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1. Bachmann in History: An Overview
- University of Massachusetts Press
- Chapter
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CHAPTER 1 Bachmann in History AN OVERVIEW Avec ma main brulée, j’écris sur la nature du feu. —Ingeborg Bachmann, Malina, quoting Flaubert History left its scars on Ingeborg Bachmann’s life and work. She was the product of a turbulent period of Austrian history that included depression, Austro-fascism, National Socialism, defeat and occupation, economic recovery, and political restoration. She hated and condemned the political course that Austria and Germany had taken but, as a member of a generation before the emergence of the student movement and the second wave of feminism , felt powerless to influence the direction of political events. Although she rebelled against her era’s conceptions of femininity, she was also entrapped by them; an independent woman who lived by her writing, she suffered through self-destructive love affairs and numbed her pain with alcohol and tranquilizers . Like the female figures of her fiction, Bachmann was often a victim of her inability to resolve her own contradictions. Born in 1926 in the small city of Klagenfurt in the province of Carinthia, Austria, Bachmann was the eldest daughter of a local high school teacher and a housewife. Her petty bourgeois family experienced firsthand the economic straits that made many Austrians, still mired in the depression, welcome their country’s annexation by a more prosperous Germany. Bachmann recalled the entry of Hitler’s troops into Klagenfurt in April 1938 as a traumatic moment that shattered her childhood. During her lifetime, however, she never revealed that her own father had joined the Nazi party in 1932, even before Hitler came to power in Germany. Drafted into defense work for the Nazis in the last year of the war, Bachmann swiftly abandoned Klagenfurt after the German defeat in { 31 } order to begin her university studies. After a semester spent in Innsbruck and in Graz, she continued her study of philosophy at the University of Vienna, receiving her doctorate in 1950 with a dissertation on Heidegger. From 1951 to 1953 she worked first as a secretary, then as a scriptwriter for Rot-Weiss-Rot, the radio station of the American occupation forces. There she coauthored Die Radiofamilie (The radio family), a comic radio series designed to ease Austrians’ transition to postwar, postfascist society. She published poetry and prose in Vienna, enjoying the mentorship of an older generation of Viennese literary figures, including Jewish émigrés returned from exile, and began her close friendship with the poet Paul Celan. Nevertheless,she found the political and literary atmosphere of Vienna corrupt, stagnant, and stifling. Preferring self-imposed exile, she left Vienna in July 1953 to take up residence in Italy with her gay friend, the composer Hans Werner Henze, and never again lived permanently in Austria. Bachmann was encouraged in her resistance to Austria’s restoration of prewar power structures by her encounter with the Gruppe 47, the influential group of young antifascist authors who dominated West Germany’s literary scene (though they failed to affect its politics) until the early 1960s. First invited to the Gruppe 47’s semiannual meetings in 1952, she won its first prize for the four poems she read there in 1953. Her first volume of poetry, Die gestundete Zeit (Mortgaged time), was published at the end of that year. In August 1954 the news magazine Der Spiegel featured Bachmann on its title page, depicting her as a poet whose accomplishment proved that Germany could once more compete on the stage of world literature, and she achieved literary prominence overnight . In spring 1954, Bachmann moved to Rome, which would remain her semi-permanent residence for the rest of her life. Italy left its imprint on many poems in her second lyric volume, Anrufung des Großen Bären (Invocation of the great bear; 1956). Under the pseudonym Ruth Keller she also reported on political and cultural events in Italy for Radio Bremen and the Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung. Her first radio play, “Ein Geschäft mit Träumen” (A business with dreams; 1952), had been completed in Vienna and originally broadcast by Rot-Weiss-Rot. In a second radio play, “Die Zikaden” ( The cicadas; 1954), she drew on her contacts with the artists’ colony on the Italian island of Ischia, where she had lived with Henze. In 1955 she attended an international summer school, led by Henry Kissinger at Harvard, for young European artists and intellectuals , and that encounter with the United States laid the foundation for her most successful radio play, “Der gute Gott von Manhattan” (The...