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Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) | |
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Austrian poet, dramatist, and novelist, a leading voice in post-war German literature. During her lifetime Bachmann, was known first and foremost as a poet, but she ceased to write poetry in the 1960s and focused on prose. In these later works feminist themes came to the fore. Bachmann was a reclusive, but socially engaged writer. Most of the fifties and from 1965 onward, she lived in Rome, where she died in a fire in her apartment. "Her apartment was meticulously clean, but gave off a faint "old-woman" smell which she was not aware of and which put Leo Jordan to flight, apart from the fact that he had no time to lose and no idea what to talk about with his eighty-five-year-old mother. Sometimes, seldom, he had been amused - that much Franziska knew – namely, when he was having a relationship with a married woman, because then old Frau Jordan had gone without sleep and made strange, convoluted allusions, trembling for his safety: she believed that the married men who wives Leo Jordan was living with were dangerous and jealous and bloodthirsty, and she wasn't able to calm down until he married Franziska, who did not have a jealous husband lurking in the bushes but was young and cheerful, an orphan, admittedly not from an educated family, but at least with a brother who had gone to college." (from 'The Barking') Ingeborg Bachmann was born in Klagenfurt, the capital of Carinthia, the first child of Mathias and Olga Bachmann, née Haas. Her father was a middle-school language teacher and later principal. In her childhood, at the age of twelve, she witnessed the march of Nazi troops into her town and returned to this period in her memoir Jugend in einer Österreichischen Stadt (1961) and the novel Der Franza Fall (1979). Bachmann studied philosophy and law at the universities of Innsbruck, Graz, and Vienna, where she completed her doctoral dissertation on the philosopher Martin Heidegger in 1950. Her interest in the limits of linguistic expression led her to study Ludwig Wittgenstein, of whom she also published an essay. Bachmann wrote for the broadcasting group Red/White/Red radioplays between 1951 and 1953. Her first collection of poetry, Die gestundete Zeit (1953), was awarded the Group 47 Prize. The group had started from informal meetings of writers and during its existence it helped several new voices, such as Günter Grass, to gain renown. In 1952 Bachmann had been asked to read her work to the assembled "Gruppe 47," the most influential German literary movement of the post-war period. In 1953 Bachmann moved to Italy and also spent some time as a visiting scholar at Harvard University in the United States. While in Italy in 1954-1955, she wrote political columns under the pseudonym Ruth Keller for the Westdeutschen Allgemeinen Zeitung. In 1958 she met the Swiss writer Max Frisch in Paris; their relationship lasted until the early 1960s. From 1962 Bachmann lived in Munich, Berlin, Zürich and Rome, breaking her somewhat reclusive lifestyle with her social and political activities. Bachmann was a member of a committee that opposed atomic weapons, and she signed a declaration against the Vietnam war. At the age of 33, Bachmann was appointed to the newly created position as chair of poetics at the University of Frankfurt, where she lectured on poetry and the existential situation of the writer. However, after Anrufung des Großen Bären (1956), written while she was living with Hans Werner Henz in Italy, Bachmann published only a few poems over a period of almost a decade. In mid-1960s she traveled in Egypt and Sudan. In 1964 Bachmann received the Berlin Critics Prize for her partly autobiographical work Das dreißigste Jahr and in the same year she was introduced into the West Berlin Academy of Arts. In 1964 she received the prestigious Georg Büchner Prize. Four years later she was awarded the Austrian National Medal. In the spring of 1973 she gave a series of readings in Poland and visited the concentration camps at Auschwitz and Birkenau. Bachmann died in Rome on October 17, 1973, three weeks after she had been badly burned in a fire in her apartment. The circumstances of the fire, attributed to an unextinguished cigarette, are still partly unclear. In 'Curriculum vitae' Bachmann wrote: "Must they drag the sky away? / Let the earth not lead me on, / but lay me long in stillness, / long in stillness, for Night /". Bachmann's poetry showed the influence of classic antiquity, surrealism, and such diverse writers as Klopstock and Rilke. She often dealt with the difficulties of love, guilt, and mindless forces that can break frail human relationships. The tone of her poems, written in precise and formally elegant style, is mostly somber. Dark, powerful images refer to private anguished experiences, problems of identity, contemporary social events, and mythology. "Great Bear, come down, shaggy night, / cloud-coated beast with the old eyes, star eyes. / Through the thickets your paws break / shimmering with their claws, / star claws." (from Anrufung des Großen Bären) Often she has visions of future catastrophes: "Worse days are coming. / The time allotted for disavowals / Comes due the skyline. / Soon you will lace up your shoes / And drive the dogs back to the marshes." (from 'The Time Allotted') In her prose works Bachmann moved more on the social level, although her writing were highly introspective and used lyrical elements. Fascist threats, the interplay of ego and alter-ego, and women's experiences in a hostile, patriarchal society, were recurrent themes. "I have to watch out that I don't fall face first onto the hot plate, that I don't disfigure myself, burn myself, then Malina would have to call the police and the ambulance, he would have to confess his carelessness at having let a woman burn halfway to death. I stand up straight, my face glowing from the red plate on the stove, where I so often burned scraps of paper at night, not so much to burn something written, but to light a last and a very last cigarette." (from Malina, 1971) Bachmann did not finish her novel cycle, Ways of Death. Two projected novels, The Franza Case and Requiem for Fanny Goldmann, were published as posthumous fragments. Her first novel, Malina (1971), anticipated later feminist discussions about a specific "female subjectivity." Malina is a self-portrait of a woman who lives with an understanding male alter ego, Malina, perhaps an imagined extension of her personality. Her relationship with Ivan, a younger Hungarian man, becomes more and more obsessive. The narrator has a nightmare of her father as a Nazi who kills her in a gas chamber, her relationship with Ivan deteriorates, and finally separateness between herself and Malina disappears. "I stare at Malina resolutely, but he doesn't look up. I stand up, thinking that if he doesn't say something immediately, if he doesn't stop me, it will be murder, and since I can no longer say this I walk away. It's not so frightening anymore, just that our falling apart is more frightening than any falling together. I have lived in Ivan and die in Malina." Although critics have read Malina from an autobiographical point of view, Bachmann has denied that the novel depicts her relationship with Max Frisch. Der Franza Fall was about Franziska, a wife of a successful Vienna psychiatrist, who becomes the victim of his sadism and fascination with Nazism. Part of the story was set in Egypt and Sudan, where Franziska travels with her brother Martin Ranner and meets a former SS captain. Doomed, Franziska dies violently and Martin return home. "Fascism is the first thing in the relationship between a man and woman," Bachmann has said in an interview. The protagonist of Requiem for Fanny Goldmann is an aging actress, whose death becomes a requiem for the old, aristocratic Vienna. " It's light and charming and terribly knowing and terribly sad -- Der Rosenkavalier updated for a nastier time," wrote Suzanne Ruta in The New York Times (October 24, 1999). Bachmann's other works include the librettos for Hans Werner Henze's operas Der Prinz von Homburg (1960; The Prince of Homburg) and Der junge Lord (1965; The Young Lord). Bachmann's cooperation with the composer had already started in the 1950, when her radio play The Cicadas (1954) was produced with Henze's music. He also set several of her poems to music. For further reading: Ingeborg Bachmann's Telling Stories: Fairy-Tale Beginnings and Holocaust Endings by Kirsten A. Krick-Aigner (2002); A Trip to Klagenfurt: In the Footsteps of Ingeborg Bachmann by Uwe Johnson (2002); Dieses Spannungsverhaltnis, an Dem Wir Wachsen: Growth and Decay in Ingeborg Bachmann's Simultan by Veronica O'Regan (2000; Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, vol. 1., ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999); The Split Scene of Reading: Nietzsche / Derrida / Kafka / Bachmann by Sabine I. Golz (1998); Thunder Rumbling at My Heels: Tracing Ingeborg Bachmann by Gudrun Brokoph-Mauch (1998); Waking the Dead: Correspondences Between Walter Benjamin's Concept of Remembrance and Ingeborg Bachmann's Ways of Dying by Karen Remmler (1996); Understanding Ingeborg Bachmann by Karen R. Achberger (1995); The Voice of History: An Exegesis of Selected Short Stories from Ingeborg Bachmann's Das Dreissigste Jahr and Sumultan from the Perspective of Austria by Lisa De Serbine Bahrawy (1990); Ingeborg Bachmann by H. Pausch (1975); Deutsche Dichter der Gegenwart, ed. by B. von Wiese (1973) Selected works:
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