Over Her Undead Body: Revenant Suicide in Heiner Müller’s Die Hamletmaschine and Elfriede Jelinek’s Ulrike Maria Stuart

The figure of the undead woman suicide features prominently in the œuvres of both Heiner Müller and Elfriede Jelinek. This article examines the significance of that figure to Müller’s Die Hamletmaschine and Jelinek’s Ulrike Maria Stuart, two plays about what kind of political action is possible in the modern media society. It argues that while Ophelia’s return from the dead is depicted as a challenge to the status quo — she stops killing herself so that she can enact change on a larger scale — Jelinek’s Ulrike is a figure who embodies modern political inertia: she cannot even manage to stay dead, much less change the world. Notably, both revenant protagonists are doubled by the postdramatic texts themselves, which can be described as both ‘undead’ and ‘suicidal’: ‘undead’, because they are subversive re-workings of previous texts, and ‘suicidal’, because they repeatedly undermine their own authority. Here again, though, the dual nature of undeadness — its capacity to represent either genuine subversiveness or mindless zombification — comes to the fore. While Die Hamletmaschine is an ‘undead’ text which aims to terrify its viewer into action, Ulrike Maria Stuart is a play which suggests that subversion is almost impossible in late capitalism.