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‘Revolution. Also of my heart.’
– Ingeborg Bachmann
Karen Leeder takes us into the life and works of Ingeborg Bachmann. Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) is one of the leading voices of modern German literature. While she was chiefly celebrated as a poet during her lifetime (and still holds her place in any assessment of modern German poetry) her literary reputation today, especially in the English speaking world, rests largely on her prose. This is the result of a vigorous Anglo-American feminist reception, which has understood that the psychic wounds inflicted on the individuals in Bachmann’s work are to be read as symptomatic of the larger injustices and abuses of patriarchy. Popular reception sees her as an autobiographical author whose turbulent life has become mythologised in her work. It is often forgotten that she was also a political author, a committed antifascist, a distinguished academic and intellectual, and a writer of huge craft and variety of tone. She was born in 1926 in Klagenfurt, capital of the southern-most province of Corinthia, though she was to claim that her childhood came to an end at the age of twelve when Hitler and his troops marched triumphantly into the main city square. The border drawn between innocence and brutality on that day became the obsessive centre of her literary imagination. After the war Bachmann left Klagenfurt to study philosophy and law at the universities of Innsbruck, Graz, and Vienna, where she completed her doctoral dissertation on the philosopher Martin Heidegger. After university she started out working for the radio station of the American occupying forces, but 1953 saw her successful debut as a poet and a move from Vienna to Italy, to settle the following year in Rome. Her life was changed by an anguished affair with the Swiss novelist Max Frisch which, after its collapse, left her in a state of physical and psychic breakdown, dependent on drugs and alcohol, but nevertheless fuelled an intense period of labour on what is perhaps her most celebrated work: her novel cycle Todesarten (‘Ways of Dying’). In 1973, Bachmann, recipient of all the major Austrian literary prizes as well as the prestigious Büchner prize, died, aged only 47, after an unexplained fire in her apartment in Rome. Her first collection of poetry Die gestundete Zeit (‘Mortgaged Time’), published in 1953, was a major media event. She was awarded the coveted prize of the ‘Gruppe 47’, and a year later the news magazine Der Spiegel ran a title story and cover photograph of her celebrating her work as a ‘stenograph of its time’. Dark, mysterious images conjure private pain, myth and other-worldly landscapes, but also point to sterile relationships, silence and corrupt social structures haunted by the legacy of Fascism; ‘Das Unsägliche geht, leise gesagt, übers Land: / schon ist Mittag’ (The unspeakable passes, barely spoken, over the land: / already it’s noon). Striking in all her work is a sense of impending threat; and although the poems often voice an impulse towards flight, they simultaneously recognise its impossibility. Her second collection, Anrufung des großen Bären (‘Invocation of the Great Bear’), of 1956, shows a distinct development of her thought. The luminous landscapes of Italy offer a respite from the colder North, and the sense of imminent destruction is met by invocations of utopian wholeness figured in fairytales, love and images of the natural world. Her increasing linguistic scepticism had a philosophical root in her studies of Heiddeger, and later Wittgenstein; and the lectures she delivered as the first holder of the Chair of Poetics at Frankfurt University are part of a continuing reflection on the possibilities and inadequacies of language, today regarded as an essential key to her poetics. Amongst her handful of final published poems Keine Delikatessen (‘No Delicacies’) of 1963 records a decision to abandon the lyric mode. successful and integrated female protagonist (a translator and a photojournalist), it is worth noticing that both are engaged in reproducing others’ words and deeds and asserting their fragile hold on the world. But Bachmann’s main work in these later years was the unfinished novel cycle – though 2000 also saw the publication of a substantial selection of previously unpublished poems charting her despair, isolation and desperate struggle with language: Ich weiss keine bessere Welt (‘I know No Better World’). Only Malina of 1971, a dark, complex work intended as the first part of the cycle, was completed. It offers a self-portrait of a woman who lives with a male alter-ego, Malina, perhaps an imagined extension of her personality. A disturbing dream chapter focuses on her father; figured as a murderous Nazi and butcher. When her erotic relationship with the younger Ivan deteriorates, she finds refuge with Malina, but only by disappearing into a crack in the wall. The novel finishes with the unattributed words: ‘Es war Mord’ (‘It was murder’). This haunting novel might seem to offer no hope for the struggling female subject, and this is certainly the case in a controversial film of the novel directed by Werner Schröter, and with a screenplay by the Nobel-prize-winning Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek. The murderous relations between the sexes are explicitly seen as a continuation of Fascism, but by other means. However, the radical form of the text, with its dramatis personae, sections of dialogue, snippets of musical notation, and utopian fairy stories, makes of it both a record of loss and also a resistance against it. This same aspect is found in other of the projected novels since published posthumously: Der Fall Franza (‘The Book of Franza') and Requiem für Fanny Goldmann (‘Requiem for Fanny Goldmann’) and Gier (‘Greed’).
Bachmann’s emotive themes, the co-ordinates
of her life (and death), along with her real and
rumoured relationships, and the bar put on
many of her private papers by the guardians
of her literary estate, have led to a mystique
most reminiscent, in the English-speaking
world, of that surrounding Sylvia Plath.
However, it would be wrong to think of
Bachmann’s works simply as protocols of a
soul in despair. As has been pointed out many
times, the gesture of authenticity is always
also an aesthetic gesture. And if one looks
beyond the emotive subject matter, one sees
the political and poetic consciousness at work,
sometimes despite herself: ‘without music,
without spite […] not out of spite / but in
spite of everything’.
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