melissa kagen bangor university This essay locates zombies in Wagner's Parsifal, interpreting them within the work's original nineteenth-century context and reading recent productions in light of contemporary zombie studies. Immediately, a question arises: why zombies? Perhaps Kundry, the wandering Jewess, could be seen as an undead wanderer. Parsifal, too, is cursed to wander past endurance, and Amfortas clearly suffers from an inconvenient and painful immortality. But even so, how can the case be made for zombies in particular? Over the last two hundred years, myriad undead monsters have evolved and receded in cultural consciousness. Vampires were the undead monster of choice in Wagner's time, popularized by John Polidori's short story "The Vampyre" in 1816 and adapted by Heinrich Marschner and Peter Joseph von Lindpaintner in two separate 1828 operas, both called Der Vampyr. Wagner even conducted a production of Marschner's opera. 1 Vampires, ghosts, and Frankenstein's monster may all have better claims than zombies to the title of the nineteenth-century undead monster, yet uniquely zombie characteristics-the slow inexorability, the tendency to travel in herds and yet remain utterly isolated, the bare exposure of animalistic drives, the horrific lack of boundary between outside and inside, the total absence of human selfconsciousnessresonate powerfully with the themes of passivity, acceptance, stasis, and Schopenhauerian hopelessness that pervade Parsifal. The zombie characteristics of Wagner's original work have been emphasized by several recent stage productions, a choice some critics have found inappropriate. In a review of the Wiener Staatsoper's 2010 production of Parsifal titled "Oster-'Parsifal': Das ist Wagners Zombie-Zauber" (Easter-Parsifal: That Is Wagner's Zombie-Magic), Peter H. Smith complained that, by zombifying the grail knights, director Christine Mielitz destroyed the complexity and paradox of Wagner's message. 2 When the Grail Knights enter after the Good Friday sequence, Smith explains: The incredibly lazy magic of this staging breaks through: the ruined Grail Knights storm the stage as zombies, the grail shatters in a thousand pieces. Guilt, sin, endless atonement, life as a prison sentence, all these Christian questions of faith raise Wagner to the level of monstrous mystery. Mielitz solves the contradictions inherent in religion simply by keeping religion outside of her interpretation. In the end, the knights stand before the curtain, passing the questions off on the audience. 3