Life can be enhanced: alive, more alive, most alive. Death doesn't allow for this: you can't be deader than dead. At least that's what grammar wants - and logic agrees. Any increase is impossible. But should it really be that simple? Language suggests an unambiguousness that does not always correspond to reality. Between the supposedly absolute poles - to be or not to be, alive or dead - various forms of over- and underlife are inserted: The half-dead and the undead, life, hard on the edge, beyond sadness, the resurrection of the dead and the dead, viruses, in the Siberian permafrost, brought back to life after 30,000 years. There are several ways of being dead. And there are different ways of dying. Not all of them coincide with the simple binary opposition of life and death.

Here we enter the realm of the undead. The undead do not only exist in films and series. We encounter them in open-plan offices and fitness studios, in online forums, shopping centres and the underground. Bodies that move, but there is hardly any life behind their eyes. Mouths that speak, but without any spirit. But there is also the opposite: there is hardly anything left of the body, but the soul lives on. Soma and psyche out of sync.

The concept of the undead challenges us to explore precisely these intermediate zones. What is the undead? What does afterlife mean? What future do zombies and coma patients dream of? And how much life is left in us anyway?

Fabian Bernhardt holds a doctorate in philosophy and is an author. He is a research associate at the Collaborative Research Centre Affective Societies at Freie Universität Berlin, writes regularly for Philosophie Magazin and other journals and is one of the founding members of the Affect and Colonialism Web Lab. His research focuses on dealing with bad pasts, guilt, injustice and violence. After publishing a monograph on the question of forgiveness in 2014, his second book ‘Revenge. About a blind spot of modernity’ (Matthes & Seitz), which was awarded a non-fiction prize.

Daniel Illger is a writer and film scholar. He has held the Chair of Popular Cultures at the European University Viadrina since July 2022. In addition to numerous academic monographs and essays, Illger has published the fantasy trilogy ‘Skargat’ with Klett-Cotta. The first volume, ‘The Path of Black Light’, was awarded the Seraph Prize for Best Debut in 2016. His essay ‘Cosmic fear’ was published by Matthes & Seitz in 2021.

Georg Seeßlen is an author, feature writer as well as a film and cultural critic. He works on social and cultural issues for publications including epd Film, Frankfurter Rundschau, Der Freitag, Jungle World, konkret, Der Tagesspiegel and Die Zeit. Seeßlen regularly writes features for radio that deal with current trends in cinema and popular culture, mostly in collaboration with Markus Metz, with whom he has published more than a dozen books, including ‘WE UNDEAD. On Posthumans, Zombies, Botox Monsters and Other Forms of Survival and Sublife in Life Science & Pulp Fiction’ (2012, Matthes & Seitz). Seeßlen has been awarded several prizes for his extensive work as a media journalist, most recently the Lessing Prize for Criticism in 2024.