Ingeborg Bachmann

Bachmann, Ingeborg (Klagenfurt, 1926-73, Rome), the daughter of a grammar-school teacher in Klagenfurt, which she left in 1945 to study philosophy, psychology, and Germanistik in Innsbruck, Graz, and (from 1946) Vienna. In 1950 she completed her doctoral thesis on M. Heidegger (Die kritische Aufnahme der Existentialphilosophie Martin Heideggers). By now she had already begun to write poetry, the genre for which she was widely acclaimed during the 1950s. It appeared in two collections as Die gestundete Zeit (1953, revised and extended in 1957), and Die Anrufung des Großen Bären (1956). During these years she also became known as the author of radio plays (see Hörspiel). Her contact with the radio began in 1951 when she became a scriptwriter and (later) editor of the Viennese station Rot/Weiß/Rot, which broadcast her first play, Ein Geschäft mit Träumen, in 1952. In the same year H. W. Richter invited her to a reading of Gruppe 47, whose prize she won in (1953; in 1957 she was awarded the prize of the Free Hanse City of Bremen in recognition of her later poetry. Her intellectual development was decisively influenced by L. Wittgenstein and R. Musil, both of whom helped her clarify her own perception of the function of literature, which is also expressed in the essays she wrote on them in the early 1950s; Musil's Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften had appeared posthumously in 1952, evoking her instant response. Among post-war poets she felt a particular affinity to Paul Celan, whom she first met after his flight to Vienna at the end of 1947. This shows in her critical attitude to language and tradition, and in aspects of her verse and composition. The major themes of her poetry derive from her experience of the occupation of her homeland in 1938 (see Österreich), and the horrors of the war and the Holocaust, and beyond it the fear that history might repeat itself, for the lessons of the past had still not been learnt. The warning ‘Es kommen härtere Tage’ which frames the title poem of the collection Die gestundete Zeit demonstrates the intensity of her commitment; though such exhortations are used sparingly, they are implied, as in ‘Holz und Späne’, ‘Thema und Variation’, ‘Alle Tage’, and ‘Früher Mittag’. Poems showing a more stringent use of metaphors, like ‘Dunkles zu sagen’ and ‘Reigen’, point forward to the second collection, Anrufung des Großen Bären, whose title-poem denounces the misuse of power inherent in any organized ideology. Apart from the biblical and mythological connotations of the sign of the Great Bear, it was also used by Simone Weil (as ‘das Große Tier’, with reference to Platon's Politeia). Ingeborg Bachmann draws attention to this association in her essay on the philosopher (broadcast in 1955). These later poems also tend to be less negative, as in ‘Mein Vogel’ (referring to the metaphor of the owl), ‘Rede und Nachrede’, ‘Was wahr ist’, and ‘An die Sonne’ with its ironic reference to the romantic image of the moon, which is eclipsed by the brightest cosmic symbol that illuminates a new reality and art: ‘Ohne die Sonne nimmt auch die Kunst wieder den Schleier’. The volume closes with the best-known cycle, ‘Lieder auf der Flucht’. Later poems, modest in number, include ‘Ihr Worte’, dedicated to Nelly Sachs, ‘Exil’, and ‘Böhmen liegt am Meer’, one of a small group published by H. M. Enzensberger in Kursbuch 15 (1968). Her rendering of a substantial selection of poetry by Guiseppe Ungaretti appeared in a bilingual edition in 1961 (and 1966).

Ingeborg Bachmann's interest in modern music led to her collaboration and friendship with Hans Werner Henze in Italy, to which she moved in 1953. Spending part of her time on Ischia and in Naples, she lived mainly in Rome, where she was in contact with other writers, including Marie Luise Kaschnitz. Her fascination with the city, which she described as ‘die Utopie in Permanenz’, is evident in her fine prose text Was ich in Rom sah und hörte (1955, in Akzente); it is also a central feature of Thomas Bernhard's novel Auslöschung (1986) which is in part a tribute to her. Her radio play Die Zikaden (with music by Henze, broadcast in 1955) was followed by Der gute Gott von Manhatten (broadcast 1958), inspired by a visit to the USA. Written with irony and imagination, it belongs to a new phase of her critical representation of the contemporary scene by projecting a woman's urge to escape from the patriarchal capitalist society to a higher sphere of freedom and love. This time also marked a new phase in her personal life, her close relationship with Max Frisch; from 1958 to 1962 she lived in both Zurich and Italy. Frisch referred to their life together in Montauk (1974-5); their parting, painful to both, permanently affected her health. From 1963 she spent a prolonged period in Berlin, then travelled to Prague, Egypt, and the Sudan, before finally settling in Rome in 1966. She died as a result of extensive burns whose cause has not reliably been established.

Ingeborg Bachmann's prose work, which includes many fragments, consists of a seemingly inexhaustible range of variations on her established themes. In her speech delivered in response to the receipt of the Hörspielpreis der Kriegsblinden in 1959, Die Wahrheit ist dem Menschen zumutbar, she refers to hidden pain as an inherent aspect of human nature which, once recognized, activates our innate urge to advance towards perfection in every sphere of experience. This utopian world of values about which, according to the Tractatus, the philosopher ‘must be silent’, the imaginative writer is free to articulate. There is a truth more powerful than the chains that tie us to this world, she says in her poem ‘Was wahr ist’: ‘Du haftest in der Welt, beschwert von Ketten, / doch treibt, was wahr ist, Sprünge in die Wand’. She returns to this metaphor at the end of Malina (1971), the only completed novel of her projected cycle Todesarten, which centres on the tension between empirical and envisaged reality, represented and endured by women, who in a patriarchal world have only the choice between subordination and death. Christa Wolf was among the first to recognize her as a forerunner of modern feminism. Ingeborg Bachmann's style of writing deliberately introduces ambiguities stimulating different readings; this marks the quality of her best work. She wrote two cycles of stories: Das dreißigste Jahr (1961), which opens with Jugend in einer österreichischen Stadt and closes with Undine geht, contains seven, and the cycle Simultan (1972) five, Drei Wege zum See being the last. One of the stories in the earlier collection, Ein Schritt nach Gomorrha, which exemplifies her frequent use of ‘erlebte Rede’, relates to her essay on Marcel Proust (broadcast in 1958) and describes the total alienation of a married woman, Charlotte, from reality, including her own sex: ‘Ich bin in kein Bild geboren’; she does not respond to the advances of the young Southern woman Mara, for despite her contempt of the moral judgement (and language) of society, she remains outwardly within its boundaries, thus preserving her inner freedom as an artist. The central (male) figure of the title story faces on the threshold of his 30th year a crisis involving his identification with Austria, a theme which Ingeborg Bachmann repeatedly addresses, notably in the last story, in which a descendant of the Trottas (see Kapuzinergruft, Die) is woven into Elisabeth Matrei's complex and decidedly not nostalgic experience of reality. The surrealist text Ein Ort für Zufälle (1965, with illustrations by G. Grass) adapts Büchner's portrayal of schizophrenia in his Novelle Lenz to contemporary conditions in Berlin, a city she associates with its National Socialist past and its world-wide consequences. This text was occasioned by the award of the Büchner Prize in 1964. In 1968 she received the Großer Österreichischer Staatspreis, and in 1971 the Anton Wildgans Prize. The basic principles of her aesthetics are contained in the lectures she delivered at Frankfurt University to inaugurate the newly instituted Gastdozentur für Poetik. Published as Probleme zeitgenössischer Dichtung, they conclude with a discourse on ‘Literatur als Utopie’.

Werke (4 vols.), ed. Chr. Koschel, I. von Weidenbaum, and C. Münster, appeared in 1978 (3rd edn. 1993); ‘Todesarten’-Projekt (5 vols.), a critical edition by R. Pichl, M. Albrecht, and D. Göttsche, in (1995; Wir müssen wahre Worte finden. Gespräche und Interviews, ed. Chr. Koschel and I. von Weidenbaum, in 1983 (2nd edn. 1994).

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