Why is Ingeborg Bachmann still such an influential writer?
Anne-Kathrin Reulecke: Throughout her entire body of work – from her 1953 poetry collection *Die Gestundete Zeit* to the so-called *Todesarten* cycle of the 1960s and 1970s – Ingeborg Bachmann struck a new, indeed unprecedented, note. Her aim was to identify literature as post-war literature in the strictest sense. She wanted to show how the supposedly bygone past lives on in the present. It is precisely in this, I believe, that her significance, which remains unbroken to this day, lies. Bachmann describes how the repressed history of National Socialism and the associated collective and individual entanglements of guilt continue to have an impact: in our dealings with the foreign and the other, but also in people’s everyday relationships with one another, in ‘small’ cruelties, in seemingly harmless insults and – quite particularly – in gender relations. Long before the slogan ‘The personal is political’ became, one might say, a truism of feminism, Bachmann had already shed light on the microcosms of power and the various forms of cruelty.
If her writings continue to influence many writers today, it is primarily because Bachmann never pandered to current political debates and discourses in her social analyses. Instead, she cultivated a poetic style that analysed the common buzzwords and linguistic clichés of her time whilst simultaneously moving beyond them. This is another reason why her texts still speak to us with such urgency today.
What makes Bachmann’s work so unique?
Reulecke: It is remarkable that Ingeborg Bachmann was equally ‘at home’ in such diverse and varied genres. She was not only an exceptional poet who revolutionised traditional metaphors, images and motifs, thereby liberating poetry from the confines of harmless contemplation and from its function as an ‘antidote’ to the evil world – she did so as radically as perhaps only Else Lasker-Schüler, Nelly Sachs or Paul Celan in the German-speaking world. Bachmann was also a virtuoso prose writer, librettist, essayist and author of radio plays. She was a poeta docta, that is, a learned poet who was thoroughly versed in the history of European literature, music and philosophy. And so her works contain intertextual references to Shakespeare, Rimbaud, Dante, Joseph Roth and many other poets, but also to Sigmund Freud and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein’s famous observation, for instance – that the limits of our language are the limits of our world – found its way into Bachmann’s poetics, her theory of poetry. Thus, she spent her life working to expand the boundaries of the sayable through literary means. For Ingeborg Bachmann, however, literature was not a refuge where a better or even utopian world could exist. Rather, for her, literature was a space in which grief over the imperfect state of our world finds expression and in which the longing for a better world can arise in the first place.
Which work would you recommend as a starting point for interested readers?
Reulecke: The wonderful thing about Ingeborg Bachmann’s texts is that you don’t need to be familiar with the scholarly and philosophical contexts in which they are set to be able to enjoy and love them. So you don’t have to be a literary scholar or a philosopher to engage with these texts. For anyone who dares to approach poetry and doesn’t subscribe to the school-day superstition that one must understand everything perfectly; for anyone, in other words, who is willing to engage with poetic language, its melody and its contradictions, I recommend the 1956 collection *Anrufung des großen Bären*. It contains the magnificent poems ‘Erklär mir, Liebe’ and ‘Was wahr ist’, which I have read again and again, discovering them anew ever since my student days.
Perhaps a little more accessible are the two collections of short stories: In *Das dreißigste Jahr* (1961) you’ll find ‘Jugend in einer österreichischen Stadt’ (Youth in an Austrian Town), a story in which echoes of Bachmann’s own childhood in Klagenfurt resound. The story “Alles” describes how a young father tries to shield his little son from the cruel world by attempting – in vain – to teach him a private language. The 1972 short story collection Simultan, on the other hand, contains the tragicomic text “Ihr glücklichen Augen”: the story of a short-sighted young woman who, out of fear of reality, refuses to wear her glasses and thus literally runs into doors. The collection also includes the story “Drei Wege zum See”, whose protagonist, a famous photojournalist, reflects on the freedoms and losses of emancipation, on the “frosts of freedom”, as the poet Marieluise Fleißer once called them.
Where in Graz can one commemorate the author’s 100th birthday?
Reulecke: From 26 June, a film portrait of the author will be shown in Graz: Ingeborg Bachmann – Jemand, der einmal ich war by director Regina Schilling, starring actress Sandra Hüller in the role of Bachmann. I am optimistic that Bachmann’s life and work will be treated here with the discretion that the author herself always wished for. For that is, if I may say so in conclusion, one of the monstrosities in the reception of one of the greatest German-language authors of the 20th century: that many people believe they know far more about Bachmann’s private life than about her literature – her literature, which originated in Austria and is world literature.