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Ingeborg Bachmann

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Born: June 24 1926

Died: 1616 10 19731973

“What actually is possible, however, is transformation. And the transformative effect that emanates from new works leads us to new perception, to a new feeling, new consciousness.” This sentence from Ingeborg Bachmann’s Frankfurt Lectures on Poetics can also be applied to her own self-consciousness as an author, and to the history of her reception. Whether in the form of lyric poetry, short prose, radio plays, libretti, lectures and essays or longer fiction, Bachmann’s œuvre had as its goal and effect “to draw people into the experiences of the writers,” into “new experiences of suffering.” . But it was especially her penetrating and artistically original representation of female subjectivity within male-dominated society that unleashed a new wave in the reception of her works.

Although Bachmann’s spectacular early fame derived from her lyric poetry , she turned more and more towards prose during the 1950’s, having experienced severe doubts about the validity of poetic language. The stories in the collection Das dreißigste Jahr typically present a sudden insight into the inadequacy of the world and its “orders” and reveal a utopian longing for and effort to imagine a new and truer order. The two stories told from an explicitly female perspective, “Ein Schritt nach Gomorrha” and “Undine geht” , are among the earliest feminist texts in postwar German-language literature. Undine accuses male humanity of having ruined not only her life as a woman but the world in general: “You monsters named Hans!” In her later prose Bachmann was again ahead of her time, often employing experimental forms to portray women as they are damaged or even destroyed by patriarchal society, in this case modern Vienna. Here one sees how intertwined Bachmann’s preoccupation with female identity and patriarchy is with her diagnosis of the sickness of our age: “I’ve reflected about this question already: where does fascism begin? It doesn’t begin with the first bombs that were dropped…. It begins in relationships between people. Fascism lies at the root of the relationship between a man and a woman….”

As the daughter of a teacher and a mother who hadn’t been allowed to go to university, Bachmann enjoyed the support and encouragement of both parents; after the war she studied philosophy, German literature and psychology in Innsbruck, Graz and Vienna. She wrote her doctoral dissertation on the critical reception of Heidegger, whose ideas she condemned as “a seduction … to German irrationality of thought” . From 1957 to 1963, the time of her troubled relationship with Swiss author Max Frisch, Bachmann alternated between Zurich and Rome. She rejected marriage as “an impossible institution. Impossible for a woman who works and thinks and wants something herself” .

From the end of 1965 on Bachmann resided in Rome. Despite her precarious health—she was addicted to pills for years following a faulty medical procedure—she traveled to Poland in 1973. She was just planning a move to Vienna when she died of complications following an accidental fire.

Joey Horsley

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Ingeborg Bachmann

Ingeborg Bachmann

Books from Ingeborg Bachmann

Malina

The Thirtieth Year: Stories

Herzzeit: Ingeborg Bachmann - Paul Celan. Der Briefwechsel

Simultan: Erzählungen

The Book of Franza and Requiem for Fanny Goldmann

مجموعه‌ نامرئی: مجموعه‌ ۴۵ داستان کوتاه از ۲۶ نویسنده‌ آلمانی‌زبان

Sämtliche Erzählungen

In the Storm of Roses: Selected Poems by Ingeborg Bachmann

War Diary

O Tempo Adiado e Outros Poemas

Anrufung des Großen Bären

Letteratura come utopia

German Short Stories 2

No sé de ningún mundo mejor

Dar Zaman

Vandra, tanke: Samlade dikter

Die Radiofamilie

Werke : 1: Gedichte, Hörspiele, Libretti, Übersetzungen ; 2: Erzählungen ; 3: Todesarten: Malina und unvollendete Romane ; 4: Essays, Reden, Vermischte Schriften, Anhang

Die Hörspiele

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