption through the bodily resurrection of the dead to God, the descent of Orpheus into Hades , the ascent to the light of knowledge as Plato's allegory of the cave pretends, as well as the uncovering of the truth in the model of the apocalypse against the background of a postmodern, media-controlled present shown in the ironic cover of Jelinek's criticism. The cited stories, which represent symbols of occidental discovery on the borderline between life and death, are used by the novel by short-circuiting them with his memory project.

The 35 chapters are held together by arcs of tension in which the undead figures are integrated. The climax of the novel can be understood as the entry of the undead into another dimension when they are shocked to encounter a renewed reproduction. The dead sex chapters between Edgar and Gudrun offer cruel tension when the characters decay during sex. The individual chapters are divided into paragraphs that are assigned to a figure or a pair of figures. The narrative perspective, however, also changes within a sentence structure from the auto-comment of an ego, to the comment of a we-collective to an authorial narrative style. A chapter usually has a discursive focus that is visualized on the levels of metaphorical speaking. (Karin Frenzel flaps his wings, for example, when the story deals with the non-unfoldability of armored personality structures. That is, the metaphors of language are retranslated and action-inducing.) This happening, which results from the - here so-called - 'language surfaces' become the Figures and locations are assigned, which goes hand in hand with the duplications of figures and locations. In the last third of the novel, however, a constant change in perspectives and language areas determines the sequence of paragraphs and chapters.

Intertextual references

The novel gains its special quality from its multi-layered text and language levels. There are intertextual references to the Bible, in particular to the Book of Moses , to Martin Heidegger's interpretation of Plato's allegory of the cave, to Hans Lebert's novel Die Wolfshaut , to Paul Celan's death fugue , and to the Austrian national anthem . Numerous films are also cited - the best known is the horror film Carnival of Souls by Herk Harvey. In its critical commentaries, the novel refers to public figures from the time of National Socialism to the present day, including high-ranking politicians, celebrities from the sports and entertainment industry, as well as German scholars and writers.

Contemporary historical backgrounds

Die Kinder der Toten encompasses all topics from Jelinek's literary work (criticism of work and gender relations, racism and anti-Semitism ) and represents her political commitment against right-wing populist tendencies.

The novel was published just in time for the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II . With his focus on the memory of the Shoah , he reacts to the political debates on the legacy of fascism as they have been waged in Austria since the mid-1980s. Triggered by the affair surrounding the election of the then Austrian Federal President Kurt Waldheim , a former member of the SA , Austria's victim doctrine was publicly discussed. With the State Treaty of 1955 , Austria did not see itself as the actual perpetrator country, but as a victim of National Socialism . It was not until 1991 that the then Federal Chancellor Franz Vranitzky officially admitted Austria's perpetration under National Socialism and revised the legend of the victims.

The reappraisal of the memory of fascism and institutionalized research into the extermination of the Jews or the euthanasia program are therefore among the more recent concerns of the Austrian Republic. The novel critically accompanies this upheaval in Austrian memory when it seeks artistic expressions for the field that spanned between Vranitzky's revision of the so-called sacrificial lie and the threatening rise of the right-wing populist FPÖ front man Jörg Haider . Jörg Haider was able to expand his power until the year 2000 so that the FPÖ became a ruling party, whereupon Austria was warned by the EU with sanctions . Jelinek's novel thus captures the fermenting political climate in Austria at the beginning of the 1990s and delivers a critical swan song for the apparent turning point in memory.

Translations

• Dutch: De kinderen van de doden. Acc .: Ria van Hengel. Amsterdam 1998.
• Russian: Deti mertvych. Acc .: Tatjana Nabatnikova. St. Petersburg 2006.
• French: Enfants des Morts. Acc .: Olivier Le Lay. Paris 2007.
• Polish: Dzieci umarlych. Acc .: Agnieszka Kowaluk. Warsaw 2009.
• Japanese: Shisha no Kodomotachi. Acc .: Keiko Nakagome, Kazuko Okamtot, Tzuneo Sunaga. Tokyo 2010. With a foreword by Elfriede Jelinek.

filming

For the 50th edition of the avant-garde festival steirischer herbst , Jelinek approved her novel for a "free cinematic adaptation" by the American performance collective Nature Theater of Oklahoma. The feature film, The Children of the Dead , shot in and around Neuberg an der Mürz , was produced by Ulrich Seidl and invited to the 2019 Berlin International Film Festival .

Reviews

• Iris Radisch : Maxima Moralia. In: Die Zeit No. 38 from September 15, 1995 online at zeit.de
• Gisela von Wysocki : The children of the dead. Elfriede Jelinek lets those murdered during the war speak, in: Die Zeit No. 34, August 16, 2012, p. 49.
• Pia Janke : Catalog raisonné Elfriede Jelinek. Vienna 2004.

Secondary literature

• Andrea Albrecht: "It never got so funny later". Notes on the relationship between memory, the grotesque and irony in Elfriede Jelinek's “Die Kinder der Toten”. In: Marian Holona, ​​Claus Zittel (ed.): Positions of Jelinek research. Contributions to the Polish-German Elfriede Jelinek Conference Olsztyn 2005. Bern 2008, pp. 87–104.
• Thomas Ballhausen, Günter Krenn: This is Hell: Elfriede Jelinek's "Children ot the Dead" and Her Rewriting of Herk Harvey's "Carnival of Soul". In: Alice Autelitano, Valentina Re (eds.): Il racconto del film. narrating the film. Udine 2006.
• Jens Birkmeyer: Elfriede Jelinek. Mad wake. In: Norbert Otto Eke, Hartmut Steinecke: Shoah in German-language literature. Berlin 2006.
• Anja Gerigk: Negotiation and reflection: taboo (re) formation between literature and culture using the example of Elfriede Jelinek's “The Children of the Dead”. In: Claude Conter (Hrsg.): Justitiableness and legality. Legalization of literature and film in modern times. Amsterdam 2010.
• Jutta Gsoels-Lorensen: Elfriede Jelinek's “The Children of the Dead”: Representing the Holocaust as an Austrian Ghost Story. In: Germanic Review. Volume 81, No 4, fall 2006.
• Roland Innerhofer: “People appear and disappear again”. Horror scenarios in Elfriede Jelinek's novel “The Children of the Dead”. In: Biedermann, Claudio / Stiegler, Christian (eds.): Horror and Aesthetics. Konstanz 2008, pp. 86-101.
• Marlies Janz : "After 45, the story decided to start all over again ..." Elfriede Jelinek's destruction of the myth of historical 'innocence'. In: Bartens, Daniela and Pechmann, Paul (eds.): Elfriede Jelinek. The international reception. Dossier extra. Vienna 1997.
• Rainer Just: Corpses of symbols - reflections on the undead in Elfriede Jelinek's work. PDF
• Klaus Kastberger: We children of the dead. Spectra from Elfriede Jelinek
• Klaus Kastberger , Stefan Maurer (ed.): Home and horror with Elfriede Jelinek. (Vienna: special number 2019)
• Joachim Lux : Home, Death and Nothing. 42,500 characters about the local poet Elfriede Jelinek: short and sweet. In: Workbook Elfriede Jelinek. Theater der Zeit, July 2006 PDF
• Maria Regina Kecht: The Polyphony of Remembrance. Reading "The Childeren of the Dead". In: Lamb-Faffelberger, Margarete / Konzett, Matthias P. (eds.): Elfriede Jelinek. Writing Woman, Nation, and Identity. Madison 2007. pp. 189-220.
• Moira Mertens: The Aesthetics of the Undead. Berlin 2008 PDF
• Julie Miess: New Monsters. Postmodern horror texts and authors. Cologne 2010.
• Lea Müller-Dannhausen: Elfriede Jelinek's intertextual approach. Using the example of the novels “The Children of the Dead” and “Greed”. In: Nagelschmidt, Ilse (ed.): Between triviality and postmodernism. Literature by women in the 90s. Frankfurt am Main 2002, pp. 185-206.
• Fatima Naqvi: After Life: Reflections on Jelinek's Works since 1995. In: Modern Austrian Literature 39, 2006, pp. 3–13.
• Annika Nickenig: Damaged Bodies: Sexuality and Testimony in Elfriede Jelinek's “The Locked Out” and “The Children of the Dead”. In: Ruthner, Clemens / Whitinger, Raleigh (eds.): Contested Passions. Sexuality, Eroticism, and Gender in Modern Austrian Literature and Culture. New York 2011, pp. 375-388.
• Jessica Ortner: Intertextuality as the poetology of memory - an approach to Elfriede Jelinek's novel “The Children of the Dead”. In: Text & Context. Yearbook for German literature research in Scandinavia 32, 2010, pp. 95–120.
• Jessica Ortner: Poetology “After Auschwitz”. Narratology, semantics and secondary testimony in Elfriede Jelinek's novel “Die Kinder der Toten”. Copenhagen, Diss. 2012.
• Dana Pfeiferová: A radical criticism of the Austrian innocence myth: Elfriede Jelinek's “The Children of the Dead”. In: Knafl, Arnulf / Schmidt-Dengler, Wendelin (eds.): Under canon suspicion. Vienna 2009, pp. 133–150.
• Alexandra Pontzen: Impious Reception? Elfriede Jelinek's handling of tradition in “The Children of the Dead”. In: Müller, Sabine / Theodorsen, Catherine (ed.): Elfriede Jelinek - Tradition, Politics and Quotation. Vienna 2008, pp. 51–69.
• Ralf Schnell: "I want to be shallow" - Jelinek's allegory of the world: "The children of the dead". In: Waltraud Wende (ed.): Nora leaves her doll's house. Twentieth Century Women Authors and Their Contribution to Aesthetic Innovation. Stuttgart / Weimar 2000.
• Sabine Treude: "The children of the dead" or: An entanglement of stories with a story that is missing. In: Elfriede Jelinek. Text + Criticism 117, 1999, pp. 100-109.
• Juliane Vogel: “No emptiness of interruption” - “The children of the dead” or the horror of the fold. In: Modern Austrian Literature. Vol. 39, no. 3/4, 2006.
• Juline Vogel: Praise to the surface. On the work of Elfriede Jelinek. Munich 2010.
• Sylvia Weiler: Elfriede Jelinek determined. On the genesis of a literary 'aesthetics of conflict' in the mirror of “investigation” and the “aesthetics of resistance”. In: Michael Hofmann u. a .: Peter Weiss Yearbook for Literature, Art and Politics in the 20th Century. Vol. 11. St. Ingbert 2002.
• Ian W. Wilson: Greeting the Holocaust's Dead? Narrative Strategies and the Undead in Elfriede Jelinek's “The Children of the Dead”. In: Modern Austrian Literature. Vol. 39, no. 3/4, 2006. pp. 27-55.

Web links

• The 18th chapter from The Children of the Dead , published on Elfriede Jelinek's website
• The 26th chapter from The Children of the Dead , published on Elfriede Jelinek's website.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Grohotolsky, Ernst (ed.): Province so to speak. Graz: Droschl 1995, p. 63.
2. ↑ Jelinek, Elfriede: The children of the dead. Reinbek near Hamburg 1995. p. 4.
3. ↑ "Bou ruchot hametim sh'elo niru mishanim werbachu et jela dehem", translation in: Schmidt, Delf: "There is no writing here" In: always yours. Elfriede Jelinek. Theater der Zeit, Arbeitsbuch 2006, p. 7 .; Schnell, Ralf (2000); Klettenhammer, Sieglinde (1998); Meyer, Verena u. Koberg, Roland: elfriede jelinek. A portrait. (2006)
4. ↑ z. B. Meyer, Verena u. Koberg, Roland: elfriede jelinek. A portrait. Reinbek near Hamburg 2006.
5. ↑ Schmidt, Delf: "There is no writing here" In: always yours. Elfriede Jelinek. Theater der Zeit, Arbeitsbuch 2006, p. 7. Jelinek's publisher Delf Schmidt to the author: “On page 5 you wanted to have a Hebrew sentence. For you it had the function of a mezuzah, i.e. the small scroll in a metal sleeve that is attached to the right door frame in Jewish houses and is supposed to consecrate or protect the living space. You had the page designed as a scroll sketch by the artist Eran Schaerf. Page 5 is the first right-hand page after the title page. [...] And it is not a sentence from the Torah, but your sentence, which you had translated into Hebrew. And it protects your house, your great masterpiece that you created with the 'Children of the Dead'! "
6. ↑ Heidegger, Martin: Plato's doctrine of truth. Frankfurt / Main 1997. (4th edition)
7. ↑ Celan, Paul: The Poems. Frankfurt / Main 2005.
8. ^ Elfriede Jelinek Research Center, Vienna: Documentation on the translations of Elfriede Jelinek's texts. In: http://www.elfriede-jelinek-forschungszentrum.com/fileadmin/user_upload/proj_ejfz/PDF-Downloads/Werke_HP-J%C3%A4nner2012.pdf  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
9. ↑ steirischer herbst: Nature Theater of Oklahoma (US) | The children of the dead - the big twist . In: steirischerherbst . ( steirischerherbst.at [accessed on November 21, 2017]). Nature Theater of Oklahoma (US) | Die Kinder der Toten - Der Große Dreh ( Memento of the original from November 30, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
10. ↑ Salzburger Nachrichten: Jelinek's “Children of the Dead” in “steirischer herbst” 2017. Accessed on October 11, 2019 . 
11. ↑ The children of the dead go through puberty - Wiener Online . In: Wiener Online . October 27, 2017 ( wiener-online.at [accessed November 21, 2017]).
12. ↑ Kleine Zeitung: 69th Berlinale: World premieres for Jelinek project and Geyrhalter . Article from January 18, 2019, accessed on January 19, 2019.
13. ↑ Forum 2019: Risk instead of perfection. In: Berlinale. Berlin International Film Festival, January 18, 2019, accessed on October 11, 2019 .