Buffy The Vampire Slayer was a television series broadcast from 1997 to 2003. The narrative follows the heroine, Buffy Summers, ostensibly a normal teen, however she is also the latest in a long line of Slayers. Death is a gift of the Slayer. The three facets of this gift point to the conclusion that Buffy, the Maiden, is Death.

This article looks at the allusions made by Austrian artists Birgit Jürgenssen and Assunta Abdel Azim Mohamed to the historical genres “Dance of Death” and “Death and the Maiden”. I examine in particular Jürgenssen’s series “Totentanz mit Mädchen” and “Untitled Polaroids” (also known as the “Death and the Maiden” polaroids). I raise the significance of her titles and argue that she is dancing with the genre, in effect with art history itself. Then I consider Mohamed, 43 years Jürgenssen’s junior. I propose her as an heir of Jürgenssen. I argue that one of the reasons both artists allude to the two traditional genres is in order for the work to address the nature of art itself.

The article examines diverse relations between Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl and the final distich of Paul Celan’s “Deathfugue,” which the American writer chose as an epigraph to her Holocaust prose. An intertextual analysis of both texts (which relate to each other in a midrash-like manner) demonstrates the existence of numerous parallels in the language and imagery used by both authors, as well as their identifiable references to the motif of “Death and the Maiden,” which can be found in German paintings (Grien, Deutsch) and music (Bach, Schubert, Wagner).