Ingeborg Bachmann

• Born: June 25, 1926
• Birthplace: Klagenfurt, Austria
• Died: October 17, 1973
• Place of death: Rome, Italy

Other literary forms

In addition to her poetry, Ingeborg Bachmann (BOK-mon) published two radio plays, three volumes of short stories, and a novel. Much of her prose concerns the role of women in search of their own identity. Bachmann also collaborated with the composer Hans Werner Henze, writing the librettos for his operas Der Prinz von Homburg (pb. 1960; the prince of Homburg) and Der junge Lord (pb. 1965; The Young Milford, 1967). She was praised by critics as a librettist of great talent. Bachmann’s other publications include essays in which she discusses her poetic theory.

Achievements

Ingeborg Bachmann attracted and fascinated readers and critics alike during her short life and has continued to do so since her untimely death in 1973. Bachmann’s work has been praised as great and pure poetry, and she has been compared with such towering figures of German poetry as Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Rainer Maria Rilke. At the same time, the critic Peter Demetz has charged that her verse is marred by a “gauche combination of high polish and utterly sentimental Kitsch,” and her metaphors have been labeled vague, justifying almost any interpretation.

It cannot be denied that Bachmann’s personality and her life, still shrouded in mystery, have attracted at least as much attention as her work. After her appearance in 1952 at a meeting of Gruppe 47 (group 47), an influential circle of postwar writers, followed in turn by a story about her in Der Spiegel, Germany’s mass-circulation newsmagazine (similar to Time magazine), Bachmann could never rid herself of her image as a beautiful blond who had become, of all things, a writer—sensuous yet intellectual, a cosmopolite from a provincial town in Austria, succeeding in a world traditionally dominated by men. When, after her death, her colleagues Günter Grass, Uwe Johnson, and Max Frisch began writing about her, Bachmann, who had already become a legend of sorts, gained increasing recognition as a significant figure in postwar German literature.

Bachmann’s appeal derived from a happy fusion of traditional and modern elements. The older generation of readers, reared on Hölderlin and Georg Trakl, appreciated her classical German, while the younger critics welcomed her linguistic experiments, controlled as they were, and what Demetz has called her “hard, dry poems in the manner of the older Brecht.” It was, however, mainly because of their themes that Bachmann’s poems struck the nerve of their time. In a period when Germans were busy reconstructing their country and enjoying the fresh fruits of the so-called economic miracle, she sent out warning signals of approaching doom. In imploring tones, she attempts to remind her readers that the end of time is near—the titles of her first two volumes, Die gestundete Zeit (borrowed time) and Anrufung des grossen Bären (evocation of the great bear), are such signals. The poems in these collections clearly define the situation: “Borrowed time, now recalled, grows visible on the horizon”; the “creature of cloudlike fur . . . with tired flanks, and the sharp, half-bared teeth stands threateningly in the sky.” In the same breath, however, Bachmann exuberantly announces her readiness for life: “Nothing more beautiful under the sun than to be under the sun. . . .” Bachmann’s combination of apocalyptic vision and lyrical affirmation compelled the attention of her generation.

Although Bachmann’s poems must be understood as products of their time and seen in their historical and cultural context, they have universal and timeless appeal. Bachmann’s existential concern, her warnings not to succumb to comfortable adjustment, and the unique poetic quality of her language will continue to capture the imagination of readers.

Biography

The daughter of a schoolteacher, Ingeborg Bachmann grew up in her native Klagenfurt, the capital city of Austria’s southernmost province, Carinthia. If the fictional account of Jugend in einer österreichischen Stadt (1961; youth in an Austrian town) is any indication, Bachmann’s childhood and youth were not particularly happy. Perhaps this accounts for her reticence concerning that period of her life. She does mention the traumatic days of March, 1938, when Adolf Hitler annexed Austria and the German army triumphantly marched into Klagenfurt with most of her countryfolk applauding enthusiastically. Otherwise, very little is known about Bachmann’s life before the age of twenty-three.

Bachmann initially studied law but soon took up philosophy at the universities of Innsbruck, Graz, and Vienna. In 1950, she received her doctorate with a dissertation on the critical reception of Martin Heidegger’s existential philosophy. In 1950 and 1951, she traveled to London and Paris. For two years, she was a member of the editorial staff of Radio Rot-Weiss-Rot, the American-sponsored radio station in Vienna. In 1952, she gave her first reading at a meeting of Gruppe 47.

After the success of her first two books of poetry, Bachmann chose to take up the life of a freelance writer, residing in Rome for many years. Her visit to the United States in 1955, at the invitation of Harvard University, provided the background for the American setting of her highly successful radio play, Der gute Gott von Manhattan (1958; the good god of Manhattan). From 1959 to 1960, Bachmann was the first guest lecturer in poetics at the University of Frankfurt. She was awarded many of the important literary prizes of her time, including the Great Austrian State Prize in 1968.

Bachmann died in 1973, following a somewhat mysterious fire in her Rome residence. Five years later, her collected works were published in four volumes by Piper Verlag in Munich. The tenth anniversary of her death sparked renewed interest in Bachmann and was the occasion for many symposia throughout the world on her work.

Analysis

With love and joy, departure and death as her prevalent themes, it seems safe to say that Ingeborg Bachmann stays well within the conventions of poetry. Nor is her message novel; after all, the end of the world has been proclaimed many times before in poetry. Bachmann tells her readers solemnly that “the great cargo of the summer” is ready to be sent off and that they must all accept the inevitable end. Time is only borrowed, if one is to believe the ominous title of her first collection of poems. The titles of many of her poems are ciphers of farewell: “Ausfahrt” (“Departure”), “Fall ab, Herz” (“Fall Away, Heart”), “Das Spiel ist aus” (“The Game Is Over”), “Lieder auf der Flucht” (“Songs in Flight”). Indeed, Bachmann’s poetry constitutes a “manual for farewells,” as George Schoolfield has put it.

Images of night, darkness, ice, and shadow abound in Bachmann’s verse. On closer inspection, however, one also discovers an entirely different set of images: warmth, summer, sunlight, plant growth. Although all these images may look conventional at first glance, one soon discovers that Bachmann has a very private mythological system and that most of her images have meaning only within that system. Many critics have attempted to decode Bachmann’s verse; perhaps the most persuasive reading is that of Hans Egon Holthusen, who sees two basic attitudes reflected in Bachmann’s poetry. One must agree with his diagnosis that there is a tension between hope and despair or joy and anguish in the fabric of nearly every poem by Bachmann.

Die gestundete Zeit

Bachmann’s “dark” or “negative” images are ciphers for what Holthusen calls her “elegiac” consciousness (in contrast to her “panegyric” consciousness, as reflected in her “positive” imagery). Images of ice, snow, cold, or barren landscape represent restricting elements in life, such as the impossibility of communication between lovers. Particularly in her first volume, Die gestundete Zeit, Bachmann frequently writes about the coldness of time. The poem “Curriculum Vitae,” for example, evokes a winter landscape. In it, life is imaged as a quest for a path laid between ice skeletons. Even in Bachmann’s love poems, there are repeated images of snow, ice, and cold.

Such imagery must be related to Bachmann’s worldview. Although there are those who see her poems as reflections of a blurry Weltschmerz trimmed in beautiful language, her pessimism was earned by experience and reflected a concrete historical situation. Bachmann herself protested frequently against the mere culinary enjoyment of her poetry. Rather, she wanted her poems to be understood as a reaction to the unprecedented horrors of World War II.

“Early Noon”

This intention is clear in “Früher Mittag” (“Early Noon”), a major poem of Bachmann’s first collection. In this poem, there are numerous references to Germany’s recent past. Having been offered a platter on which is displayed the German heart, Bachmann’s lyrical traveler opens the heart, looks inside, and reflects on what he finds: Germany’s misuse of idealism and its efforts to disguise the past with what George Schoolfield has called the “simple heartiness of the beer-garden.” Fragments of a song by Franz Schubert and a poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, cherished treasures of German musical and literary heritage, are interspersed with Bachmann’s lines reminding the reader, all too painfully, of the aesthetic component of the German mind. In their context, these quotations sound like parodies, for Germany, in the poem, is a beheaded angel, and yesterday’s hangmen drink from the golden goblet of Goethe’s “Der König in Thule”—who, one must know, was “faithful unto the grave.”

The message could not be lost on the German (or Austrian) reader of the poem. After all, loyalty was a key word with which many of Hitler’s henchmen defended their actions. Later in the poem, Bachmann conjures up Fyodor Dostoevski’s Zapiski iz myortvogo doma (1861-1862; The House of the Dead, 1881), provoking visions of Germany as a Siberian labor camp, with all the old jailers still in power—a not-so-subtle reminder that many of Germany’s war criminals went free, had their civil rights and privileges restored, and even, in some cases, again enjoyed positions of power.

“Early Noon” clearly demonstrates that Bachmann did not wish to retreat into a realm of private memories or to hide behind fairy tales, as some critics have charged. On the contrary, it should be mentioned here that even many of her love poems are not as private as they may at first appear. Love, too, is shown as a victim of the modern age. Communication is no longer possible. The poem “Nebelland” (“Fog Land”), for example, is set in the winter. The lost lover is seen as a fish. The speaker is being driven away by ice floes, symbols of despair and desolation.

Although her poems can be related to their historical situation, Bachmann was not, strictly speaking, a political poet. Her methodological approach to language was based on her study of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Attempting to discover the limits of human understanding, Bachmann, in “Early Noon,” questions the effectiveness of the poetic word. “Where Germany’s soil blackens the sky,” she writes, “the cloud searches for words and fills the crater with silence. . . .” Silence, the ultimate vanishing point of a poem? In “Early Morning,” Bachmann clings to the hope that the unspeakable may still be said. The poem concludes with these words: “The unutterable, gently uttered, goes over the land: it is already noon.” As Schoolfield explains, “unutterable” is an abstract noun with two implications. Unspeakable crimes and unutterable beauty come to mind, and beyond these connotations lies a hint that there are problems the complexity of which defies expression.

It should be pointed out that Bachmann’s skeptical attitude toward language reflects an Austrian tradition whose roots lie in the linguistic and philosophical dilemmas of the turn of the century. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, in his celebrated Brief des Lord Chandos (pb. as “Ein Brief” in 1902, pb. in book form in 1905; Letter of Lord Chandos, 1952), expressed his despair at the ineffectiveness of poetic language. In “Early Noon,” an echo of the famous last sentence of Wittgenstein’s “Logisch-philosophische Abhandlung” (1921; better known by the bilingual German and English edition title of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1922, 1961) can be heard: “What one cannot speak of, one must keep silent about.”

“Autumn Maneuvers”

Many of the poems in Bachmann’s first collection read—in the apt formulation of George Schoolfield—like a vade mecum of instruction for dealing with a brief phase of European history. One such poem is “Herbstmanöver” (“Autumn Maneuvers”). In it, Bachmann addresses German readers of the 1950’s. They may find personal pleasures by traveling to the most exotic lands, but they will still be afflicted by twinges of guilt—guilt that they will not be able to dispel by claiming that they are not at home.

“Borrowed Time”

Another such poem is “Die gestundete Zeit” (“Borrowed Time”). When time actually does run out and appears on the horizon, “your beloved,” Bachmann writes, “sinks into the sand, which rises to her wandering hair, choking her into silence and finding her mortal, willing to part after each embrace.” Once again, the imagery of this poem and its symbols, drawn from nature, should not be regarded as mere ornamentation but rather as integral elements in a “complex totality operating on the outer boundaries of meaning.” Again, an individual is shown as being incapable of communication and falling into silence.

“Evocation of the Great Bear”

One of Bachmann’s best-known poems is “Anrufung des grossen Bären” (“Evocation of the Great Bear”). It has been anthologized many times and has provoked numerous interpretations. In spite of its fairy-tale-like introduction and atmosphere, it suggests many parallels with contemporary history.

In the first stanza, the image of a shaggy bear blends with that of the Ursa Major of the stars. The mighty old bear is about to break loose and destroy all those shepherds, representatives of humankind who have, maliciously or mischievously, invoked him, knowing full well that he would destroy them and their flock, thus bringing about their predicament. In the second stanza, the bear becomes a symbolic bear, and the earth itself becomes a pinecone with which he plays, testing it between his teeth, rolling it between the trees, and grabbing it with his paws—all this symbolizing humanity’s precarious position. A warning follows in the last two stanzas: Contribute to the church and keep the blind man (who shows the bear at carnivals) happy, so that he will not let the beast loose. The bear could still crush all cones, all worlds that have fallen from the trees of the universe. Biblical parallels suggest themselves here: the story of the Last Judgment, the Fall of Man.

In the final analysis, no single interpretation is possible. The total effect of Bachmann’s symbolic vocabulary in this poem is to leave the reader in doubt about its exact meaning.

The value of poetry

Bachmann’s entire oeuvre can be interpreted as a transformation of inner conflict into art. In a speech of thanks to the donors of an award she received, Bachmann spoke in the following terms of the function of the poet:

We extend our possibilities in the interplay between the impossible and the possible. It is important for us to create this tension, we grow on it, we look toward a goal, which becomes more distant the closer we get.

In this speech, Bachmann expresses a certain ambivalence about the role of the poet. She vacillates between a firm belief in the eternal value of poetry and poetic language and a sense of its ultimate futility. In the end, the latter prevailed, and she virtually gave up poetry. The few poems that Bachmann wrote after 1956 and published in various magazines all revolve around her doubts about the validity of poetic language. The final poem of her collection Anrufung des grossen Bären, titled “Ihr Worte,” ends with two ambiguous lines that are indicative of her crisis: “Kein Sterbenswort, Ihr Worte!” (“not one more death-prone word, you words!”).

Bachmann has been called a poet-thinker. As such, she made heavy demands on herself, and her work likewise demands much from her readers. Her readiness to confront, using exemplary lyric language, the issues of Germany’s dark historical past as well as the universal problems of modern humanity has secured for her a permanent position among the great poets of German literature.

Bibliography

Achberger, Karen. Understanding Ingeborg Bachmann. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995. The first biography of Bachmann in English offers interpretation of her poetry, radio plays, librettos, critical writings, and prose. Achberger is a leading critic and has published a number of articles on Bachmann.

Brinker-Gabler, Gisela, and Markus Zisselsberger, eds. If We Had the Word: Ingeborg Bachmann, Views and Reviews. Riverside, Calif.: Ariadne Press, 2004. This collection of essays was partly the result of a 1996 symposium on Bachmann. Provides analysis of Bachmann’s poetry and major themes in her writing, such as death.

Brown, Hilary, ed. Landmarks in German Women’s Writing. New York: Peter Lang, 2007. This work on prominent German women writers contains a chapter on Bachmann that analyzes her work and life.

Demetz, Peter. “Ingeborg Bachmann.” In Postwar German Literature: A Critical Introduction. New York: Pegasus, 1970. A brief introduction to Bachmann’s work.

Ezergailis, Inta. Woman Writers: The Divided Self. Bonn, Germany: H. Grundmann, 1982. Critical analysis of prose by Bachmann and other authors. Includes bibliographic references.

Gölz, Sabine I. The Split Scene of Reading. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1998. Criticism and interpretation of Bachmann and Franz Kafka’s writing with an emphasis on the influence of Jacques Derrida and Friedrich Nietzsche. Includes an extensive bibliography.

Gudrun, Brokoph-Mauch, and Annette Daigger, eds. Ingeborg Bachmann: Neue Richtungen in der Forschung? Ingbert, Germany: Röhrig, 1995. A collection of critical essays on Bachmann in German with a section of essays in English.

Lennox, Sara. Cemetery of the Murdered Daughters: Feminism, History, and Ingeborg Bachmann. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006. An analysis that relies on feminist criticism while at the same time positioning the works of Bachmann in their historical context.

Lyon, James K. “The Poetry of Ingeborg Bachmann: A Primeval Impulse in the Modern Wasteland.” German Life and Letters 17 (April, 1964): 206-215. A critical analysis of selected poems by Bachmann.