Blurred Spaces and Belated Shock: The Poetics of Multidirectional Memory in Ingeborg Bachmann’s The Book of Franza

The composition of Ingeborg Bachmann’s unfinished novel , ; published posthumously in 1978) can be located in an era fraught with Cold War tensions, colonial independence movements, and public confrontations with Holocaust atrocities. Using recent theories from global memory studies to frame my analysis, I read The Book of Franza as an attempt to process the legacy of Austrian fascism in relation to experiences of colonialism and violence in North Africa. Through a close examination of repetition and spatial blurring in the various manuscript drafts, I argue that Bachmann’s poetics urges readers to think comparatively about multiple historical traumas and their legacies in a global context.