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5 books match the query 'Bachmann, Ingeborg'

cover of Cemetery of the Murdered Daughters: Feminism, History, and Ingeborg Bachmann

Cemetery of the Murdered Daughters

Feminism, History, and Ingeborg Bachmann

Sara Lennox

University of Massachusetts Press, 2006

Although Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann (1926–1973) is widely regarded as one of the most important twentieth-century authors writing in German, her novels and stories have sometimes been viewed narrowly as portraits of women as victims. In this innovative study, Sara Lennox provides a much broader perspective on Bachmann's work, at the same time undertaking an experiment in feminist methodology. Lennox examines Bachmann's poetry and prose in historical context, arguing that the varied feminist interpretations of her writings are the result of shifts in theoretical emphases over a period of more than three decades. Lennox then places her own essays on Bachmann in similar perspective, showing how each piece reflects the historical moment in which it was written. Making use of recent interdisciplinary approaches—Foucauldian theories of sexuality, post-colonial theory, materialist feminism—she explores the extent to which each of her earlier readings was shaped by the methods employed, the questions asked, and the political issues that seemed most germane at the time. Out of this analysis comes a new understanding of the significance of Bachmann's work and new insight into the theory and practice of feminist criticism.

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cover of Correspondence

Correspondence

Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann

Seagull Books, 2019

Paul Celan (1920–70) is one of the best-known German poets of the Holocaust; many of his poems, admired for their spare, precise diction, deal directly with its stark themes. Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann (1926–73) is recognized as one of post–World War II German literature’s most important novelists, poets, and playwrights. It seems only appropriate that these two contemporaries and masters of language were at one time lovers, and they shared a lengthy, artful, and passionate correspondence.

            Collected here for the first time in English are their letters written between 1948 and 1961. Their correspondence forms a moving testimony of the discourse of love in the age after Auschwitz, with all the symptomatic disturbances and crises caused by their  conflicting backgrounds and their hard-to-reconcile designs for living—as a woman, as a man, as writers. In addition to the almost 200 letters, the volume includes an important exchange between Bachmann and Gisèle Celan-Lestrange, who married Celan in 1951, as well as the letters between Paul Celan and Swiss writer Max Frisch.

“Scarcely more breathlessly and desperately can two lovers ever have struggled for words. Little known among German literary historians, the relationship between these two poets amounts to one of the most dramatic and momentous occurrences in German literature.”—FAZ, on the German edition

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cover of The Book of Franza and Requiem for Fanny Goldmann

The Book of Franza and Requiem for Fanny Goldmann

Ingeborg Bachmann, translated from the German by Peter Filkins

Northwestern University Press, 2010

These unfinished novels were intended to follow her widely acclaimed Malina in a Proustian cycle to be entitled Todesarten, or Ways of Dying. Through the tales of two women in postwar Austria, Bachmann explores the ways of dying inflicted on women by men, and upon the living by history, politics, religion, family, and the self.
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cover of War Diary

War Diary

Ingeborg Bachmann

Seagull Books, 2011

Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann (1926–73) is recognized as one of the most important novelists, poets, and playwrights of postwar German literature. As befitting such a versatile writer, her War Diary is not a day-by-day journal but a series of sketches, depicting the last months of World War II and the first year of the subsequent British occupation of Austria. These articulate and powerful entries—all the more remarkable taking into account Bachmann’s young age at the time—reveal the eighteen-year-old’s hatred of both war and Nazism as she avoids the fanatics’ determination to “defend Klagenfurt to the last man and the last woman.”
 
The British occupation leads to her incredible meeting with a British officer, Jack Hamesh, a Jew who had originally fled Vienna for England in 1938. He is astonished to find in Austria a young girl who has read banned authors such as Mann, Schnitzler, and Hofmannsthal. Their relationship is captured here in the emotional and moving letters Hamesh writes to Bachmann when he travels to Israel in 1946. In his correspondence, he describes how in his new home of Israel, he still suffers from the rootlessness affecting so many of those who lost parents, family, friends, and homes in the war.
 
War Diary provides unusual insight into the formation of Bachmann as a writer and will be cherished by the many fans of her work. But it is also a poignant glimpse into life in Austria in the immediate aftermath of the war, and the reflections of both Bachmann and Hamesh speak to a significant and larger story beyond their personal experiences.
Praise for the German Edition
“A minor sensation that will make literary history. Thanks to the excellent critical commentary, we gain a sense of a period in history and in Bachmann’s life that reached deep into her later work. . . . What makes these diary entries so special is . . . the detail of the resistance described, the exhilaration of unexpected peace, the joy of freedom.”—Die Zeit
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cover of ‘We Didn’t Do Very Well’: The Correspondence

‘We Didn’t Do Very Well’

The Correspondence

Ingeborg Bachmann and Max Frisch

Seagull Books, 2026

The fraught and generative relationship between two postwar literary giants—revealed through a series of letters published for the first time in English.  

Ingeborg Bachmann (1926–1973) stands among the most vital voices of postwar German literature—an acclaimed poet and prose writer who also reshaped radio drama and opera. In 1958, a letter of admiration from the Swiss novelist Max Frisch (1911–1991), written after hearing Bachmann’s radio play The Good God of Manhattan, led to a meeting in Paris and the beginning of an intense, volatile love affair that would forever leave a mark on both their lives and work. Presented here for the first time in English, 299 letters written between 1958 and 1973 trace the arc of that relationship: long separations, the strain of two writers attempting to share a life, creative rivalry, sexual jealousy, and gendered tensions sharpened by a fifteen-year age gap. The correspondence ranges from everyday logistics to raw psychological insight, from passion and longing to bitterness, silence, and regret. The later letters, written as Bachmann’s health declined, expand to include friends, relatives, and key literary figures. First published in German in 2022, this correspondence overturned long-held myths about the two writers, revealing mutual influence, negotiated freedom, and a struggle to reconcile incompatible needs. Intimate and revelatory, these letters illuminate the fragile intersection of love, power, and creativity.

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