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

Introduction

INTRODUCTION As readers familiar with Ingeborg Bachmann’s writing will recognize, the title of this book, Cemetery of the Murdered Daughters, is borrowed from an episode that appears both in Bachmann’s novel fragment The Book of Franza and in her only finished novel, Malina (1971)—the “overture,” as she termed it, to the novel cycle “Ways of Death,” an anatomy of contemporary Austrian society left uncompleted when she died in 1973. In both Franza and Malina, the “cemetery of the murdered daughters” is an image that occurs in a dream of the protagonist. In Malina, it is the first of the many “dreams of this night” recounted in the novel’s second chapter: A large window opens, larger than all the windows I have seen, however not onto the courtyard of our house in the Ungargasse, but onto a gloomy field of clouds. A lake might lie below the clouds. I have a suspicion as to what lake it could be. But it’s no longer frozen over, it’s no longer Carnival and the hearty men’s glee clubs which once stood on the ice in the middle of the lake have disappeared. And the lake, which cannot be seen, is hemmed by the many cemeteries. There are no crosses, but over every grave the sky is heavily and darkly overcast; the gravestones, the plaques with their inscriptions are scarcely recognizable. My father is standing next to me and takes his hand off my shoulder, since the gravedigger is heading our way. My father looks at the old man commandingly; fearful of my father’s gaze, the gravedigger turns to me. He wants to speak, but merely moves his lips for a long time in silence, and I only hear his last sentence: This is the cemetery of the murdered daughters. He shouldn’t have said that to me, and I weep bitterly. (Malina 113–14) { 1 } { 2 } introduction How should this multivalenced image be interpreted? This book’s title gestures toward its multiple meanings: it points not just toward Bachmann’s texts but also toward the reading strategies that feminists, among others, have elaborated in order to understand those texts and the various factors that enable those strategies . Specifically, it directs attention to some of the various ways I want to address “Feminism, History, and Ingeborg Bachmann,” my subtitle. In a 1953 poem, “Message,” Bachmann wrote: “Our godhead, / History, has reserved us a grave / from which there is no resurrection” (Storm 55). My title first connects the death and destruction of almost all of Bachmann’s female figures to their historical situation and insists upon historical causes for their devastation . Or, as Bachmann put it in a 1971 interview, “It is such a big error to believe that people are only murdered in a war or in a concentration camp— people are murdered in the midst of peace” (GuI 89). This is a point I elaborate at length in subsequent chapters. As well, “In the Cemetery of the Murdered Daughters” was the title of my first scholarly tussle with Bachmann’s writing in 1980 (an article included here as chapter 3). The title thus also points to this book’s concern with the historicity of reading practices and to the use of my own scholarship as an exemplum to demonstrate that historicity. Politically, from the perspective of feminism, “cemetery of the murdered daughters” designates the “woman-as-victim-of-patriarchy” stance that not only informed my own 1980 article on Bachmann but also inflected those of many other feminists, who viewed Bachmann’s texts and her life (which they sometimes conflated) as evidence for the legitimacy of their own position. From a later, rather different, and somewhat more historically specific feminist perspective, the “murdered daughters” can be viewed as a synecdochal representative of all victims, either of “the whites” (as The Book of Franza seems to suggest) or more particularly of National Socialism. From yet another feminist perspective, the very conception of a “cemetery of the murdered daughters” can become the target of a far-reaching feminist critique of white women who, while denying their own racial privilege, arrogate the status of victims to themselves— or, in the German/Austrian context, targets of a similar critique of white Christian (“Aryan”) women who consider women’s subordination by the National Socialist regime (which many of them supported) to parallel the treatment of the millions the Nazis murdered. From that standpoint, the title of my book could (and does...