On the 100th anniversary of her birth
The Continuing Relevance of Ingeborg Bachmann

What remains of an author who ceaselessly reshaped her own image? A century after Ingeborg Bachmann’s birth, her work leads us back to the enduring questions of freedom, love, and identity – and compels us to see them anew.

Ingeborg Bachmann had already attained legendary status in her lifetime. After her untimely death in 1973, Heinrich Böll noted that “the iconisation of a living person can conceal a slow killing”. He then asked a question that still encapsulates the challenges of studying this writer today: “Was Ingeborg Bachmann not trapped in the image that others made of her – and made her into?”

From the very beginning, this poet invited projection. She stepped into the limelight suddenly, in 1953, aged 26, when she received the Group 47 Prize for her existentially cryptic poems about love, longing and loss. A cover story in Der Spiegel the following year further cemented her image as a lyrical diva – always enigmatic, impossible to pin down. Her two poetry collections Die gestundete Zeit (Time Deferred, 1953) and Anrufung des Großen Bären (Invocation of the Great Bear, 1956) are undisputed landmarks of 20th-century literature. They reveal a female voice of striking confidence – one that moves between tradition and modernity in a wholly distinctive way, in permanent conflict with the boundaries of the society in which she found herself. Acknowledging this – in other words, reading her work in its full historical context – is perhaps the most important challenge her poetry poses to readers today.

In 1971, two years before her death, one defining strand of her writing came fully into its own: with her novel Malina, she became for many a central figure of feminism. In the decades that followed, however, the way she was perceived shifted considerably. She died in hospital after falling asleep with a lit cigarette in her hand and sustaining severe burns. The fatal outcome was primarily the result of the mismanagement of her addiction to sleeping pills.

For some journalists, she has become – not least because of her frequently changing relationships with men – a figure defined by volatility and drug addiction. This writer seems to serve as an ideal canvas onto which the most varied and contradictory discourses and theoretical interpretations can be projected. The appeal of biographical speculation appears to lie in the fact that so little is ultimately known, and yet the gaps appear to invite endless interpretation. Ingeborg Bachmann remains, to this day, a figure who provokes. All the more necessary, then, is an approach that is as objective and historically grounded as possible.

From the author’s early years, six pages from diaries written shortly before and shortly after the end of the war have survived. One brief passage is particularly striking.

Although neighbours in the Austrian city of Klagenfurt had been killed by bomb attacks, the 18-year-old no longer fled to the air-raid shelter. She could not bear the stuffy air and the “dull, silent masses”. Instead, she set a chair out in the garden and read obsessively, devouring both the classics and modern literature: “I have firmly resolved to keep reading when the bombs come.”

Her guiding principle: “to be free”

From the outset, literature represented for Bachmann an alternative life plan. The vision of the intoxicated poet was the most immediate expression of her desires: “In my intoxication I can only be boundless / and drink and take and endure.” At the end of the war, Bachmann’s guiding principle was “to be free”: words she used to free herself of Jack Hamesh, a British officer in the occupying forces who had fallen in love with her. In this, she apparently set herself apart from other young women at the time. When a friend planned to marry a soldier from the occupying forces, Bachmann wrote: “Of course I want to leave, but I want to leave so that I can study. I don’t want to marry at all – not even an Englishman for a few tins of food and silk stockings.”

A woman living independently was, however, not within the norms of the 1940s and 1950s. Ingeborg Bachmann encountered this conflict again and again, and it is this tension that gives her work its distinctively charged quality. A surprisingly large number of her texts experiment with different self-images. From an early age, she treated life as a kind of creative game, reworking experiences from her own life and later playing with the expectations of the public. Even as a child, she preferred to be a “clown” and liked being photographed as one – treating the details of her own life as material to be continually rearranged and recomposed.

A letter that Heinrich Böll wrote to Bachmann after the 1954 meeting of Group 47 at Cap Circeo in Italy seems particularly revealing. He asked her to send him the poem about the “unfaithful beloved,” as he recalled it, which she had read at the meeting and which had evidently stayed with him. He was referring to Nebelland (Land of Fog), which ends with the lines: “I know my beloved / is unfaithful. Sometimes she floats / towards the city on high-heeled shoes. / In bars she kisses glasses deep / in the mouth with drinking straws, / and she comes out with words for everyone./ But this language I don’t understand.” (Translation by  Paul Archer)

It is striking that Bachmann often wrote from a male perspective. In a letter to her parents in October 1959, she stated that where her “profession” was concerned, she regarded herself as belonging more “among the men”. In her eyes, an autonomous female language did not exist. Yet from an early age, she had learned to adopt and switch masks and roles, using them to define her own position. In Nebelland, for example, she portrays a particular image of womanhood through a man’s gaze. In doing so, she conjures up the very fantasies that were projected onto her – as an independent woman – and that provoked such resistance.

The challenge of having to describe herself as a woman

Ingeborg Bachmann knew public fame, but not what to do with it She lived the life of an emancipated woman without having the vocabulary or a clear understanding of what this meant. Through her often male protagonists, she avoided the problem of having to describe herself directly. The unfinished story Portrait von Anna-Maria, written in the mid-1950s, appears to be an unusual experiment, for here she confronts that challenge head-on. A rather unassuming first-person narrator encounters the painter Anna-Maria. The labels attached to the artist begin early: one male friend is jealous of the village dentist, with whom she is having an affair – the year before, it had been a fisherman – and yet he remains devoted to her, because she is, he assures himself, a “personality”. 

In this story, Bachmann plays with perceptions of herself – both her own and others’ – that have long since taken on a life of their own. For example, Anna-Maria is said to be somewhat unfeminine, but that, owing to a certain aura, she is clearly accustomed to being desired as a woman: “Her effect on men was immense – undeniable and astonishing.” This is then contrasted with what the first-person narrator learns in the dining car of a train from a gentleman, who also knows Anna-Maria. He dismisses all criticism of the painter with the words: “But for her, there is nothing but her art!”

Bachmann once again lays out the image that exists of her, as if trying to discover what fixed shape, if any, it has actually taken. Anna-Maria’s affairs in the village recall the many rumours that surrounded Bachmann herself. Even then, her various relationships were inseparable from how the public read her as a writer. A comparison seems unavoidable here: it is striking that the affairs of the aging Gottfried Benn, in the same period, appear to have enhanced his reputation for posterity – what a rogue, this pleasure-loving cynic! – whereas with Ingeborg Bachmann, from a postfeminist lens of empowerment, they are seen as signs of self-destruction. And yet throughout her writing, Bachmann returns again and again to destruction as something inflicted by social structures and mechanisms. She sought aesthetic responses to the predicament in which she found herself. Her major literary works – the two poetry collections, the short stories and prose cycle Todesarten (Ways of Dying) – repeatedly confront the same fundamental pattern: the oscillation between a longing for attachment and the will “to be free”.

Unconditional love as a central theme

These underlying tensions are particularly apparent in the highly successful radio play Der gute Gott von Manhattan (The Good God of Manhattan) from 1958. At the time, radio drama was a genre with an enormous reach, and one that allowed Bachmann to pursue her interest in media and music – developed in collaboration with Hans Werner Henze, among others. Here, the author explores the motif of unconditional love in its most radical form – a love that is, by its very nature, inseparable from the impossibility of its own fulfilment. It is likely that Bachmann was working through her relationship with Paul Celan in this play. The Eastern European Jewish, German-speaking poet – who had first come to Vienna after the Second World War as a “displaced person” – was unmistakably the great love of Ingeborg Bachmann’s life. The novella Drei Wege zum See (Three Paths to the Lake), the last text she ever wrote, in which the image of Celan plays a central role, returns to this theme once more. Her love for Celan was rooted in a shared literary origin, as Celan once described it in a love poem to Bachmann: “Banished and lost / we were at home.” In reality, in everyday life, however, this love could not be lived out – a fact documented in meticulous detail in their correspondence.

A decisive turning point in Bachmann’s life came at the end of 1962. Max Frisch was the last man with whom Bachmann attempted to build a life together; he embodied a kind of desperate hope that it was possible to be with an intellectual and artist who was also grounded, reliable and capable of managing everyday life. Yet it was precisely this that proved to be the problem. The separation from Frisch triggered a severe crisis, leading to several operations and psychiatric treatment.

After this, Bachmann worked on a major project which, early on, she had titled Todesarten (Ways of Dying). It evolved into a highly associative network of figures and motifs, incorporating a wide range of linguistic forms: shifts in perspective, the barely perceptible transition between first- and third-person narration and the switching back and forth between multiple time layers. After several false starts, a final concentrated effort resulted in the novel Malina. She also left behind, in fragmentary form – though with extended, self-contained prose sections – the unfinished novels The Book of Franza and The Book Goldmann. In them, she writes about illness, of social conditioning and crimes, and of fascist tendencies.

The structure of Malina emerges from a complex process of aesthetic compression that seeks to render all autobiographical sources unrecognisable. Particularly haunting are the horror visions in the chapter “The Third Man”, in which the “father” figure symbolically embodies every mechanism of social oppression. Early speculative readings prompted a far-reaching theory that the author had been sexually abused by her father in childhood. This claim rests on no evidence beyond the chapter itself, yet, in view of its apparent plausibility and certain patterns in Bachmann’s relationships with men, it still seems so compelling that the absence of proof can be easily overlooked. Meanwhile, Ingeborg Bachmann’s dream notes from her psychotherapeutic treatment in the mid-1960s have been published, making it clear that the original model for the father figure in Malina was in fact Max Frisch.

Living on a razor’s edge

As with all texts that view literature as an art form, a summary of the content of Malina says very little about what actually happens in the novel. At its centre is a female first-person narrator who is apparently a poet. She is involved in a love affair with Ivan, who lives three houses away. There is, however, another man with whom she shares a home in a complicated arrangement. His name is Malina, and he emerges as an enigmatic figure within the novel’s complex structure: he is a masculine component of the female first-person narrator, necessary for survival, for writing and for thought, from which she separates herself. In this sense, he represents a continuation of one of the characteristic motifs running throughout Bachmann’s work. By the end, only Malina remains in the shared apartment. In a surreal scene, the female figure disappears into a crack that opens in the wall. Faced with the dominant masculine principle, the female “I” cannot simply exist as herself and leaves behind, as the novel’s final sentence, the declaration: “It was murder.”

Malina revolves, in an ever-tightening spiral, around the question of how the female self can actually be given a voice. The novel systematically explores all the forms of domination to which the female narrator falls victim – the power of economics, politics, religion, media, and, not least, the power of men. Yet Bachmann also seeks a way of presenting the intellectual female self as something other than a victim, simultaneously probing the irresolvable tensions that come with being an artist. Central to the aesthetic design of Malina is the author’s use of a musical leitmotif. At various points, Arnold Schönberg’s Pierrot Lunaire is cited not only through textual passages but also through musical notation, and the structure of Malina also aligns to that work in an astonishing way. The musical structure, culminating in a kind of coda, ultimately runs counter to the final declaration that it was “murder”.

Perhaps the most impassioned text Ingeborg Bachmann ever wrote as an aesthetic credo is the one dedicated to opera diva Maria Callas. It can also be read as a secret vision of herself. According to Bachmann, Callas “lived on the razor’s edge”; she was “the last fairy tale”, “the last reality”. The fragment, discovered among Bachmann’s papers after her death, concludes with the words: “Callas – yes, when did she live, when will she die? – is great, is human, is unfamiliar in a world of mediocrity and perfection.” For Bachmann, this remains timelessly relevant. She views life and art together as a dance on the razor’s edge, capturing, in this single image, virtually everything that can be said about her multifaceted body of work. The historical and aesthetic dimensions of Bachmann’s literature are capable of lending contemporary debates about gender an unexpected depth and acuity.