Introducing Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973)
with the kind and generous permission of Dr Heinz Bachmann.
Introducing Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) |
|
with the kind and generous permission of Dr Heinz Bachmann. |
| (The following brief introduction to Ingeborg Bachmann was written for the publication Days in White, Angelika Fremd's translation of selected poems by Ingeborg Bachmann, published by Five Islands Press in 2003.) |
"All that noise for such small poems!"Soon after Ingeborg Bachmann moved to Italy from her native Austria in 1953, the police were called to her apartment in Rome. A neighbour had complained about the clattering typewriter noises which persisted into the early hours of each morning. When the carabinieri asked why it was necessary to make so much noise at night, Bachmann showed them one of her poems, explaining that it was too hot in Rome to write during the day, and besides, her inspiration came at night. "Ah", one of the policemen exclaimed in realisation, "poeta!". As they left, one of the officers reportedly muttered a bemused remark which unwittingly offers an apt comment on the acclaim that Bachmann's poetry was later to receive: "All that noise for such small poems!"
Though Bachmann was one of the most important women, if not the most important woman in post-war German literature, the recognition and celebrity that she achieved in the fifties as a lyric poet seem completely out of proportion to the volume of her poetic production: only two slim collections of her poetry were published in her lifetime. As early as 1953, Bachmann was awarded the highly regarded prize of the Gruppe 471 for four poems that were subsequently published in her first volume of poetry Die gestundete Zeit (Borrowed Time). The following year she received the Literary Prize of the Confederation of German Industry, and a few months later in August 1954 Bachmann was featured on the front cover and in the title story of the well-known German news magazine Der Spiegel. In 1957 she received the Literary Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen for her second volume of poetry Anrufung des großen Bären (Invocation) and later that year she was made a member of the German Academy for Language and Literature.
All but one of the poems in Angelika Fremd's collection of translations come from Bachmann's second volume of poetry, which was published after her move to Italy. The Mediterranean and Roman influences are evident in the poems of this period, as in, for example, Brief in zwei Fassungen (Letter in Two Versions), accompanied by a burgeoning of emotions, passions and colour in poems such as An die Sonne (To the Sun) and Erklär mir, Liebe (Tell Me, Love), in contrast to the stoical stance of protest and resistance, and the imagery of loss and devastation, which characterised her earlier poetry. Nevertheless many similarities remain between the poems of her first and second volumes: there is still the common thread of elegiac mourning and a sense of foreboding; and there is still a perpetual dance between the extremes of despair on the one hand, and passionate, even utopian, hopes for a better world on the other.
Born in 1926 in the southern Austrian region of Carinthia, Bachmann was indelibly marked as a teenager by the arrival of Hitler's troops in her home town of Klagenfurt in 1938, an event which "destroyed her childhood" as she was to later express it, an experience which was to echo thematically in many forms throughout her writing. Like many of the post-war generation of German-speaking writers and intellectuals, Bachmann was alarmed at developments in contemporary Europe: the onset of the "Cold War", the prospect of nuclear war, the "restoration regime" of Konrad Adenauer in West Germany, and the "colonial" wars in Algeria and Vietnam. Although politically committed as a citizen (publicly supporting the election campagin of Willi Brandt's Social Democrats and joining the West German "Committee against Nuclear Armament"), Bachmann was never as overtly political in her writings as, say, Bertolt Brecht. Her political and social concerns are reflected (but never polemically) in her poems, particularly in her first volume of poetry, but also in some of the poems included in this current collection, for example, Rede und Nachrede (Speech and Slander), Mein Vogel (My Bird) and Keine Delikatessen (No More Delicacies).
The critical reception of the time, however, largely ignored the socio-political aspects of her poetry, focusing instead on her literary achievement in form, style, and turn of phrase. Despite (or, perhaps more accurately, because of) her success as a writer of lyric poetry, Bachmann subsequently turned her back on this genre and engaged in a broad range of literary pursuits including another radio play, more libretti for the composer Hans Werner Henze, as well as a number of essays and a collection of short prose.
In 1959 Bachmann was awarded the Radio Play Prize of the War Blind for her radio play Der gute Gott von Manhattan (The Good God of Manhattan) and was invited to become the inaugural holder of the Visiting Chair of Poetics at the University of Frankfurt where she delivered a series of lectures on Probleme zeitgenössischer Dichtung (Problems of Contemporary Literature). For her collection of short prose, Das dreißigste Jahr (The Thirtieth Year), Bachmann was awarded the annual literary prize of the Association of German Critics and nominated as an Extraordinary Member of the literature division of the Academy of Arts in Berlin. (Interestingly, Bachmann did not receive any official awards in recognition of her literary work from her native Austria until 1968.)
When asked why she had given up writing poetry in favour of prose, Bachmann explained she had begun to feel that poetry had become too easy for her, and writers, she believed, had a duty to avoid the facile and comfortable - a view which is reflected in Keine Delikatessen (No More Delicacies) where the poetic persona scorns the well-turned phrase, prepared "gourmet-like" for the eagerly-consuming reading public. This professional and creative integrity is perhaps why Ingeborg Bachmann's work continues to find so much resonance, even outside of German literary circles. It perhaps also explains why most of her work, including her first (and only) novel Malina, has been translated into many languages in the three decades since 1973 when the 47-year old Bachmann died as a result of a fire in her Rome apartment. (The "60-Gitanes a day" Bachmann had fallen asleep while smoking.)
Something that is often overlooked in the literature about Ingeborg Bachmann is her story-telling skills. For Heinz Bachmann, for example, the strongest memories of his sister reside in recalling how she entertained the family with amusing anecdotes and humorous observations when she came home to visit. This aspect of Bachmann is evident in her literary work, but often neglected by literary commentators and critics, who have traditionally focused almost exclusively on the serious side of her writing and ignored the playful, self-deprecating humour and irony that pervades much of Bachmann's work, particularly her later prose, and is most notably present in Malina and the Simultan (Simultaneous)2 collection of short prose.
Bachmann's playfulness and ironic humour emerges even more clearly from her comments in interviews. On one occasion, a journalist, (apparently assuming that Bachmann, as a literary diva, was surely too remote from reality to be capable of such a practical skill) enquired if she had a driver's licence. In response, Bachmann (who, according to her brother, was not only a capable driver but also prided herself on her ability to change a tyre) pointed out that if someone told her they didn't like her poems, she would be disappointed but would not hold this against them. On the other hand, if someone were to criticise her driving, she would be mortally offended!
It would, however, be wrong to overestimate the role that humour played in Bachmann's work, for Bachmann's primary concerns were indeed extremely serious, and revolved around the difficult and unceasing struggle for honesty and integrity at a personal as well as public level. At the core of her writing, as well as her public statements about her work, is an undying commitment to individual freedom and personal autonomy, which, according to Bachmann, can only be achieved by facing difficult and uncomfortable realities. For this reason Bachmann always scorned the "easy path", believing it led not only to mental stultification and blindness but also to enslavement - both metaphorical and literal.
At a concrete (albeit subtle) level, this meant, for example, that Bachmann's writing, portrayed the pervasiveness of mass consumerism, the increasing commercialisation of everyday life and the growth of materialistic values at the expense of ethical behaviour, personal insight and individual autonomy. Given the current discussion about the "crisis of capitalism" (in the wake of US corporate collapses and the worldwide growth of anti-globalisation movements), it is clear from a close reading of Bachmann's work that she was not merely depicting social phenomena of her own period but also identifying forces behind socio-political developments that give rise to much more enduring and intractable concerns.
Lennox, Sara. Cemetery of the Murdered Daughters: Feminism, History, and Ingeborg Bachmann. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006.
Brokoph-Mauch, Gudrun (Editor). Thunder Rumbling at My Heels: Tracing Ingeborg Bachmann. (Studies in Austrian Literature, Culture and Thought). Riverside, California: Ariadne Press, 1998.
Achberger, Karen. Understanding Ingeborg Bachmann. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995. (The bibliography in this book includes a comprehensive list of translations of Bachmann's work into English.)
Bahrawy, Lisa de Serbine. The voice of history: an exegesis of selected short stories from Ingeborg Bachmann's Das dreissigste Jahr and Simultan from the perspective of Austrian history. New York: P. Lang, 1989.
Ezergailis, Inta Miske. Women Writers. The Divided Self. Analysis of novels by Christa Wolf, Ingeborg Bachmann, Doris Lessing, and others. Bonn: Bouvier, 1982.
(Copyright Gisela Nittel Holster 2001-2002)
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(This page last updated 21 June 2007) |