“Die Waffen nieder! Lay down your weapons!” Ingeborg Bachmanns Schreiben gegen den Krieg by Karl Ivan Solibakke and Karina von Tippelskirch, eds. (review)

When I finished reading the 2012 collection of essays on Ingeborg Bachmann edited by Karl Ivan Solibakke and Karina von Tippelskirch, the thought struck me that the experience had been the equivalent of taking an entire course bringing me up to date on the latest Bachmann scholarship with an emphasis on relating her writings to her own life, relationships, and historical era. The essays explore a wide range of topics, as the section titles indicate: “Bachmann rekontextualisiert,” “Bachmann und das Judentum,” “‘Böhmen liegt am Meer’ und andere Gedichte” and “Interpretationen.”

As Solibakke explains in the introduction, the book resulted from a conference held at Syracuse University in 2010 that focused on war and conflict in Bachmann’s literature. It was held in conjunction with the display, “Ingeborg Bachman Writing against War: An Exhibition,” a traveling multimedia exhibition that has been featured internationally, accompanied by a catalog of texts and photographs in bilingual editions using German and six other languages. The German/English version was edited by Solibakke, along with Hans Höller and Helga Pöcheim.

Not all of the seventeen essays included relate directly to the subject named in the book’s title, “Die Waffen nieder! Lay down your weapons!” Ingeborg Bachmanns Schreiben gegen den Krieg, but war certainly constitutes a pervasive and unifying theme of the volume. Several passages express the view that in Bachmann’s writings war is inextricably connected to other subjects. For example, Robert Pichl writes, “Den Begriff ‘Krieg’ verwendet Ingeborg Bachmann nicht nur für die übliche Bezeichnung einer militärischen Auseinandersetzung, sie versteht darunter vielmehr eine existentielle Grundbefindlichkeit der Gegenwartsgesellschaft” (33). Likewise, Karen R. Achberger asserts, “The exhibition […] has left little doubt that the life and work of Ingeborg Bachmann are best understood as one relentless struggle against war and the kind of thinking that leads to war and atrocity. […] At the same time her life and work have to be understood as one relentless struggle to find a new language” (59).

Some essays in the volume extend the concept of war to encompass other kinds of violence, conflict, and oppression. In an essay on Bachmann’s “Schreiben gegen Gewalt und Krieg” Peter Beicken discusses texts in which Bachmann associates war with violence between the sexes. Another contributor, Dagmar Lorenz, in comparing Bachmann and the writer Clemens Eich, comments on the way that Bachmann’s writings reveal memories of oppression in her hometown: “In ‘Youth in an Austrian Town,’ Klagenfurt represents the site of painful childhood memories with authoritarian teachers, a pedantic school system, and a strict parental home. There is a brief reference to the imperiled people of the Roma” (253). Defining a different type of “war,” in “Ingeborg Bachmann’s War: Between Philosophy and Poetry,” Peter Gilgen explicates not only Bachmann’s academic career turn but also her personal struggle with issues of creativity, language and silence, rationalism, and metaphysics.

Mark M. Anderson’s essay on the young Bachmann traces the early shift from Bachmann’s image in the 1950s as a classical aestheticist “poetess” to a “politically engaged prose writer of the 1960s and 1970s” when her feminist messages were elucidated (67). Although Bachmann’s family is withholding some of her personal writings until 2023, fifty years after her death, they did make public her correspondence with the poet Paul Celan in 2008 (analyzed here by Berndt Witte, Vivian Liska, and Young-Ae Chon) as well as her “war diary” and her correspondence with Jack Hamesch in 2010.

Anderson reveals that Bachmann herself withheld some aspects of her life from public scrutiny, namely associations with the Nazi ideology she opposed so strenuously. Such connections include the facts that her father was a Nazi party member and officer and that the committed Nazi Josef Perkonig had served as her teacher and mentor as well as certain concepts in...