Ingeborg Bachmann rose to prominence as a celebrated author of the postwar era with her very first publication. To mark what would have been her 100th birthday, Beate Tröger revisits the poetry collection “Die gestundete Zeit” (Time Deferred) – with which Bachmann not only challenged the imprecision of language, but also wrote against the silence surrounding war, crimes and guilt.

By Beate Tröger

Ingeborg Bachmann began searching for her own precise, distinctive language at a very early stage. This search gave rise to the poems that were published under the title Die gestundete Zeit in 1953. On 26 December 1952, the then 26-year-old author reflected on why quick understanding – finding the same language in others – diminished her own willingness to speak: “I believe it is because language found too quickly easily leads to playfulness and a lack of commitment, indeed to imprecision.”

Making the Unsayable Sayable

This scrupulous attention to language is not confined to Bachmann’s poetry; her entire oeuvre is shaped by a sense of linguistic urgency – a crisis of expression born from the imperative not to follow familiar patterns or render thoughts in well-worn sentences, but to discover original images and make the previously unspoken speakable.

This search for a new, unspoiled language is surely one reason why, more than seventy years after its first publication, Die gestundete Zeit continues to resonate. The final four stanzas of Psalm make this particularly clear: Here is a voice that dares “To say dark things” – which is also the title of another poem in the collection. It becomes clear why Alfred Andersch, who edited Die gestundete Zeit, wrote to the author in July 1953: “I am now more than ever convinced that the appearance of this volume will be an event […]. For your poems do not dazzle; instead, they slowly descend to the depths.”

From Group 47 to Star Author of the Postwar Era

Die gestundete Zeit was not just Bachmann’s first collection of poems but her first independent publication of any kind. The volume consists of a motto poem, 23 poems in three parts and the “Monologue of Prince Myshkin for the ballet pantomime ‘The Idiot’” and appeared in the studio frankfurt series published by the Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt, edited by Andersch. The edition had only a brief lifespan: the publisher filed for bankruptcy before it even appeared. Yet Andersch was proven right. The poems had already begun to make their mark. Further editions followed, and Bachmann’s ascent to becoming one of the defining voices of postwar German-language literature continued. She appeared at the meeting of Group 47 in Niendorf in 1952 and was formally presented with the group’s literary prize the following summer.

Several poems from Die gestundete Zeit have become canonical works and found their way into school textbooks – among them “Die große Fracht” (The Great Cargo), “Herbstmanöver” (Autumn Manoeuvre) and “Alle Tage” (Every Day), alongside the title poem itself. A closer reading reveals the precision Bachmann brings to her writing. Take the circular structure of the title poem, which opens and closes with the line “Es kommen härtere Tage” (“Harder days are coming”). If we picture the rotating hands of a clock measuring out “borrowed time”, the eternal return of the same and the experience of transience are rendered in striking linguistic form. The tension of the poem intensifies – especially when read repeatedly – making the passage of time itself palpable.

The address to a “you” – which can also be read as a self-address – grows increasingly urgent as the poem unfolds. Lines that begin as statements turn into imperatives: the opening “Soon you must lace up your boots / and chase the hounds back to the marsh farms” becomes, by the end, a series of commands: “Lace up your boots. / Chase back the hounds. / Throw the fish into the sea. / Put out the lupins! // Harder days are coming.”*

New Words for Reality

In Die gestundete Zeit, sensual and poetic language becomes a force in itself – something Bachmann fundamentally believed poetry to be capable of, as she wrote in a 1954 journal article: “I believe that […] whoever writes poetry lays formulas into memory, wonderful old words for a stone and a leaf, joined or shattered by new words, new signs for reality.”

Ingeborg Bachmann’s autobiographical notes Senza Casa, published in 2024, make clear that she was concerned with something quite different from reducing poems to instruments of abstract thought. After completing her second and final collection, Anrufung des Großen Bären (Invocation of the Great Bear), which appeared in 1956, she wrote on 29 August: “The volume of poems was finished just in time, before it was threatened by thought. Now thinking has become unavoidable.”

The metaphorical language of Bachmann’s poems is therefore memorable not because it is habitual or routine. Rather, she writes almost like a visionary, her language reaching beyond her merely subjective perception.

Writing Against the Silencing of Nazi Crimes

In Bachmann’s poetry, there is no place for conventional thinking. Instead, as she notes, her aim is to speak “beautifully into the impure” – or to use poetry to break through the silence that settled over Germany and Austria after World War Two, where the wilful suppression of historically incurred guilt had become the norm. Perhaps it is Bachmann’s own suffering under that silence that drives her towards a language which breaks it – yet remains perpetually threatened by a retreat into speechlessness. Such lines resist a society in which enthusiasm for war and the participation of so many in the organised mass murder of Jews continued to reverberate, and where historical guilt was present, yet the reckoning with that guilt largely never came.

The Troubling Relevance of Bachmann’s Poetry

In such a ghostly linguistic landscape – built on murder, ruins and physical and moral destruction, yet simultaneously invoking renewal and continuity – these poems, with their critical force, must have had a deeply unsettling impact. The composer Hans Werner Henze, a close friend, wrote to Bachmann: “in these new poems there is something alarming, scandalous, alienating, frightening. if you continue like this, you will get the most wonderful scandals, whether you want them or not.” And yet this did not come to pass. In a heavy, leaden age, even the starkest verses found their audience: Many of the poems reflect Bachmann’s confrontation with her father’s membership in the Nazi Party and his service on the Eastern Front – subjects never spoken of within the family. From an early stage, she engaged with the lingering presence of fascism and the genocide of the Jews, and precisely because of the persistent silence surrounding these issues found life in Austria and Germany hard to endure. From today’s perspective, what once appeared alarming, scandalous, alienating and disturbing in Die gestundete Zeit can be seen in a different light. Given the resurgence of fascist tendencies in our own time, the relevance of this volume remains undiminished.


* Translations marked with an asterisk are taken from Peter Filkins’s translation in Darkness Spoken: The Collected Poems of Ingeborg Bachmann. All other translations are by Sue Pickett.
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