Return of the living dead: Reading the revenant body in post-68 German-language literary and visual culture

Concomitant with pre-unification efforts to archive cultural memory through the proliferation of a decidedly material Erinnerungskultur ("memory culture"), German literature and visual culture in the 1980s manifested an increasing fascination with the dead body, more specifically with the body that was not "properly dead." This uncanny body---which resists death or even conquers it to return in the form of the "undead"---appears here as a material reminder of uncomfortable national legacies and of incomplete Vergangenheitsbewaltigung ("coming to terms with the past"). My dissertation traces the correspondences between these "improper" bodies and specters of the fascist body in Germany and Austria since the 1960s, arguing that the revenant body speaks to the largest cultural challenges of the past four decades, including the ongoing legacy of National Socialism, the "monstrous birth" of German reunification, and---interwoven throughout---attempts to reconceptualize postwar masculinity. In three large sections, I examine: first, the necrophilic gaze of recent memory culture as mapped onto the plastinated cadavers of Gunther von Hagens' traveling exhibit "Korperwelten" ("Body Worlds") and the taxidermic bodies of Thea Dom and Tanja Duckers; second, discourses of national identity and violence in postwar German horror films (most notably those of Jorg Buttgereit and Christoph Schlingensief); and, third, critiques of the postmodern subject in Jelinek's dramatic use of the undead. I find that the dead body becomes both a medium for constructing or critiquing pre- and postmodern notions of subjectivity as well as a map for charting the ways in which gendered identities change in response to crises of national identity. At the same time, the act of representing the corpse often functions as an act of mourning for perceived losses such as the (presumed) death of the Cartesian rational subject or the disintegration of geopolitical borders. Here, the dead body surfaces as a means of re-establishing those borders, by re-inserting materiality into the virtual bodies of cyberculture, for example, or by resuscitating essentialist notions of gendered or ethnic identities.