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Last Living Words: The Ingeborg Bachmann Reader
This Ingeborg Bachmann Reader consists of works of poetry and fiction published during the life of the great Austrian writer. Brilliantly translated by Lilian M. Friedberg, Last Living Words (winner of the Kayden Translation Award) presents a new perspective on this important, internationally renowned figure. Friedberg’s Bachmann is no longer the frail and tortured writer presented in so many previous translations, but stands out as a strong woman and major literary figure.
Born in Klagenfurt, Austria on June 25, 1926, Ingeborg Bachmann studied law and philosophy at the universities of Innsbruck, Graz, and Vienna. She received her degree, writing a dissertation on Martin Heidegger, from the University of Vienna in 1950. After graduating she became a scriptwriter at Radio Rot-Weiß-Rot in Vienna, and in 1953 won the Gruppe 47 Prize for her first collection of poems, Die gestundete Zeit ( The Mortgage on Borrowed Time ). Over the next many years, she produced numerous collections of poetry, fiction, and radio plays, including Anrufung des Großen Bären ( Invocation of the Great Bear ), the story collections Das dreißigse Jahr ( The Thirtieth Year ) and Simultan , and the novel Malina . Green Integer previously published an early work, Letters to Felician .
Born in Klagenfurt, Austria on June 25, 1926, Ingeborg Bachmann studied law and philosophy at the universities of Innsbruck, Graz, and Vienna. She received her degree, writing a dissertation on Martin Heidegger, from the University of Vienna in 1950. After graduating she became a scriptwriter at Radio Rot-Weiß-Rot in Vienna, and in 1953 won the Gruppe 47 Prize for her first collection of poems, Die gestundete Zeit ( The Mortgage on Borrowed Time ). Over the next many years, she produced numerous collections of poetry, fiction, and radio plays, including Anrufung des Großen Bären ( Invocation of the Great Bear ), the story collections Das dreißigse Jahr ( The Thirtieth Year ) and Simultan , and the novel Malina . Green Integer previously published an early work, Letters to Felician .
335 pages, Paperback
First published July 1, 2006
About the author
Ingeborg Bachmann
170 books634 followers“What actually is possible, however, is transformation. And the transformative effect that emanates from new works leads us to new perception, to a new feeling, new consciousness.” This sentence from Ingeborg Bachmann’s Frankfurt Lectures on Poetics (1959-60) can also be applied to her own self-consciousness as an author, and to the history of her reception. Whether in the form of lyric poetry, short prose, radio plays, libretti, lectures and essays or longer fiction, Bachmann’s œuvre had as its goal and effect “to draw people into the experiences of the writers,” into “new experiences of suffering.” (GuI 139-140). But it was especially her penetrating and artistically original representation of female subjectivity within male-dominated society that unleashed a new wave in the reception of her works.
Although Bachmann’s spectacular early fame derived from her lyric poetry (she received the prestigious Prize of the Gruppe 47 in 1954), she turned more and more towards prose during the 1950’s, having experienced severe doubts about the validity of poetic language. The stories in the collection Das dreißigste Jahr (The Thirtieth Year; 1961) typically present a sudden insight into the inadequacy of the world and its “orders” (e.g. of language, law, politics, or gender roles) and reveal a utopian longing for and effort to imagine a new and truer order. The two stories told from an explicitly female perspective, “Ein Schritt nach Gomorrha” (“A Step towards Gomorrah”) and “Undine geht” (“Undine Goes/Leaves”), are among the earliest feminist texts in postwar German-language literature. Undine accuses male humanity of having ruined not only her life as a woman but the world in general: “You monsters named Hans!” In her later prose (Malina 1971; Simultan 1972; and the posthumously published Der Fall Franza und Requiem für Fanny Goldmann) Bachmann was again ahead of her time, often employing experimental forms to portray women as they are damaged or even destroyed by patriarchal society, in this case modern Vienna. Here one sees how intertwined Bachmann’s preoccupation with female identity and patriarchy is with her diagnosis of the sickness of our age: “I’ve reflected about this question already: where does fascism begin? It doesn’t begin with the first bombs that were dropped…. It begins in relationships between people. Fascism lies at the root of the relationship between a man and a woman….”(GuI 144)
As the daughter of a teacher and a mother who hadn’t been allowed to go to university, Bachmann enjoyed the support and encouragement of both parents; after the war she studied philosophy, German literature and psychology in Innsbruck, Graz and Vienna. She wrote her doctoral dissertation (1950) on the critical reception of Heidegger, whose ideas she condemned as “a seduction … to German irrationality of thought” (GuI 137). From 1957 to 1963, the time of her troubled relationship with Swiss author Max Frisch, Bachmann alternated between Zurich and Rome. She rejected marriage as “an impossible institution. Impossible for a woman who works and thinks and wants something herself” (GuI 144).
From the end of 1965 on Bachmann resided in Rome. Despite her precarious health—she was addicted to pills for years following a faulty medical procedure—she traveled to Poland in 1973. She was just planning a move to Vienna when she died of complications following an accidental fire.
Joey Horsley
Although Bachmann’s spectacular early fame derived from her lyric poetry (she received the prestigious Prize of the Gruppe 47 in 1954), she turned more and more towards prose during the 1950’s, having experienced severe doubts about the validity of poetic language. The stories in the collection Das dreißigste Jahr (The Thirtieth Year; 1961) typically present a sudden insight into the inadequacy of the world and its “orders” (e.g. of language, law, politics, or gender roles) and reveal a utopian longing for and effort to imagine a new and truer order. The two stories told from an explicitly female perspective, “Ein Schritt nach Gomorrha” (“A Step towards Gomorrah”) and “Undine geht” (“Undine Goes/Leaves”), are among the earliest feminist texts in postwar German-language literature. Undine accuses male humanity of having ruined not only her life as a woman but the world in general: “You monsters named Hans!” In her later prose (Malina 1971; Simultan 1972; and the posthumously published Der Fall Franza und Requiem für Fanny Goldmann) Bachmann was again ahead of her time, often employing experimental forms to portray women as they are damaged or even destroyed by patriarchal society, in this case modern Vienna. Here one sees how intertwined Bachmann’s preoccupation with female identity and patriarchy is with her diagnosis of the sickness of our age: “I’ve reflected about this question already: where does fascism begin? It doesn’t begin with the first bombs that were dropped…. It begins in relationships between people. Fascism lies at the root of the relationship between a man and a woman….”(GuI 144)
As the daughter of a teacher and a mother who hadn’t been allowed to go to university, Bachmann enjoyed the support and encouragement of both parents; after the war she studied philosophy, German literature and psychology in Innsbruck, Graz and Vienna. She wrote her doctoral dissertation (1950) on the critical reception of Heidegger, whose ideas she condemned as “a seduction … to German irrationality of thought” (GuI 137). From 1957 to 1963, the time of her troubled relationship with Swiss author Max Frisch, Bachmann alternated between Zurich and Rome. She rejected marriage as “an impossible institution. Impossible for a woman who works and thinks and wants something herself” (GuI 144).
From the end of 1965 on Bachmann resided in Rome. Despite her precarious health—she was addicted to pills for years following a faulty medical procedure—she traveled to Poland in 1973. She was just planning a move to Vienna when she died of complications following an accidental fire.
Joey Horsley
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 24, 2009
So much better than the Continuum collection of her and Christa Wolf's work in the German Library series. She writes male characters incredibly well, so well that that at times it's very easy to forget that it's a female writer. She might have done the most justice to being a bookish thirty year old male with no prospects of a future and a disdain for the world than anything else I've ever read (and if you think about it isn't this a common enough theme that bookish male authors write about even if not directly?).
The book is also wonderfully pessimistic, but not in a total doom and gloom way. Just that the world might just be shit and how is one supposed to deal with living in a post-World War 2 world where the margins of good and evil have been so severely compromised that one almost can't help but be something of a collaborator, no matter how strong ones convictions are. I would have liked for the collection to be a little longer, it would have been interesting to have more of her poetry included. The handful of poems at the end of the book seem almost like an after thought after the short stories, and from the tone of the poems included they should be as important as her short prose work.
The book is also wonderfully pessimistic, but not in a total doom and gloom way. Just that the world might just be shit and how is one supposed to deal with living in a post-World War 2 world where the margins of good and evil have been so severely compromised that one almost can't help but be something of a collaborator, no matter how strong ones convictions are. I would have liked for the collection to be a little longer, it would have been interesting to have more of her poetry included. The handful of poems at the end of the book seem almost like an after thought after the short stories, and from the tone of the poems included they should be as important as her short prose work.
October 18, 2023
i only read one of the stories bc that was what was necessary for my comp lit class (of murderers and madmen) and it was scarily good. i feel that I will greatly enjoy the lectures bc they will help me come to conclusions about it, but I did really enjoy reading it
October 23, 2023
Read ~ Among Murderers and Madmen
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews