Ingeborg Bachmann Between Glamour and Despair
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She was a literary star of her time, simultaneously shy and a free-thinking intellectual, lover of famous artists like Hans Weigel, Paul Celan and Max Frisch, but also a pioneer of women’s emancipation.
Ingeborg Bachmann and Hans Werner Henze Literatur-Verein ib
She grew up with three siblings in Klagenfurt. Her father Mathias Bachmann was the principal of a secondary school, and her mother Olga came from an industrialist family from Lower Austria. She spent her youth in her home town, until she began to study philosophy, German literature and psychology in Innsbruck, Graz and Vienna in 1945. “Sometimes I am asked how I came to be interested in literature, since I grew up out in the country. I’m not sure exactly why. All I know is that I started to write at the age at which one reads Grimm’s fairy tales… and that sent my thoughts on a journey,” said Bachmann in “Biographisches” in 1952.
Literatur-Verein ib
he interest in the work as well as the person of Ingeborg Bachmann continues unabated even decades after her death. This is seen not just in the impressive sales figures of her works, but also her recently published correspondence with the composer Hans Werner Henze.
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A second home In the 1950s, she was frequently drawn to Italy – she lived in Naples for a short time and finally settled in Rome in 1957. There she worked at Radio-Bremen as a correspondent and deliver reports on politics and culture under the pseudonym Ruth Keller. With her first volume of poetry, “Die gestundete Zeit” – an alternative to predominantly realistic post-war literature – she became a rising star on the horizon of German-language authors in 1954. Ingeborg Bachmann once said she led a double life because she lived in Rome, but as soon as she enters her study, she is in Vienna. Indeed, the settings and characters of the incomplete “Todesarten”-project are located in Vienna. In Rome, she also wrote “Malina” (1971), the story collection “Simultan” (1972) and the narrative “Gier”, which also remained fragments, as did the novel “Der Fall Franza” and the “Requiem für Fanny Goldmann”. “I want the war to end” - this sentence from Ingeborg Bachmann’s novel Malina can also be seen as the theme of her entire work. “I always dreamt of oceans, sand and ships, but then the war came and always pushed aside the world of the dream and replaced it with the real world, in which one didn’t get to dream, but had to make decisions,” said the artist in retrospective. An important theme in her prose is the relationship between women and men in a patriarchal society, which she always described as a “dilemma”. She was the first German post-war author to describe the continuing effect of the war 12
and the destruction of society from the perspective of the relationships between men and women. Fear and alcohol For her entire life, the artist was plagued by a fear of death – she tried to control this fear with medication and alcohol. She remembers her first attack as taking place at the time “when Hitler’s soldiers came marching into Klagenfurt”. After his, she seemed to be completely obsessed by her fears and tried to escape from them at least temporarily through many parties. In the last years of her life in Rome, she became more and more dependent on sleeping tablets and sedatives. This is also the theme in “Malina” and “Der Fall Franza”. In 1973, Ingeborg Bachmann died in a clinic in Rome as the result of burns she incurred during a fire in her apartment, which would not have taken place if her perception of pain had not been dulled by permanent abuse of tablets and alcohol. The fire is suspected to have been started by a burning cigarette.
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