Cemetery of The Murdered Daughters: Feminism, History, and Ingeborg Bachmann

Preface

PREFACE This book has been a long time in the making, and I’ve incurred many debts along the way. I would not have started or continued this project without the encouragement of editors (often also good friends) who included my essays on Bachmann in journals and collections: Monika Albrecht, Ute Brandes, Gisela Brinker-Gabler, Jeanette Clausen, Susan Cocalis, Donald Daviau, Elke Fredericksen, the late Marilyn Sibley Fries, Rainer Nägele, the late Henry Schmidt, Inge von Weidenbaum, and Sigrid Weigel. I would also like to thank fellow Bachmann scholars Karen Achberger, Robert Pichl, Karen Remmler, and Leslie Morris for their generosity with information and materials. Hanna Schnedl-Bubenicek and Ursula Kubes-Hofmann offered me hospitality and good company in Vienna. Dr. Heinz Bachmann gave me permission to publish material from the Bachmann archive. Early stages of my research were supported by the Research Council of the University of Massachusetts and the Austrian-American Association of Boston. Manyfriendsandcolleaguesaccompaniedmeontheintellectualjourneythat this book records, and I thank them for their counsel and comradeship along the way. My feminist sisters in Women in German stood behind me through the hard decades during which early feminists in German Studies like me established themselves in the U.S. academy, and I thank them for being there. The long years of friendship with Wiggies like Angelika Bammer, Sara Friedrichsmeyer , and Patricia Herminghouse, along with those mentioned above and many others, have been especially important for me. I thank my colleagues { ix } in the German Studies Association, especially the women historians, for helping me learn to think historically. The support of senior male colleagues Peter Uwe Hohendahl and Frank Trommler also emboldened me to elaborate sometimes iconoclastic ideas. My colleagues in the former Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, now the Program in German and Scandinavian Studies, especially Barton Byg, have contributed to the transformation of our field and my own thinking which made this book possible. Over many years my friend Arlene Avakian and other UMass Women’s Studies colleagues have been central to my learning to think of gender as always complexly inflected by many other changing social categories, particularly ethnicity and race, and my friend Sabine Broeck helped me to understand how to think about gender and race in German-speaking contexts. Though John Bracey often disagreed with me, his ideas have left a strong imprint on these pages. I thank Julia Demmin for understanding and encouragement at many crucial moments. In the early years of this book my son, Jonathan, patiently listened to me talk through my ideas about Bachmann over many a meal and helped me to weather many crises of confidence; as an adult he kindly saved me from many a computer catastrophe . Finally, for over twenty-five years the staff and students of the Social Thought and Political Economy Program helped me to acquire the education in interdiscplinarity that, I hope, informs this book and also to remember what my real priorities are. They and countless other activist friends and allies again and again demonstrated their political steadfastness on the occasions I discuss in Part Two and continue to the present day. I thank them for their principled solidarity, which keeps hope alive in these hard times. Somewhat or substantially revised, the chapters of this book first appeared in the following books and journals: chapter 1 as “Ingeborg Bachmann,” GermanLanguage Women Writers: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook, ed. Elke Fredericksen and Elizabeth Ametsbichler (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishers, 1998), 56–68; a much earlier version of chapter 2 as “The Feminist Reception of Ingeborg Bachmann,” Women in German Yearbook 8, ed. Jeanette Clausen and Sara Friedrichsmeyer (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 73–111; chapter 3 as “In the Cemetery of the Murdered Daughters: Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina,” Studies in Twentieth Century Literature 5.1 (Fall 1980), 75–105; chapter 4 as “Christa Wolf and Ingeborg Bachmann: The Difficulties of Writing the Truth,” Responses to Christa Wolf: Critical Essays, ed. Marilyn Sibley Fries (Detroit:WayneStateUniversityPress,1989),128–148;chapter5as“Geschlecht, Rasse und Geschichte in ‘Der Fall Franza,’” text + kritik Sonderband Ingeborg { x } preface Bachmann, ed. Sigrid Weigel (München: edition text + kritik, 1984), 156–179; chapter 6 as “Bachmann and Wittgenstein,” Modern Austrian Literature 18 3/4 (1985), 239–259; chapter 7 as “Bachmann Reading/Reading Bachmann: Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White in the Todesarten,” German Quarterly 61.2 (Spring 1988), 183–92; chapter 8 as “Representing Femininity in Ingeborg...