How do you put the inexpressible into words? After the horrors of the Holocaust, this question haunted post-war German writers.
Their aim was to reject the legacy of the Nazi era while documenting the trauma of bombed cities and the country’s starving population. He explored the complexities of collective guilt and individual responsibility.
But the German-language literary landscape raising these difficult issues was dominated by male writers. Women’s writing was often dismissed as trivial.
Ingeborg Bachmann, an anti-fascist and feminist Austrian writer and poet, was one of the few women who spoke out in the face of a deeply sexist literary industry.
The literary icon remains extremely relevant today, says Regina Schilling, a longtime admirer of Bachmann and director of the new documentary, “Ingeborg Bachmann: Someone Who Was Me.”
Through her research for the film, Schilling was particularly impressed by “how visionary and contemporary Bachmann’s texts are.”
“They addressed topics that are at the center of today’s social discourse, such as gender identity,” Schilling said.
“She was definitely ahead of her time,” the filmmaker said.
Bachmann confronted the way language perpetuated ruling power structures. “There is no new world without a new language,” the narrator says in her story “Murderers and Madmen.”
fighting language barriers
Born in the Austrian city of Klagenfurt in 1926, Bachmann was the daughter of an early member of the Nazi Party. Even though she never discussed it publicly, her troubled background deeply influenced her work, which dealt with collective guilt, trauma, and patriarchal violence.
Fleeing his home town in the Carinthian Alps was an important first step towards liberation. He once said, “Although I later traveled to Paris, London, and Germany, it matters little; for in my memory, the journey from the valley to Vienna will always remain the longest.”
A student of philosophy, psychology, and German literature, Bachmann’s doctoral thesis focused on the existentialist thought of philosopher Martin Heidegger.
He was also considered an expert on another thinker, Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose philosophy suggested that there are things that cannot be described logically, and that we should remain silent about them. Rejecting Wittgenstein’s conclusions became one of Bachmann’s lifelong goals: through his writings, he attempted to express “the inexplicable, the mysterious, the limit.”
A distinguished group of avant-garde writers
Through his work at the radio station of the American forces occupying Vienna after the war, Bachmann came into contact with the broader German-language literary scene.
He was invited to read his poetry at a gathering of Group 47 (Group 47), an influential avant-garde literary group. The informal association of German-speaking writers, founded in 1947, aimed to free German literature from the propaganda and corruption of the Nazi era. It launched the careers of prominent writers such as Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass as well as Bachmann.
In 1953, Bachmann won the Group 47 Literary Award, the organization’s highest honor, for poems published as his first collection, “Die Gestundete Zeit” (The Borrowed Time). These works reveal worlds that are at once profoundly beautiful and horrifyingly violent.
He also achieved success with his radio plays.
His only completed novel, “Malina”, published in 1971, is considered his magnum opus. The work explores the psychological disintegration of a female writer living in a tense love triangle in Vienna.
Before he died of complications following an accidental fire in his Rome apartment in 1973 at the age of 47, Bachmann was working on a massive project of several volumes, titled “Ways of Dying”.
His tragic death strengthened his myth, as it reflected the existential revelations and trauma that were major themes of his work.
High-profile literary love stories
The author’s romantic and intellectual relationships also contributed to her mythology. As a young adult, she fell in love with the Romanian Jewish poet and Holocaust survivor Paul Celan. Even though he married another woman, they continued writing letters for years, documenting their complicated love story.
He shared a deep partnership, in both life and art, with Hans Werner Henze, one of Germany’s most important contemporary composers. They collaborated on opera and even considered marriage. But because of Heinz being gay, Bachmann moved away from the platonic union.
Bachmann was also in a relationship with the prominent Swiss playwright and novelist Max Frisch. Although they became the most famous couple in German-language literature, their intense exchange of ideas was also plagued by tension. Their letters – only published in 2022 – give insight into how their open relationships and love affairs were a source of trouble for both of them.
Sandra Hulser in the new movie
Several works are being organized to mark the 100th anniversary of Ingeborg Bachmann’s birth on June 25, 1926.
Schilling’s documentary features archival footage and interviews with Bachmann, as well as excerpts from his texts and improvised scenes with Oscar-nominated star Sandra Hülser.
A new autobiography by Andrea Schall, “Two People Are Within Me”, is also based on recently published letters and diary entries. The title represents the main tension in Bachmann’s life, the dichotomy between an uncompromising, intellectually gifted writer and a man deeply struggling with addiction, isolation, and self-doubt.
But despite the extensive body of work analyzing all aspects of Bachmann’s writings and life, she remains an enigmatic figure, epitomized by the characteristics of her modernist masterpiece, “Malina”: a work that is vulnerable and brave, elegant and extremely sharp, terrifying but deeply human.
Edited by: Stuart Braun