Wilhelm Müller’s Leiermann, Elfriede Jelinek’s Leierfrau, and radical repetition

Wilhelm Müller’s 1824 cycle Die Winterreise, and particularly its final poem ‘Der Leiermann’, are often read as nihilistic expressions of a Romantic death wish. The wanderer moves into a state of eternal alienation, symbolized by the icy landscape where he will forever rehearse his songs of loneline...