Ingeborg Bachmann (Austrian German: [ˈɪŋəbɔrɡ ˈbaxman]; June 25, 1926 – October 17, 1973) was an Austrian poet and writer. She is considered one of the most important writers in German-language literature during the 20th century. In 1963, she was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature by German scholar Harald Patzer.
Early life and education
Bachmann was born in Klagenfurt, a city in the Austrian state of Carinthia. She is the daughter of Olga (née Haas) and Matthias Bachmann, who worked as a schoolteacher. Her father was an early member of the Austrian National Socialist Party. Bachmann has a sister named Isolde and a brother named Heinz.
She studied subjects like philosophy, psychology, the study of the German language, and law at universities in Innsbruck, Graz, and Vienna. In 1949, she earned her PhD from the University of Vienna. Her thesis was titled "The Critical Reception of the Existential Philosophy of Martin Heidegger," and her thesis adviser was Victor Kraft.
Career
After graduating, Bachmann worked as a scriptwriter and editor at the Allied radio station Rot-Weiss-Rot. This job allowed her to learn about modern literature and earn a good income, which helped her focus on her own writing. Her first radio dramas were published by the station. Her career improved when she met Hans Weigel, a writer who supported young post-war writers, and joined Gruppe 47, a group of famous writers that included Ilse Aichinger, Paul Celan, Heinrich Böll, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, and Günter Grass.
In 1953, she moved to Rome, Italy. There, she spent many years writing poems, essays, short stories, and opera libretti with Hans Werner Henze. These works brought her international recognition and many awards.
Bachmann’s doctoral dissertation showed her growing disappointment with Heideggerian existentialism. This was partly resolved through her interest in Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus greatly influenced her understanding of language. During her lifetime, she was most famous for her two poetry collections, Die gestundete Zeit ("Time Deferred") and Anrufung des Grossen Bären ("Invocation of Ursa Major").
Bachmann’s writing often focused on themes such as personal limits, the search for truth, and the philosophy of language, which followed Wittgenstein’s ideas. Many of her prose works explored the struggles of women to survive and find a voice in post-war society. She also wrote about the histories of imperialism and fascism, especially how imperialist ideas remained in the present. Fascism was a common theme in her work. In her novel Der Fall Franza ("The Case of Franza"), she argued that fascism had not ended in 1945 but continued in the German-speaking world of the 1960s, especially in how men oppressed women. In Germany, the progress made by women’s rights campaigns in the late 19th and early 20th centuries had been undone by the Nazi regime in the 1930s. Bachmann’s work on fascism followed other women writers, like Anna Seghers, Ilse Aichinger, Ingeborg Drewitz, and Christa Wolf, who also wrote about fascism from a woman’s perspective.
A crisis of dealing with the past, along with fear that National Socialism might still exist in modern societies, is present in Bachmann’s work. In her radio plays, this theme shows the tension between freedom and imprisonment. Her first radio play, Ein Geschäft mit Träumen ("A Shop for Dreams"), deals with the cruelty of violence and oppression. Der gute Gott von Manhattan ("The Good God of Manhattan") echoes Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechwan, as it examines the difficulty of goodness and love surviving in capitalist, consumerist societies. In her analysis of Bachmann’s radio drama Die Zikaden ("The Cicadas"), written in Ischia and Naples in late 1954 and first broadcast on Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk (NWDR) on March 25, 1955, Lucy Jeffery wrote:
The temporary existence of writers who escape prejudice, conflict, and dominance is similar to the experience of refugees. The feeling of not being settled is compared to the desire to find a better place, both geographically and in time, away from suffering. However, as Bachmann knew, escaping is only temporary, and guilt and longing cannot be avoided.
Similar themes appear in works like Ein Wildermuth ("A Wildermuth"), included in Das dreißigste Jahr ("The Thirtieth Year: Stories," published in 1961), Malina (published in 1971), and Kriegstagebuch ("War Diary," published posthumously in 2010).
Bachmann was also part of a group of Austrian women writers who found political realities in their personal lives and tried to achieve freedom from them. Her writings, along with those of Barbara Frischmuth, Brigitte Schwaiger, and Anna Mitgutsch, were widely published in Germany. Male Austrian authors like Franz Innerhofer, Josef Winkler, and Peter Turrini also wrote popular works about traumatic social experiences, often published by major German publishing houses. After Bachmann’s death in 1973, Austrian writers such as Thomas Bernhard, Peter Handke, and Elfriede Jelinek continued the tradition of Austrian literature in Germany.
Between November 1959 and February 1960, Bachmann gave five lectures on poetics at Goethe University Frankfurt. Known as the Frankfurter Vorlesungen: Probleme zeitgenössischer Dichtung ("Frankfurt Lectures: Problems of Contemporary Writings"), these lectures are considered her most important work. In them, she discussed recurring themes in her early writing and the role of literature in society. Bachmann argued that literature must be studied in its historical context, which foreshadowed a growing interest in connecting literary works to historical understanding.
In the first lecture, Fragen und Scheinfragen ("Questions and Pseudo-Questions"), Bachmann focused on the role of writers in post-war society and listed essential questions she called "destructive and frightening in their simplicity." These included: Why write? What does change mean, and why do we want it through art? What are the limits of a writer trying to bring change? According to Karen Achberger, Bachmann saw the major literary achievements of the 20th century as expressions of moral and intellectual renewal in individual writers. She believed that a writer’s new thinking and experiences formed the core of their work, helping them move closer to a new language. Bachmann also linked literary renewal to writers who felt silenced by self-doubt and despair over the powerlessness of language. She cited Hofmannsthal’s Ein Brief (1902) as the first expression of this dilemma.
In the second lecture, Über Gedichte ("On Poetry"), Bachmann distinguished poetry’s power to grasp reality through language from other genres like novels and plays. She referenced Günter Eich and Stefan George, identifying a new generation of "poet-prophets" whose mission was to lead the world to discover an "ever purer heaven of art" (George). Bachmann separated these poets from the Surrealists, who sought violence,
Later life and death
During her later years, she had problems with alcohol and became dependent on medicines called barbiturates and benzodiazepines, which her doctor prescribed. A friend described the situation:
"I was very surprised by how many pills she was taking. It must have been about 100 each day, and the trash can was full of empty boxes. She looked very unhealthy, with a pale, waxy appearance. Her body had many bruises, and I wondered how they happened. Then, when I saw her roll a cigarette and let it burn on her arm, I understood: the bruises were caused by burns from falling cigarettes. The large number of pills had made her body unable to feel pain."
On the night of September 25, 1973, her nightgown caught fire, and she was taken to Sant'Eugenio Hospital at 7:05 A.M. the next morning for treatment of serious burns. Local police said the fire was caused by a cigarette. During her hospital stay, she experienced symptoms from stopping barbiturate use, though the doctors treating her did not know the cause. This may have contributed to her death on October 17, 1973.
Legacy
After World War II, German writers like Hilde Domin, Luise Rinser, and Nelly Sachs wrote important books about women's issues. However, a feminist movement in West Germany began in the 1970s. After her death, the writer Ingeborg Bachmann became well-known to feminist readers. Feminist scholars studied her work, which led to more research and interest in her writing. Her books became popular in the Frauenliteratur (women's literature) movement, which aimed to find true female voices in writing. New publishing companies, such as Frauenoffensive (Women's Offensive), supported this movement and published works by writers like Verena Stefan.
In 2021, the government of Carinthia bought the childhood home of Ingeborg Bachmann on Henselstraße in Klagenfurt to turn it into a museum dedicated to her life and work.
Awards and recognition
The Ingeborg Bachmann Prize, given every year in Klagenfurt since 1977, is named after Ingeborg Bachmann.
The Dreamed Ones (Die Geträumten; 2016) is a movie based on the nearly 20-year collection of letters between Bachmann and poet Paul Celan. It was directed by Ruth Beckermann and won the SCAM International Award at Cinéma du Réel 2016.
A movie about her life, Ingeborg Bachmann – Journey into the Desert, stars Vicky Krieps as Bachmann and was directed by Margarethe von Trotta. It had its first showing at the 73rd Berlin International Film Festival in February 2023 and will be shown in theaters on 26 October 2023. The film shows her relationship with Max Frisch and how it affected her life. It also shows her friends, composer Hans Werner Henze and writer Adolf Opel, who traveled with her to Egypt to experience the desert.
Personal life
From 1945 to 1946, Bachmann fell in love with a man who had served in the British Army, named Jack Hamesh, who was Jewish and from Vienna. In May 1948, she began a romantic relationship with Paul Celan, a poet and Holocaust survivor, in Vienna. In 1955, she met Henry Kissinger, a political scientist who was already married and had two children. Despite this, the two had a romantic relationship that lasted for several years. From 1958 to 1963, she lived together at times with Max Frisch, a Swiss playwright. Her 1971 novel, Malina, has been described as a response, at least in part, to Frisch’s 1964 novel Mein Name sei Gantenbein. Bachmann never married and did not have any children.