Elfriede Jelinek: Die Kinder der Toten

Elfriede Jelinek’s seminal novel Die Kinder der Toten (The Children of the Dead) attacks the continued repression of the memory of the Holocaust in Austria. Her novel revisits both the discourse of the historical avant-garde and the Austrian neo-avant-garde while highlighting the persistence of the void caused by the destruction of war, its aftermath and the loss of Jewish life and culture. Moreover, she points at the elusive, often invisible ways, in which memorialization, Holocaust memory and trauma are transferred and transmitted across generations. Published in 1995, her intense and critical text appeared at a time when the political right gained a new momentum. Jelinek uses key strategies of the European neo-avant-garde to shed light on different forms of political framings in relation to memory culture, feminism and economization that eventually lead to forms of de-humanization.