Ingeborg Bachmann | |
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.jpg) Photograph of Bachmann by Mario Dondero (c. 1962) | |
| Born | (1926-06-25)25 June 1926 Klagenfurt, Austria |
| Died | 17 October 1973(1973-10-17) (aged 47) Rome, Italy |
| Pen name | Ruth Keller |
| Occupation | Poet, short story writer, novelist, translator, journalist |
| Language | German |
| Alma mater | University of Vienna (Ph.D. in Philosophy, 23 March 1950)University of Graz |
| Notable works | Die gestundete Zeit (1953, "Time Deferred") Anrufung des großen Bären (1956, "Invocation of Ursa Major") Malina (1971) |
| Notable awards | Prize of the Group 47 1953 Georg Büchner Prize 1964 Anton Wildgans Prize 1971 |
| Partner | Paul Celan (1950–52, 1957) Max Frisch (1958–63) |
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Ingeborg Bachmann (Austrian German:[ˈɪŋəbɔrɡˈbaxman]; 25 June 1926 – 17 October 1973) was an Austrian poet and author. She is regarded as one of the major voices ofGerman-language literature in the 20th century. In1963, she was nominated for theNobel Prize in Literature by German philologist Harald Patzer.[1]
Bachmann was born inKlagenfurt, in the Austrian state ofCarinthia, the daughter of Olga (née Haas) and Matthias Bachmann, a schoolteacher. Her father was an early member of theAustrian National Socialist Party. She had a sister, Isolde, and a brother, Heinz.[2][3][4]
She studied philosophy, psychology, Germanphilology, and law at the universities ofInnsbruck,Graz, andVienna. In 1949, she received her PhD from the University of Vienna with her dissertation titled "The Critical Reception of the Existential Philosophy ofMartin Heidegger";[5] her thesis adviser wasVictor Kraft.[6]
After graduating, Bachmann worked as a scriptwriter and editor at theAllied radio stationRot-Weiss-Rot, a job that enabled her to obtain an overview of contemporary literature and also supplied her with a decent income, making possible proper literary work. Her firstradio dramas were published by the station. Her literary career was enhanced by contact withHans Weigel (littérateur and sponsor of young post-war literature) and the literary circle known asGruppe 47,[7] whose members also includedIlse Aichinger,Paul Celan,Heinrich Böll,Marcel Reich-Ranicki andGünter Grass.[8]
In 1953, she moved toRome, Italy, where she spent the large part of the following years working on poems, essays and short stories as well as operalibretti in collaboration withHans Werner Henze, which soon brought with them international fame and numerous awards.
Bachmann's doctoral dissertation expresses her growing disillusionment withHeideggerianexistentialism, which was in part resolved through her growing interest inLudwig Wittgenstein, whoseTractatus Logico-Philosophicus significantly influenced her relationship to language.[9] During her lifetime, Bachmann was known mostly for her two collections of poetry,Die gestundete Zeit (Time Deferred) andAnrufung des Grossen Bären (Invocation of Ursa Major).[10]
Bachmann's literary work focuses on themes likepersonal boundaries, establishment of the truth, andphilosophy of language, the latter in the tradition of Wittgenstein. Many of her prose works represent the struggles of women to survive and to find a voice in post-war society. She also addresses the histories ofimperialism andfascism, in particular, the persistence of imperialist ideas in the present.[11] Fascism was a recurring theme in her writings. In her novelDer Fall Franza (The Case of Franza) Bachmann argued that fascism had not died in 1945 but had survived in the German speaking world of the 1960s in human relations and particularly in men's oppression of women. In Germany the achievements of thewomen's rights campaign at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century had been systematically undone by the fascistNazi regime in the 1930s. Bachmann's engagement with fascism followed that of other women writers who in the immediate post-war period dealt with fascism from a woman's perspective, such asAnna Seghers,Ilse Aichinger,Ingeborg Drewitz andChrista Wolf.[12]
A crisis ofVergangenheitsbewältigung, along with the fear of the continued existence ofNational Socialism within democracy, suffuses Bachmann's oeuvre. In her work for radio, this takes the form of a self-conscious pivoting between the possibility of freedom and the inevitability of imprisonment. Her first radio playEin Geschäft mit Träumen (A Shop for Dreams) is concerned with the inhumanity of violence and oppression.Der gute Gott von Manhattan (The Good God of Manhattan) consciously echoesBertolt Brecht'sThe Good Person of Szechwan, as it tackles the impossibility of Good and Love surviving in capitalist, consumerist societies. In her analysis of Bachmann's radio dramaDie Zikaden (The Cicadas), which was written inIschia and thenNaples towards the end of 1954, and first broadcast onNordwestdeutscher Rundfunk (NWDR) on 25 March 1955, Lucy Jeffery states that
The transitory existence of the exiled or marginalised writer who escapes prejudice, conflict, and dominance is paralleled by the experience of the refugee. The feeling of unsettledness is measured against the desire to find that utopian land away (both geographically and temporally) from suffering. Yet, as Bachmann knows too well, escapism is a temporaryheterotopia where guilt and longing cannot be kept at bay.[13]
Similar themes can also be found throughout Bachmann's writings in works such asEin Wildermuth (A Wildermuth), included inDas dreißigste Jahr (The Thirtieth Year: Stories, published in 1961),Malina (published in 1971), andKriegstagebuch (War Diary, published posthumously in 2010).
Bachmann was also in the vanguard of Austrian women writers who discovered in their private lives the political realities from which they attempted to achieve emancipation. Bachmann's writings and those ofBarbara Frischmuth,Brigitte Schwaiger andAnna Mitgutsch were widely published in Germany. Male Austrian authors such asFranz Innerhofer,Josef Winkler andPeter Turrini wrote equally popular works on traumatic experiences of socialisation. Often these authors produced their works for major German publishing houses. After Bachmann's death in 1973, Austrian writers such asThomas Bernhard,Peter Handke andElfriede Jelinek continued the tradition of Austrian literature in Germany.[14]
Between November 1959 and February 1960 Bachmann gave five lectures on poetics at theGoethe University Frankfurt. Known as theFrankfurter Vorlesungen: Probleme zeitgenössischer Dichtung (Frankfurt Lectures: Problems of Contemporary Writings) they are historically and substantively Bachmann's central work. In it she explained recurring themes in her early literary publications and she discussed the function of literature in society.[15] Bachmann insisted that literature had to be viewed in its historic context, thus foreshadowing a rising interest in studying the connection between literary discourse and the contemporary understanding of history.[15]
In the first lecture onFragen und Scheinfragen (Questions and Pseudo-Questions) Bachmann focused on the role of writers in the post-war society and listed some essential questions that she defines "destructive and frightening in their simplicity". They are: why write? What do we mean by change and why do we want it through art? What are the limitations of the writer who wants to bring about change? According to Karen Achberger
Bachmann views the great literary accomplishments of the twentieth century as expressions in language and poetic form of a moral and intellectual renewal in the individual writers; it is the writer's new thinking and experiencing that forms the core of their literary works, and lets them come closer to a new language. (…) Bachmann stresses the need for a new language inhabited by a new spirit. (…) She also associates literary renewal with writers on the verge of silence due to self-doubt and despair over the impotence of language and she cites in this contextHofmannsthal'sEin Brief (1902) … as the first articulation of this dilemma.[15]
In the second lecture,Über Gedichte (On Poetry), she distinguished poetry with its new power to grasp reality in its language, from other genres such as novels and plays. With reference toGünter Eich andStefan George she identified a new generation of "poet-prophets" whose mission consisted in leading the world to the discovery of an "ever purer heaven of art" (George). Bachmann set these poets apart from theSurrealists who aspired to violence and theFuturists who claimed that "war is beautiful". She argued that these two movements exemplifiedart for art's sake and that the careers ofGottfried Benn andEzra Pound exemplified the "easy friendship between pure aestheticism with political barbarism" (Achberger). She referencedKafka on the need (with his words) to "take the axe to the frozen sea in us" and refuse to remain indifferent to the injustices that are perpetrated before our eyes. In the lecture she also named writings ofNelly Sachs,Marie Luise Kaschnitz,Hans Magnus Enzensberger andPaul Celan as examples of his concept of new poetry.[16]
In the third lecture, onDas schreibende Ich (The writingI), Bachmann addressed the question of thefirst-person narrator. She was concerned with the "accountability and authority, the authenticity and reliability, of the person in the position of narrating the work" (Achberger). She distinguished between the unproblematic "I" in letters and diaries, which conceals the person from the author, and the unproblematic "I" in memoirs, in which a "'naive' handling of the first person is requested (Achberger). She argued thatHenry Miller andCéline placed "themselves and their personal experience directly at the centre of their novels" (Achberger). She referencedTolstoy'sThe Kreutzer Sonata andDostoyevsky'sThe House of Dead as first-person narrators of the inner story. She also argued that narrators could provide a new treatment of time (for exampleItalo Svevo), of material (for exampleProust) or of space (for exampleHans Henny Jahnn). According to Bachmann, in the modern novel the "I" had "shifted: the narrator no longer lives in the story, but rather, the story lives inside the narrator" (Achberger).[16]
In the fourth lecture,Der Umgang mit Namen (The close association with names), Bachmann explored how names could have a life of their own. She discussed the use of names in contemporary literature. She identified "denied names" such as in Kafka'sThe Castle, "ironic naming" byThomas Mann, "name games" inJoyce'sUlysses and instances where the identity of the character is not secured by a name but by the context, such as inFaulkner'sThe Sound and the Fury.[17]
In the fifth lecture onLiteratur als Utopie (Literature as Utopia), she turned to the question of what makes literatureutopian. She argued that it was the process that was set in motion in the writer and reader, as a result of their interaction with literature, which made a work utopian. She argued that literature could make us aware of a lack, both in the work and in our own world. Readers could remove this lack by giving the work a chance in our time. Thus she argued that each work of literature is "a realm which reaches forward and has unknown limits".[15] Bachmann's understanding of utopia as a direction rather than a goal, and her argument that it was the function of literature to take an utopian direction, stemmed fromRobert Musil, who had analysed European modernism in his 1908 dissertation onErnst Mach,Beitrag zur Beurteilung der Lehren Machs (Contribution to the assessment of Mach's theories.[17]
During her later years she suffered from alcoholism and from an addiction to medication (barbiturates andbenzodiazepines) prescribed by her doctor.[18] A friend described it:
"I was deeply shocked by the magnitude of her tablet addiction. It must have been 100 per day, the bin was full of empty boxes. She looked bad, she was waxlike and pale. And her whole body was covered in bruises. I wondered what could have caused them. Then, when I saw how she slipped herGauloise that she smoked and let it burn off on her arm, I realized: burns caused by falling cigarettes. The numerous tablets had made her body insensible to pain."[19]
On the night of 25 September 1973, her nightgown caught fire and she was taken to theSant'Eugenio Hospital at 7:05 A.M. the following morning for treatment of second and third degree burns.[20] Local police concluded that the fire was caused by a cigarette. During her stay, she experienced withdrawal symptoms frombarbituratesubstance abuse, though the doctors treating her were not aware of the cause. This may have contributed to her subsequent death on 17 October 1973.[21][22]
Although German language writers such asHilde Domin,Luise Rinser andNelly Sachs had published notable works on women's issues in the post-war period, it was only in the 1970s that afeminist movement emerged inWest Germany.[23] After her death, Bachmann became popular among feminist readers. Feminist scholars' engagement with her work after her death led to a wave of scholarship that also drew attention to her prose work.[24] Her works gained popularity within the emergingFrauenliteratur (women's literature) movement which struggled to find the authentic female voice. New publishing houses carried the movement, such as the feminist pressFrauenoffensive (Women's Offensive), which published writings byVerena Stefan.[25]
In 2021, her childhood home on Henselstraße in Klagenfurt was purchased by the state ofCarinthia, to be turned into a museum dedicated to her.[26]
Source:[27]
TheIngeborg Bachmann Prize, awarded annually in Klagenfurt since 1977, is named after her.[30]
The Dreamed Ones (Die Geträumten; 2016), is a feature film based on the almost 20-year correspondence between Bachmann and poetPaul Celan.[31] It was directed byRuth Beckermann and won the SCAM International Award atCinéma du Réel 2016.[32]
A biographical film,Ingeborg Bachmann – Journey into the Desert, starringVicky Krieps as Bachmann and directed byMargarethe von Trotta, premiered at73rd Berlin International Film Festival in February 2023, and gets a cinema release on 26 October 2023.[33] The film focuses on her relationship withMax Frisch and the impact it had on her life. It also depicts her friends, composerHans Werner Henze, and writerAdolf Opel, with whom she travelled to Egypt to experience the desert.[34]
From 1945 to 1946, Bachmann fell in love with a former member of theBritish Army, the Viennese JewJack Hamesh.[35] In May 1948 she began in Vienna a love affair with the poet and Holocaust survivorPaul Celan.[36] In 1955 she met the political scientistHenry Kissinger; even though he was married and had two children, the two had a romantic relationship that lasted several years.[37] From 1958 to 1963, she lived on and off with Swiss playwrightMax Frisch. Her 1971 novel,Malina, has been described as a response, at least partially, to his 1964 novelMein Name sei Gantenbein.[38] She never married nor had children.
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