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The German filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger has on three different occasions put the camera aside and directed for the theatre, each time another a play by Nobel Prize laureate Elfriede Jelinek In 2010 they embarked on another kind of collaboration as Jelinek began contributing to the dialogues in the screenplay of Ottinger’s film project Die Blutgräfin (The Blood Countess) While the reasons for each artist to address undeath are as varied or polymorphous as the range and style of their oeuvres, a direct connection in Jelinek’s case to her 1995 ‘Gothic novel’ The Children of the Dead (Die Kinder der Toten) is doubled by her own conviction, ever since its publication, that this work was her masterpiece, her posthumously-addressed legacy And yet it was received by its first readership as a timely diagnostic encounter with the rise of right-wing politics in Austria   In allegorical work, as Walter Benjamin pointed out, the first layer of figuration and exegesis is wrapped around topical significance The Children of the Dead allegorises prefab Austria, in its own media reflection and echo, as a new youth culture that doesn’t need mass media now that it gets around as zombieism Against the reign of prosperous postmodernity in Austria since the mid-1980s, Jelinek’s novel is set on an uncanny continuity, symptomatised as zombie epidemic, with the postwar Austrian ego idyll of decontextualised fascism and denial of the Holocaust dead   ‘I Was There’ when the post-war era lingered, malingered on An excellent document of Vienna at the time I spent a year there is Valie Export’s movie Unsichtbare Gegner (Invisible Adversaries) It was the season right before the antifreeze content of Austrian wine was disclosed [Editor’s Note: a 1985 scandal in which it was revealed that some Austrian vineyards had been adulterating their product with diethylene glycol] In the late afternoon on a daily basis you encountered at every turn individuals throwing up and passing out in the streets Behind the counter at the local post office (where older women, so-called war widows, would ask for stamps for ‘Groß Deutschland’) sat a dwarf whose object of contemplation, the latest calculator gadget, was handcuffed to his wrist To register at